The Justice

While many of your fellow students spent the end of last week recovering from Wednesday's costumed bacchanalia, a number of Boston-area music lovers were storming Slosberg Recital Hall. Latin music group Sol y Canto was their target. Friday night's sold-out concert (a second concert was added later that night so more concertgoers could attend), featuring the pan-Latin American jazz troupe as well as the musical/photography duo Melodic Visions, attracted a decidedly off-campus crowd.

The show, entitled "Noche de Muertos: Welcoming Our Ancestors Home," was presented by the University's Music Department and featured what Sol y Canto ("Sun and Song") singer Rosi Amador referred to as a "mini-set" of Sol y Canto's repertoire before the Noche de Muertos-themed performance with Melodic Visions. The group, which was founded in 1994 by guitarist and composer Brian Amador, performed four or five jazz-tinged songs featuring Amador's vocals as well as saxophonist Bernardo Monk, percussionist Renato Thoms, pianist Nando Michelín and bassist Andrés Rotmistrovsky, who was performing with the band for the first time. Monk's saxophone stylings were perhaps the highlight of the band's offerings, though all of the members were clearly very talented. The soprano sax, that 1980s musical touchstone, smoothly and elegantly propelled the band's up-tempo songs.

Before each song, a band member would read an English translation of the lyrics, which were all in Spanish. This was not perhaps the best move; lyrics that can seem so elegant when sung can become rather pedestrian when read aloud (especially when the song covers a subject of love, which a number of Sol y Canto's songs did). Perhaps a page of lyric translations in the bulletin would have been a better choice. The Spanish lyrics nonetheless sounded superb when treated with Rosi Amador's clear, sparkling voice. The up-tempo ditty "Credo" particularly showed off Amador's voice as well as the musicians' stellar rapport.

After the group played its regular repertoire of songs, photographer Susan Wilson of Melodic Visions came onstage to explain the night's feature presentation: a slideshow of photographs taken in Michoacán, Mexico while Wilson was studying Mexican culture and the Day of the Dead holiday with a group of artists and writers. Upon arriving home from Mexico, Wilson was present to do a slideshow of the photographs she took at Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, Mass. Wilson asked her friend, violinist Rebecca Strauss, to help set the slideshow to music, and thus Melodic Visions was born. Wilson and Strauss initially played recordings of Sol y Canto's music over the slideshow, but for Friday's performance, Melodic Visions and Sol y Canto teamed up to present the photographs with live music.

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools