Wild Cuban Rhythms, Loose in North America

Musikkjournalist Ben Ratliff i New York Times si anmelding av Pupy y los Que Son Son sin konsert i New York nyleg:

The thing about Pupy y los Que Son Son, one of Cuba’s greatest dance bands, is how casual it is about blowing a hole through you. It’s the almost absurdly high confidence, attack and playfulness, the band’s whole wizardly performance rhetoric — especially in rhythm and vocals — that’s astonishing, if only because it’s so seldom seen here. But at the end of the night, it’s not heroism; it’s professionalism.

Led by the pianist Cesar Pedroso, known as Pupy, a former member of Los Van Van and an important link in the history of the last 40 years of Cuban music, the band played at S.O.B.’s on Thursday night. It was the fourth show of its first North American tour since forming in 2001, its second New York gig and its first in a nightclub here. (Last weekend the band played a Summerstage concert, filling in for the current version of Los Van Van, which had canceled.) This band is used to playing in outdoor theaters in Cuba to much bigger crowds; here, with brass and percussion and voices pushed to the limit, it boomed at a level almost beyond the room’s scale.

At the same time, across Thursday’s two sets, los que Son Son stayed loose enough to incorporate members of the audience: one of its former singers, Pepito Gómez, who now lives in New Jersey; some local percussionist royalty; and in “Bailalo Hasta Afuera (La Machucadera)” — roughly translated as “Dance It Out” — dancers of the nonprofessional class who turned their backs to the crowd and shook it.

The band’s three singers — Rusdell Pavel Núñez Carmenate, Michel Pérez Sotolongo, and Norisley Valladares Gómez — shuttled back and forth between romance and aggression, smiling and wincing and sex-gesturing. They sang from Mr. Pedroso’s past with Los Van Van and his present, including the new hit “Un Loco Con Una Moto” (“A Crazy Person With a Motorcycle”); they harmonized in rapid choruses, pushing one voice up to the front to lead verses or improvise.

The songs quickly proceeded to their long middle sections: vamps, calls and responses, Mr. Pedroso’s harmonically ingenious, syncopated guajeo patterns on the keyboards and the band’s four percussionists constantly changing the accents in their dense grid of rhythm.

Toward the end of the first set, during “De La Timba a Pogolotti,” there were actual solos on timbales and congas, by local guests: Marc Quiñones, Ralph Irizarry and Bobby Allende, some of New York’s best salsa percussionists. But then the trap-set drummer, Roelvis Reyes Simono, spelled them with his own solo, pretty much a continuation of everything he’d been doing. He played about half as much, finding new places for the downbeat in every bar and falling into them with the force of gravity. It was all in a night’s work.