Ted Piltzecker's Brindica

New releases from Zoho Records tend to arrive in clusters, and this has been one of those weeks where I'm staring at a bunch of them--which, of course, is always a good thing. I even snuck one in yesterday, that swirling and exotic Gabriel Espinosa CD, and I didn't perform my usual genuflections about how great this label is in terms of performances and sound quality. It should be a given at this point, unless a bad-sounding one slips by. And that ain't happening today.

Ted Piltzeker's Brindica automatically score points with me because it features a vibraphone player. (Look back at every review I've done a review of a CD with vibes and at some time I probably told you, like now, how much I love the sound. Goes for marimbas, too.) So the math here is getting awesome--a Zoho release that features a struck idiophone? That sounds like I'm setting you up for a disappointment, and oh boy, I'm not. I would have been satisfied with something as simple as that, mostly because the vibraphone is such a primer on the subjects of reverb and decay. Instead, Piltzecker (I have to look very closely at that name at least a couple of times before I actually type it) has such an interesting background, and that adds so much to the performances captured here.

The first interesting factoid about Ted Piltzecker is that he started off playing the trumpet. He's also a superb general percussionist, as you'll hear on this album--he is very skillful with talking drums, marimbas and all sorts of keyboard instruments. And because he's just one guy, he's not playing them all at the same time, which prompted me to say, hey, I haven't heard a vibraphone in a while, Ted, and that's when you stop and listen to his approach on each different instrument. That is the peeling of the onion's first layer, and why Brindica digs a lot deeper than you'll think after just a single listen.

Brindica, by the way, is a portmanteau of "Brazil, India and Africa." Piltzecker and his not-quite big band have a quiet and intimate feel throughout these original compositions, probably because so many percussionists are involved, and they're all not playing at the same time. The ensembles, in other words, change frequently and that allows the songs to bounce between these three countries and their distinct musical cultures with considerable grace. Brazil seems to be the dominate form, but the other two locales are represented more heavily in the percussion and there's another layer gone. It's fun to dig them out, especially when the horn section is at fever pitch.

Like most Zoho releases, there's a lot going on here and repeated listens are mandatory--but extremely enjoyable.

Gabriel Espinosa's Nostalgias De Mi Vida

"I chose the title Nostalgias De Mi Vida in honor of my life in music."

I'm just going to assume that I don't have to translate the title to you. I don't even need to discuss the themes behind Gabriel Espinosa's new album on Zoho Records, since the beauty is in its simplicity. I do want to go off on a tangent here, because it might be a key to opening this music up. Many electric bass guitarists usually try to insert a modicum of funk whenever they are part of a jazz ensemble--that sounds like a dumb generalization, but I just don't hear a lot of plug-in bassists try to preserve the unique physical presence of a big double bass through any particular style. Does that make sense? It does, just a little, in the world of Latin jazz.

What I'm saying about Gabriel Espinosa is that he plays an electric bass, for the most part, like it's a stand-up bass. I'm not sure if that's important on any level, but I notice it a lot here. From a distance, or in the car, you might miss this detail. It's also tough to concentrate on Espinosa's beautifully regulated tones when singer Kim Nazarian is out front on about half the songs. Nostalgias De Mi Vida marks a creative partnership with Espinosa and Nazarian--she also composed "Tu Mirada," which floats off toward South America almost instantly. They're an inspired team, with collaborations that are filled with celebration and happy times.

But wait, I was talking about Espinosa's bass. As I said, it's not easy to do that when so much is going on. This album isn't so much an ode to a childhood and the music that evokes those memories. It's a sweeping and fluid series of rhapsodies made of ideas so diverse that it would be unfair to pick it all apart. This is Latin jazz that has been filtered through a lifetime of experiences, and the new stuff tends to glom onto the older stuff and that's why our memories fade. And that is the reason why Espinosa's bass is so central to these arrangements. He's been playing that electric bass forever, and he can make it sound like anything he wants.

The Brazilian influences are not lost in all this--they're up front throughout most of these songs. That means this music isn't so challenging in its ideas that it's willing to sacrifice a gorgeous melody. If you're really into Brazilian jazz right now, and I think a lot of people are starting to rediscover it, you'll really enjoy this music as a sort of slight departure from the norm. But if you're interested, the ideas in Nostalgia De Mi Vida are very layered and complex, and there's another level to explore.