I haven't had much of an appetite for polite and reserved music during the first half of 2012. With my recent predilection for harsher sounds, I simply couldn't appreciate what I heard from Juego Estandar at Take Five Coffee + Bar as the sun went down on Saturday evening.
The concept of young locally-based musicians forming a new Latin jazz band is inherently appealing. What I experienced, however, sounded too much like the "lounge-chill" sensibility Marc Myers cites in an essay at his excellent JazzWax blog. Keyboardist Andrew Ouellette, for instance, played a technically impressive solo in the vein of Eddie Palmieri, but the star's signature ferocity was missing. Only a percussion segment during a version of "Afro Blue" contained the sparks that I associate with Latin jazz.
It's entirely possible that the sextet played an impassioned second set. Not wanting to feel like I was at a Sunday brunch as my Saturday night was just getting started, I didn't stick around to find out.
(EDIT: The personnel pictured in the band's publicity photo is not the same as the band that appeared Saturday at Take Five. Perhaps most notably, neither Sam Wisman nor Dominique Sanders were present.)
(Original image by Plastic Sax.)
