It came upon a midnight clear… the sound of merry jazz in this silent of nights.
Puerto Rican jazz pianist Edsel Gomez, who performs with multi-Grammy Award jazz singer Dee Dee Bridgewater among others, was in town. And on a chilly Sunday evening, December 25, Tago Jazz Café was bouncing with groove and feeling.
“It’s a reunion of friends playing a set with a lot of room for personal reflection and improvisation,” promised Gomez a few minutes before the band took the stage. The Puerto Rican was with his fellow Berklee School of Music alum Tots Tolentino on saxophone, Simon Tan on upright bass, and Nelson Gonzales on drums.
It was Gomez’ first trip to Manila since the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
“I try to be in Manila once a year,” said Gomez who met his wife Eileen in Manila. And that led to the Edsel Gomez World Fusion Band that fused traditional Filipino and tribal Filipino music with jazz that was performed twice for the Ayala Museum.
“The idea was to combine traditional and tribal Filipino music with jazz and Puerto Rican music. Puerto Rico has over 300 years of Spanish heritage just like the Philippines. There are many similarities. And my curiosity was to find common ground and then perform with Filipino instruments. That is how the World Fusion Band came to be.”
Christmas Day though found Gomez with a smaller band of friends and colleagues with whom he has performed before. The promise of Christmas Day was hope and smiles through jazz.
“We’ll see what we can do with the music that we came up with that was unfortunately put on hold by the pandemic,” he added. “Unfortunately, I am only here for a few weeks so I really cannot do much with that. But, we must perform.”
It was intriguing to say the least.
Gomez’ jazz theory on his second solo album, Cubist Music, about motivic variations where the different musicians perform melodic solos that build into the whole as opposed to aimless noodling that oft characterizes jazz music.
The band opens with the jazz standard, “There is No Greater Love” by Isham Jones. And the jumping keys of Gomez set the tone for the evening. And when each of the members go off on their own cubist segments, Gonzales is there to rope them back in.
The first set is long, adventurous, and intoxicating with the songs clocking in at about 10-minutes each. The ticklish keys of Gomez are no doubt born from the big band jazz he grew up listening to as well as the Latin rhythms of his heritage, and the influences of samba as he lived in Brazil for 10 years.
“I’ll Remember April” by Gene de Paul, Patricia Johnston, and Don Raye that was famously recorded by Cannonball Adderley, Chet Baker, and Shirley Bassey among others is next. Then it’s “Darn That Dream” that was composed by Jimmy Van Heusen and Eddie DeLange and first recorded by Benny Goodman way back in 1940.
They provide their own stamp on “Donna Lee” by Miles Davis (it was erroneously credited to Charlie Parker; at least according to Davis).
The welcome vocal break comes when Gomez’ wife, Eileen, takes the stage to perform
“Corcovado” by Antonio Carlos Jobim with the first part sung in flawless Portuguese and the second in English.
The first set ended with a short instrumental morsel of Mel Torme’s “The Christmas Song.” And as Torme intended back in 1945 when he first penned the song, the cool nature of the song helps everyone keep cool on a chilly December evening. A perfect tonic to the swinging nature of the set to bring everyone a notch or two below.
The second set was steaming, swinging jazz.