The Afro​-​Georgian Project by Raul Gutierrez & Cugate Artists (CD)

To some extent, the greatness of jazz can be explained from the history of its survival outside the fluctuations of the market and government policies. It is a genre that was born from the confluence of necessity, chance, vocation and respect transposed to music. Thus, the genetic identity of its sounds can be traced in the way in which the different communities around them were formed. This music is what it is because it has been the conflagration fire of all cultures that, in communion with others, have recognized in diversity a fundamental pillar of their permanence in time.
Afro Gerogian Moods is an album that reclaims these principles and makes them its own to challenge the conventional parameters of music and cultural interaction. With a solid base loaded with rhythmic cells linked to the Afro-Cuban liturgical tradition, a lyrical discourse is developed with surprising results. For example, due to the ceremonious effect of the ternary subdivisions on the themes composed by Chabuka Amiranashvili, impregnated with the Persian mysticism suggested in the vocal inflections of the choirs, or by the fortunate chain of resolutions of the melodic motifs that usually appear in passages characterized by their harmonic tensions, as is the case of “Monkiano”, composed by Raúl Gutiérrez. It is also worth highlighting the stupendous role of Raúl Cabrera, one of the main arrangers, together with Quillo García Caturla and José Antonio Quintana, who retakes a search for textures and colors that sounds familiar to us because of the references to María Schneider and Thad Jones, but with a more contemporary orchestration, linked to the development of Afro-Cuban music.
It should be emphasized: producing this album must have been a major challenge, not only because of the geographical distance involved in producing it between Xalapa, Havana and Tbilisi, but also because of the great gap implied by the difference between the expressive sensibility of the Georgian and Afro-Caribbean cultures living together in the same temporal space.
Afro Georgian Moods is a celebration of human greatness through music. The evidence that the threads that unite all cultures are there, beating, between silence and sound, waiting for creativity, intelligence and mutual respect to make these two primordial elements their own in order to achieve the miracle of creation.