New Jazz Release: Charles Flores | “Impressions Of Graffiti” (Avail Now)

“It’s scary,” said bassist Charles Flores (in Spanish) to keyboardist Elio Villafranca as they listened to the playback.

“This is so perfect that something must be wrong.”

Best friends and musical collaborators going back more than twenty years to
their student days in Havana, Flores and Villafranca were working on
Impressions of Graffiti, the 40-year-old Charles Flores’s first-ever
album as a leader.

Flores was right; the music was perfect, and
something was wrong. He didn’t know it at the time, but he already had
the cancer that would take him on August 22, 2012.

He leaves behind
this one incredible album. “He put all his knowledge into it,” says
Villafranca. “It wasn’t one of those let’s-see-what-happens things.
Every note was thought through.”

Impressions of Graffiti was
recorded in three days of lock-out, sleep-in-the-studio sessions at the
Carriage House Studios in Stamford, Connecticut. Dense with ideas, it
presents a quartet of virtuoso musicians at the mid-career peak of their
powers — though the writing is so intricate, and the execution so
accurate, that it often sounds like a bigger group is playing.

Charles
Flores’s bass is the center of authority, but the album is only
incidentally a solo platform for him. For all the instrumental skill on
display, it’s about composition, and about a level of communication
among the players that took years to achieve. The seemingly orchestral
effects created by fast-breaking interlocking melodic lines may sound
like the kinds of things commonly done today by overdubbing, chaining,
or programming. But this music was played, and played the old way: with
everyone together live in the studio, solos included, doing things that
can’t be done overdubbing.

Stylistically, it proceeds along a
jazz-fusion line that developed in Havana in the ‘80s and ‘90s and
evolved further in New York. Flores plays six-string bass guitar
throughout (shifting to upright only for #2, “Gentle Words”), while
Villafranca leans more toward synth than piano. The guitar is electric,
too, tending toward overdrive in the hands of Havana-born Richard
Padrón, and also on two numbers featuring guest axmaster Wayne Krantz.
In the drum chair is Cliff Almond, who played extensively with Flores in
the Michel Camilo Trio. Cuban keyboardist Manuel Valera – nominated for
a Grammy this year as a leader — guests on #9, “The Whole Train.” All
but one of the album’s eleven numbers clock in at under six minutes.
They snap from groove to groove, both between numbers and within them,
giving the effect of one stylistically coherent large-form composition
as the album plays on. Every cut is strong, but radio programmers might
want to jump on:

“Carlito’s Way” (#5), a hypercaffeinated
kind-of-cha-cha-chá with a screaming electric guitar lead from Padrón
and breaks that have to be heard to be believed.
“Miriam” (#7), a
ballad that is, in Villafranca’s words, “beautiful beautiful beautiful
beautiful beautiful,” featuring Flores on the high strings of his
six-string bass, playing the theme as if he were singing it.

The
propulsive Flores-Villafranca composition “Street Walk” (#3), which
functions as a high-voltage mini-concerto for Wayne Krantz, framed by a
synth hook from Villafranca.

Charles Flores was part of one of
Cuba’s many musical golden ages, the 1990s Havana scene. He attended
Cuba’s famed ENA (Escuela Nacional de Arte), and was briefly the first
bassist in trovador Carlos Varela’s band (which Villafranca co-founded
with Varela). His professional career effectively began with a stint
with Cuban jazz singer and trumpeter Bobby Carcassés. He then moved to
the quartet of pianist Emiliano Salvador, playing with him for three
years — which is to say, he was in musical mind-lock with one of the
greatest figures in modern Cuban jazz. Sadly, Salvador died in 1992, at
the age of 40, as international recognition was beginning to come his
way. That same year, Flores joined the seminal Havana jazz-fusion
quartet Afrocuba (whose influence can perhaps be detected in the texture
of this album), playing on their album Acontecer.

He then signed
on with one of the biggest stars in Cuba, singer Issac Delgado, whose
band was known for its popular flavor, the quality of its repertoire,
and – even among Cuban dance bands – the surpassingly high quality of
its musicians. Flores was the bassist on Delgado’s second, breakthrough
album Con Ganas as well as the subsequent El Chévere de la Salsa y El
Caballero del Son and El Año Que Viene, records that attracted an
international audience. After coming to the United States, he played
with a first-call sideman’s list of bandleaders: Paquito d’Rivera, Juan
Pablo Torres, Brian Lynch, Giovanni Hidalgo, Jane Bunnett, David
Sánchez, Arturo Sandoval, Horacio “El Negro” Hernández, Dave Valentín,
Dafnis Prieto, and many more.

His most important professional
affiliation came in 2002 when he joined the Michel Camilo Trio. With
that group, he performed in the world’s most important venues and played
on Camilo’s 2004 Grammy-winning Live at the Blue Note album. He
remained with Camilo for the rest of his career, while playing in other
configurations that included Dafnis Prieto’s Sí O Sí Quartet, whose
album Live at the Jazz Standard was released in 2009 (Dafnison 002).

After
recording Impressions of Graffiti, Flores, who did not smoke, was
diagnosed with a fast-advanced cancer of the Larynx. About a month
before his death, Dafnis Prieto visited him at home in Connecticut,
where the two made an agreement for Prieto’s label Dafnison to release
the album posthumously.

And here it is. Impressions of Graffiti is a
classic already upon its release. Charles Flores intended it to be the
first of many, and it should have been. But he put everything he had
into this one, and it will stand.