Irakere may be Grammy-winning legends of Cuban music, but they don’t bring on genial gents in white flat caps just to sing serenades of old Havana. Now celebrating their 40th anniversary under the brilliant pianist Chucho Valdes’s continuing leadership, Irakere are a hurricane where the Buena Vistas were a summer breeze. They launched a week’s residency at Ronnie Scott’s club on Monday with the elated parade of big-band jazz, funk, rock, classical music, and African-rooted ritual percussion and vocals that have been their trademark from the start.
The current 10-piece edition look young enough to be Valdes’s children, or even grandchildren. A five-strong brass and reeds section wail and snap over the tumult from a booming bass, the matchless leader at the piano and three drummers.
Bata-player Dreiser Durruthy Bombalé opened with quietly tuneful patterns that quickly doubled in speed, were picked up by hand-drums, shakers and Rodney Barreto’s kit, then became a medium groove with a spirited Afro-Cuban vocal chant, and stopped on an admonishing shout.
A sensuous bolero drew a lissom flugelhorn solo from Reinaldo Melián, shadowed by a blend of glittering treble runs and throbbing low chord-vamps from Valdes. A traffic-jam clamour of brass riffs swept in behind Bombalé’s vocal on its harmonically more dissonant successor – which began to sound increasingly like 60s modal jazz with Ariel Bringuez’s somewhat Wayne Shorter-like tenor sax break, and the almost free-improvisational stream of piano lines that followed it.
Valdes introduced a tango with asides of a Russian navy dance in its shifting rhythms, and some luxurious Rachmaninov chords in the harmony. A lyrical jazz ballad became a familiar Cuban dance groove, a glide that drifted close to the melody of Spanish Harlem, then became a funk gallop and ended with some thrilling percussion badinage.
The band wound an already vibrant show’s intensity up to eleven with a handclapping funk riff that set a cheerleading Bombalé bouncing through the crowd, finally returning to the stage for an ecstatically writhing dance.
• At Ronnie Scott’s, London, until 25 July. Box office: 020-7439 0747.
