2020 LATIN GRAMMY WINNER: Best Latin Jazz Album! All music composed and arranged by Emilio Solla (SGAE/BMI)

The Tango Jazz Orchestra

Alejandro Aviles (CUBA) (soprano, alto, piccolo, flute) Todd Bashore, (USA) (alto, flute, clarinet) Tim Armacost, (USA) (tenor, alto flute, clarinet) John Ellis (USA) (tenor, soprano, clarinet, flute) Terry Goss (USA) (baritone, bass clarinet) Alex Norris (USA) (trumpet, flugelhorn) Jim Seeley (USA) (trumpet, flugelhorn) Brad Mason (UK) (trumpet, flugelhorn) Jonathan Powell (USA) (trumpet, flugelhorn) Noah Bless (USA) (trombone) Mike Fahie (CANADA) (trombone) Eric Miller (USA) (trombone) James Rodgers (USA) (bass trombone) Julien Labro (FRANCE) (bandoneon, accordina) Emilio Solla (ARGENTINA) (piano, conducting) Pablo Aslan (ARGENTINA) (double-bass) Ferenc Nemeth (HUNGARY) (drums)

Guests: Samuel Torres (COLOMBIA) (congas on track 1) Arturo Prendez (URUGUAY) (percussion on track 2) Franco Pinna (ARGENTINA) (bombo legüero on track 6)

Special Guests: Arturo O’Farrill (MEXICO) (piano on track 2) Edmar Castañeda (COLOMBIA) (harp on track 6)

Soloists:

1- Armacost, tenor sax Fahie, trombone 2- O’Farrill, piano Ellis, tenor sax Coda trading: O’Farrill, piano (right). Solla, piano (left) 3- Bashore, alto sax 4- Labro, bandoneon 5- Norris, trumpet (left ch.) Powell, trumpet (right ch.) Mason, trumpet Seeley, trumpet 6- Castañeda, harp Aviles, soprano 7- Aslan, bass Solla, piano 8- Bless, trombone Norris, trumpet Goss, baritone Labro, accordina

Producers Kabir Sehgal, Paul Avgerinos

Co-Producer Darcy James Argue

Executive Producers Denny Abrams, Kabir Sehgal

Recorded at Oktaven, NY by Roy Hendrickson on March 19 & 20, 2019 Edited by Brian Montgomery, NY, April-July 2019 Mixed by Oscar Autie at El Cerrito, CA, August 5 to 9, 2019 Mastering by Mike Marciano, NY, August 12 & 13, 2019 TJO Production Assistant: Eduardo Palacios 2nd Assistant: Jasmine Tseng Assistant Engineers: Charles Mueller and Edwin Huet Sessions photos: Arturo Prendez & Daniel Foselli Cover art and design: Nicolas Gaggero Brajcich

C & P Avantango Records 2019 www.avantango.com

I’d like to thank deeply everybody involved in this huge production for their efforts and their love for these pieces of music. To the orchestra and guests for believing in the music, making it yours and leaving your souls in the sessions. To Kabir and Paul for your strong and smart artistic suggestions about the direction of this ship. To Denny, for your huge support, I wouldn’t be writing these lines without you back there. To Darcy, you contributed ideas and clarity throughout. Great working with you, Maestro. To the 139 crowdfunding backers, we wouldn’t be here without you either, you are a big part of this production. Extra hugs portion to Gloria Sintes, Sara Solla, David McKee, Karl Greenberg, David Espinosa, Fred Sherman. To Arturo O’Farrill, for your support and faith in my music, I owe you brother! To Roy, Brian, Oscar and Mike for their superb work in making these ideas clear to the listener (and for covering some of our silly mistakes in the process) To Eduardo Palacios, you’ve been there since day one, and made everything go smooth, not a minor thing. To Jasmine, for your great videos and protools assistance To all my many music teachers and students, teach me on! To Paz, for being the light and the sun, always.

