Time Zone + Ewegbemi Batá Ensemble + DJ Natty Bo + fotos de Cuba

Time Zone + Ewegbemi Batá Ensemble + DJ Natty Bo + fotos de Cuba

Time Zone Cuban night, launching new CD 'Crossing the Line'

Based in East London, 6-piece Time Zone plays bilingual music with a strong undercurrent of Afro-Cuban rhythm. Cuban elements are re-assembled, as in collage, or mutated to fit odd meters more common in eastern Europe, but still with a Cuban feel - and the groove can change, like turning a corner, a new view opening up, another way of looking at things. Speyer has stayed for extended periods in Santiago de Cuba, and his music expresses some of the surreal complexity of life there, and of the interaction and collision of Cuban culture with his own.

“There is an intriguingly saturnine quality in both the leader’s compositions and the band’s execution, a sense of hard-edged modernity that has a side-winding thrust reminiscent of Dave Holland's ensemble at times. Time Zone is an ensemble led by a trumpeter/composer who has absorbed the essence of Cuban music and distilled it quite cunningly into an improvisatory context with no compromise to either culture. The result is gritty, graceful sounds with a dark-light intensity.” - Kevin Legendre, Echoes

Loz Speyer - trumpet/flugel

Martin Hathaway - alto sax/bass clarinet
Stefano Kalonaris - guitar/trés
Davide Mantovani - double bass
Maurizio Ravalico – congas
Andy Ball - drums

Ewegbemi is the UK's most longstanding Cuban Batá drumming practice ensemble. Celebrating 20 years of shared study of this most iconic family of drums, this is a rare public performance of one of the African diaspora's most classical of musical forms: Ewegbemi proudly presents excerpts from the traditional repertoire of the Lukumi, the cultural descendants of Yoruba people brought to Cuba by force: this is their music of cultural resistance.

DJ Natty Bo, frontman and leader of Ska Cubano, will be spinning some off-the-wall Cuban classics, and there will be a big screen backdrop of many and various photos from Cuba.

The finale is a collaboration of Time Zone with Ewegbemi, playing music from the album "Roots en Route – Raices en Viaje" by Proyecto Evocación, Speyer's collaboration with master percussionist Rafael Cisneros (of Ballet Folklorico Cutumba), and other musicians based in Santiago de Cuba.

www.lozspeyer.com

www.myspace.com/lozspeyer

Image: Tom Swire