Direct Grace Records 2LPs - Elio Villafrance & The Jazz Syncopators Flower by the Dry River

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LP is mint cover is NM except for one small corner ding

Elio Villafranca & The Jass Syncopators is the artistic and cultural synthesis of his vision of Duke Ellington’s Colored Syncopators musical approach. It is applied to contemporary jazz idioms, and Villafranca’s Latin heritage features strongly. The name came after he read about Ellington’s orchestra and the description given by the reviews of the day that did not quite understand his highly syncopated approach to the music. Elio, born in Cuba, where syncopation is one of the most familiar and important elements in Afro Cuban, popular and classical music, understood at once! Syncopation was what the earliest Cuban classical and first nationalists composers such as Ignacio Cervantes Kawanagh (Havana, 31 July 1847 – Havana, 29 April 1905) and Manuel Saumell Robredo (19 April 1818 – 14 August 1870) based their earliest Danzas and Countradanzas on to differentiate themselves from other European classical composers. In this project Villafranca challenges the boundaries of Jazz by fusing it with the syncopated nature of Afro-Caribbean music from Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Congolese rhythms of Makuta and tambor Yuka, as it is called in his hometown of Pinar del Rio, Cuba.

In this band, Elio Villafranca & The Jass Syncopators strive to create a multi-layered musical dialogue where intellectual understanding of the music is secondary to its full rich experience. The music serves as a platform where each of the musicians can express their artistry through their respective musical backgrounds, yet assert themselves within a body of movement and syncopations. According to Villafranca, Flower by the Dry River, unlike other recordings he has done, started with the visual image, not with music. The image was of a bright red flower blooming by the bank of a very dry river. That image, inspired him to not only write the piece that gives title to this album, but also to use the proceeds from this recording to help children of the world subject to abuse, starvation, and poverty.