EMILIO SOLLA, August 2019

Liner Notes By Kabir Sehgal

Life at sea is one of adventure, mystery, and intrigue. For most of modernity, traveling by water has been a principal pathway of migration. And tracing these routes doesn’t just yield insights into our collective history but also our musical one. When people of different countries and civilizations collide, so do their cultures, cuisines, and compositions. (And from an ecological perspective, estuaries that form from the mixing of salt and freshwater are rich with biodiversity.) And herein is the spark of Puertos: Music of International Waters: a diverse and dazzling, triumphant, and tantalizing album for “all hands” by acclaimed bandleader, composer, and arranger Emilio Solla.

“I’ve always been fascinated with how bodies of water merge as one. And especially, the role of ports,” said Solla. “It’s where people arrive and depart, and where new relationships and ideas begin.” His curiosity with voyaging by sea began when he learned about his ancestors. His paternal grandparents hailed from Spain (Galicia and Andalusia). His maternal grandparents came from Ukraine and arrived in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1919. They rented a room in a home near the main port. Solla fondly remembers his grandparents speaking Spanish only proficiently, full of Neapolitan slang, with a Russian accent. Such a unique mix in the early twentieth century might have only been found in Buenos Aires. In fact, the cover picture of the album is circa 1920, and shows immigrants arriving here, entering a new life.

Born and raised in Argentina, Solla followed the family tradition (not of traveling by ship!) of moving countries, first settling in Spain, and then ending up in the United States. While in the US, he recognized parallels in the port cities of New York and Buenos Aires. “Both are integral to unique forms of music: jazz and tango,” he said. “Foreigners made these port cities home and, in turn, made their place in the world.”

Wanting to explore the role of ports in cultural collision, he began writing and arranging music that would invoke this theme. Puertos is Solla’s big band follow up album to his GRAMMY-nominated Second Half that was every bit of a masterpiece. Each piece on this album is dedicated to a port that has played a seminal role in the development of jazz, tango, or Solla’s creative life. That an artist has thought deeply about the geography of his craft speaks to his commitment in honoring traditions, paying homage to those who came before, rending them anew, and creating a “port” for new audiences to dock. Like his previous album, this one is a transcendent vessel.

A play on Emilio’s last name “Sol La, al Sol” plays with the “Sol” (G) and “La” (A) tones. The piece is dedicated to La Habana. With a ¾ mambo feel, it has a distinct Afro Cuban vibe, with both a propulsive beat and syncopated feel.

“Llegará...” (dedicated to Montevideo) is a resplendent odyssey, as Solla builds the introduction with layers of harmonies and rippling percussion. When the bandoneon enters, it’s as if we can see the shore of Montevideo Bay. Disembarking at the port, Arturo O’Farrill’s contemporary and jazz-infused solo awakens us to the freshness of a new place, seeing something with new eyes, and in this case -- listening to tango and jazz in a manner that only Solla could have imagined. O’Farrill has made Solla’s composition a staple of his recurring Sunday night Birdland sets, so it’s fitting that the two maestros collaborated on this studio version (which Solla has remarkably taken up a notch!)

“Chakafrik” (dedicated to Benguela) is a tribute to the role Africans have played in shaping American music. Benguela is a port western Angola, where many African slaves were sent to America, in one of the worst periods of human history. “You can’t make an album with jazz and tango without recognizing the importance of Africans in the Americas,” said Solla. This piece in 6/8 is an undulating number that swells through successive choruses, recognition of how the contribution of Africans to the Americas have expanded over centuries and enhanced the world in which we live today. Todd Bashore’s remarkable alto solo is a highlight of the entire production

“La Novena” (dedicated to Buenos Aires) is an enticing and emotional experience. Solla’s melody captures the listener from the first playing on the baritone saxophone, which builds like a kaleidoscope across the reeds and horns. “I wanted to write a piece inspired by the capital city of my birth nation,” said Solla, “because it shaped my aesthetic sensibilities as an artist.” Labro’s brilliant bandoneon is a reminder of the cultural drift of international waters. Originally made in Germany in the 1800s, this instrument was played for religious and folk music. As Germans migrated to Argentina in the early twentieth century, it was being repurposed for tango music.

