(Reprinted from the March issue of Downbeat magazine)
Only once does drummer Francisco Mela cede control on MPT Trio, Volume 1 (577 Records), his debut album with tenorist Hery Paz and electric guitarist Juanma Trujillo. Otherwise, his unflappable grasp of momentum on the album’s eight tracks is a marvel, given the overwhelming impulse, as a listener, to collapse into the many disparate feels and moods on this record.
The release starts with “Calipso,” a free, horn-centric improvisation tinged with Afro-Caribbean joie de vivre—steel drums, dance melody, and infectious polyrhythms. Extrapolating from these same sources, the group ventures into more daring spontaneous composition on tunes like “Baldor,” an open pastiche of dramatic tones and textures, and “Vino,” with its gritty rock guitar sections and frenzied allusions to folkloric song.
Not all of the tracks rely on rhythm for their movement: The tension on the disquieting tune “Sustain” builds from the monotony of the droning guitar, and the tether for “Whisper” is the restless search for connection in the sax improvisation. Further, two of the tracks favor more traditional lines, like the ballad “Naimo,” which opens with a relaxed sax solo that leads into a comfortably familiar harmonic progression, and “Suite for Leo Brouwer” (in honor of the Cuban composer), a sequence of musical assertions that wend naturally through Cuban beats, modal tonality, and the minimalism of new music forms.
Mela closes the album with “El Llanto de la Tierra”—“Cry of the Earth”—arguably the freest track of the lot and the most experimental. A tempestuous brawl of unfettered blowing, electronic wailing, and wood-on-wood accents, this tune, in the last, voices the raw emotion that the rest of the album only hints at.