New Jazz Beginnings

I made my debut on the Buenos Aires jazz scene on Thursday night, catching the Ramiro Flores Quintet at Thelonious, an elegant second-story club in the tony Palermo barrio. I didn't know quite what to expect going in, and I was pleasantly surprised at how inventive the music was. The instrumentation and sound (on some of the band's songs) brought to mind the Dave Holland Quintet (although the Flores Quintet certainly isn't anywhere close to matching that supergroup's cohesion and individual virtuosity). They also sound like they've listened to artists like Jason Moran and Vijay Iyer who have brought techniques from Hip-Hop including improvising over sampled musical and vocal tracks into mainstream jazz. One of the night's best numbers, a celebration of Bolivian folklore's equivalent of a faun, pitted Flores's agile horn against a crackling vocal track that was meant to conjure up the spirit of the mythical beast.

I was also impressed with the club, a narrow hang-out space that put everyone close to the music and invited the band and the audience to mingle at the bar. I'd worried that jazz in Buenos Aires might be fetishized as a nostalgic American experience, and that the clubs would be more like The Blue Note than The Jazz Gallery. Thelonious isn't quite the Gallery, but if Thursday night is any guide, it's an intimate space where creative, demanding music gets played.

Update: My hot water heater was fixed this morning. Now the water in the entire building is off. I still wait for the hot shower at the end of the tunnel.

Addition: I stumbled upon an excellent blog last night which I've added to the links section. It's called Destination: OUT, and is a streaming mp3 site that features rare, mostly free jazz, tracks and pithy commentaries to boot.