“Four for Miles” (dedicated to New York) is fashioned on a seeming modal progression that one could find on a vintage Miles Davis recording. “He was one of my musical heroes,” said Solla. “He never looked back.” Certainly, Miles was full steam ahead, and Solla wrote this piece that has a constant forward motion, hardly repeating the same line twice in the exact way. A resident of Brooklyn, Solla knows whereof he writes as New York has become familiar waters for the artist. And we hear him and the band fully at home with this arrangement.

“Allegrón” (dedicated to Cartagena) features Edmar Castañeda, a masterful harpist from Colombia. This port city was established in 1533 and served as a strategic location for the Spanish to export raw metals (and other lucrative wares) from the New to Old worlds. Castañeda is himself the personification of old and new paradigms, playing a traditionally Colombian instrument on jazz music. A collaboration with maestro Solla was only natural! Castañeda intersperses staccato hits with percussive strums, over lilting flutes. The composition is exquisitely crafted and arranged with aplomb, giving space to the featured soloist while also providing ballast with harmonic color.

“Andan Luces” (dedicated to Cadiz) swirls with hypnotic effect, around the melodic line until it fully catches hold, and then Solla never lets go. Located in Southwest Spain, Cadiz is part of Andalusia, where Spanish Galleons were launched in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The mixing of Spaniards and natives is the most obvious of pairings that had to be acknowledged on this production. Though we often think of the Spanish as colonialists who ravaged the New World, there’s no doubt that their seafaring journeys made them nostalgic for home. This piece has a certain loneliness and somberness vibrating amidst the minor harmonic progression. It’s on this track that Solla renders his only piano solo on the album. And what a performance it is – a pensive and virtuosic meditation.

“Buenos Aires Blues” (dedicated to New Orleans) begins with a jarring ostinato that draws a sharp and even foreboding line. Such fierceness is warranted, as the port city of New Orleans was a destination for many people who were forced to be there. Africans were brought as slaves and sold in city markets, an ugly and sinful chapter of America’s checkered past that also left its mark on music. Solla invokes a blues form to evoke the historical blackness and brownness of this port, while the beat and melody's rhythm are a clear reference to Astor Piazzolla modern tango. The escalation of horn lines builds suspense and tension throughout the piece. There’s even tautness to the saxophone soli, bracketed by the march-march of snare work. It’s only until Goss’s saxophone solo, that Solla gives the audience a moment of unvarnished swing. Julien Labro’s accordina solo accompanied by Pablo Aslan’s arco bass is a beautiful duet moment of this entire production.

“Imagine the ship company which draws curved lines that represent routes on a map,” said Solla. “The lines are the cables, and the ports are the connectors between people from different backgrounds.” Wanting to bring people together through music, Solla has also connected us to his heart, in which he leaves everything on the table. There is an emotional rawness to this recording that will burn in you for days. It has been the highest of honors to produce this album for maestro Solla with collaborators Paul Avgerinos and Darcy James Argue. Solla is one of the most brilliant jazz and tango composers and arrangers of our times. And this is his finest work yet. Bravo, maestro!

Kabir Sehgal is a New York Times bestselling author, multi-GRAMMY and Latin GRAMMY Award winning producer.

Tango fantasies on original and traditional compositions, played with flair and passion.

As a performer of tango music I have always been fascinated by the unique sound of the bandoneón and how the instrument is used in solo arrangements and compositions. Performing together with bandoneón players and writing for the instrument as an arranger/composer has inspired me to adapt some of the techniques and interpretational aspects into my own piano playing. I wanted to see if I could incorporate the multilayered, flowing and improvisational manner of playing - constantly changing focus between the bass, chords, and melodic structures, rather than trying to do all at once as often as possible, like an orchestral reduction. This approach can be heard throughout the album and is taken to the extreme in El Marne, which is a bandoneón arrangement adapted for the piano. The melting point is the tribute composition “Tristezas de un doble S” where Piazzolla’s «Alfred Arnold» bandoneón is replaced by «Steinway and Sons».

