Zaccai Curtis: “Cubop Lives!” on kuvojazz
The Curtis brothers came out of Hartford, CT as protégés, Zaccai on piano, and Luques on bass. They honed their skills in part at the Vail Jazz Summer Camps as well as being mentored by some of the finest musicians and instructors of NYC while still in their teens. Both are firmly embedded in both jazz and Latin music. Cubop is a term coined by the legendary radio host in the early 1940s to describe the music of Machito & the Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra which was the first ensemble to play jazz with Afro-Cuban rhythms, Cubop is a contraction for Cuban bebop. Zaccai and Luques are accompanied by three percussionists in this superlative collection of 17 songs, mostly remakes of jazz standards, several originals, and even a few pop song covers. This session is a reaffirmation of the words of Jelly Roll Morton: “If you can’t manage to put tinges of Spanish in your tunes, you will never be able to get the right seasonin’ for jazz.”