Los Mareados: A musical poem of the great classic tango Sentimiento Tanguero: Lucio Demare meets Håkon Skogstad Tango del Angel: A piano adaptation tribute to Leopoldo Federico and his orchestra’s arrangement Milonga Impromptu: A retrospective composition where Chopin meets tango Felicia: In memory of the late Horacio Salgán Sur: A rhapsodic arrangement flirting with the original Norte: North contrasting South - A Norwegian “tanguero” composition El Marne: A piano adaptation of Leopoldo Federico’s bandoneón arrangement Canaro en Paris: Salgán meets Horowitz in this concert paraphrase arrangement Tristezas de un doble S: Exploring the bandoneónesque sounds of Piazzolla on the piano

HÅKON MAGNAR SKOGSTAD

A powerful mixture of tangos for the dance floor, dished out by four masters under the direction of a Grammy nominated composer and arranger.

“This album is my tribute to the tango,” says Emilio Solla, composer, bandleader, and pianist. Given that he performs a tango gig every Sunday night at a New York City jazz club, it made sense for him to pay homage to this style. “It was time for me to rediscover why I fell in love with this music in the first place.” And so in composing and adapting these eleven tracks, he went back to the roots of the tango tradition. “And what a storied tradition it has,” says Pablo Aslan, bassist and tango cognoscenti. Born at the end of the nineteenth century on the shores of the Rio de la Plata, as a dance of suggestive yet restrained movement, it was founded upon the rhythms of the Cuban habanera, Brazilian and Spanish tango, Argentine milonga and the Afro-American candombe. First performed by the immigrants at the cafes of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, the tango gained prominence as conservatory-trained musicians added it to their repertoire, as it became an international rage in the 1920s. Then again in the 1940s, the tango experienced a second Golden Age, as it was performed across many different countries. That the tango has been adapted into various forms was grist for Solla to put his own stamp on this music. To be sure, he listened to the works of the tango masters Osvaldo Pugliese, Juan D’Arienzo, and Astor Piazzolla. “But I wanted to color the music with more harmonies while also keeping it danceable,” he explains. “More harmonies” is an understatement. Tributango is the creation of a genius composer who imbues each track with a full range of sonic material: vivid melody, thoughtful development, contrasting accompaniment, searing solos, and yes “more harmonies.” This is to be expected of Solla, who left Argentina for Barcelona in his early 30s in search of “new horizons and bigger challenges,” as he puts it. He eventually moved to New York, where he has lived for ten years, and where he has become a cornerstone of the jazz scene -- and one of the best composers of our time. Solla wanted to see if he could make it with the big guys, and in so doing, he became one himself.
In creating this album, Solla called upon three other big guys: Pablo Aslan, bass; Raul Jaurena, bandoneon; and Nick Danielson, violin. If they were a football team, they would be called the “tango all-stars,” as they are all “experts of the craft,” according to Solla. He considers Aslan as his primary mentor, who first invited Solla to the United States to perform. Danielson is a virtuosic violinist who has deep experience with both classical and tango music. Jaurena hails from Uruguay and started playing professionally when he was sixteen, and has performed with the great tango maestros like Piazolla. “When Raul plays a tango, it’s like okay, guys, that’s it. This is how it should be played,” says Solla.

Tributango is Solla’s ninth release as a bandleader. And it’s more than a tribute. It’s a triumph of an artistic mastermind, who has given us something new, by channeling the giants of this art form. However, Solla has rendered this music not just for aficionados but DJs and dancers too. These tracks will compel you onto the dance floor. This is quintessential Solla: accessible tunes with refined arrangements. Tributango is both historical and fresh, bittersweet with nostalgic references yet thought-provoking with modern touches. No matter its era, tango goes on, well into the night. Kabir Sehgal Executive Producer & Producer New York, November 2016

Tango & Jazz experiments in downtown New York, recorded at the Knitting Factory by these intrepid artists.

Thomas Chapin, alto saxophone and flute Ethan Iverson, piano Pablo Aslan, bass

Originally released as Avantango “Y en el 2000 también” (EPSA MUSIC), in 1998

Recorded live at Knitting Factory, May 8 1996 except for Track 7 recorded at Studio 900 NYC May 6 1996.

Remixed by Luis Bacque and Pablo Aslan at Bacque Recording Studios, Roselle NJ, in May 2016 Remastered by Luis Bacque

All arrangements by Pablo Aslan except track 7 by Thomas Chapin

Produced by Pablo Aslan

For full credits please visit www.avantango.com