I first heard band leader and trumpeter Gilbert Castellanos last year at an outdoor concert at the Los Angeles Museum of Art (LACMA). My wife Betty and I try to attend every one of the Jazz at LACMA concerts, events that showcase artists from the Southern California area. Castellanos is the only featured Chicano artist I have seen at these concerts and words cannot sufficiently convey the orgullo (pride) I felt when he dedicated one his songs to La Raza.
Gilbert was born in Guadalajara, Mexico and is a terrific trumpeter, composer, bandleader, and arranger based in San Diego, California. He was once a member of the Black Note, an ensemble of young Los Angeles musicians of color who followed in the great jazz Be-Bop tradition, while refreshing that tradition with new feelings and approaches. I love the fact that along with his own music, Castellanos is the Artistic Director and Curtator of the Young Lions Jazz Conservatory that produces a weekly program featuring middle and high school musicians from So Cal, more than 250 young artists that he has taught and mentored. The man is keeping this incredible art form --- rooted in the African American experience -alive and vibrant.
While I am going to share my thoughts about Castellano’s newest release, I want to strongly encourage you all to also check out his earlier recordings – Underground (2006), and The Federal Arts Project (2013). I am a music lover, not a musician. I discovered jazz while growing up in North Denver (Colorado), introduced to this amazing music by an Italian-American friend who was himself a fine pianist and sax player. At that time, Denver music radio was pretty much a banal cultural desert and jazz felt like my ears and heart had found the most delicious oasis. And Gilbert’s new album Esperme En El Cielo is like drinking the coolest, sweetest water in the world.
What is special about this release is that Castellanos is at once a leader and a master collaborator with Christopher Holloway on alto sax, Joshua White on piano, John Murray on bass, and Tyler Kreutel on drums – each player a virtuoso who shine as individual artists, but know how to make the whole into a master work of art and feeling. Castellnos’ trumpet can be smooth as butter, following the rhythmic drums that open Bilad As Sudan, the cd’s first track. This is a “jump out of bed” song, with Holloday’s righteous alto getting the blood flowing. But Castellano’s horn is the centerpiece – insistent, unpredictable, lyrical, music that is not going to let you go as it works its way through the masterful genius of Jimmy Heath’s Big P and Lee Morgan’s Totem Pole. Home is Africa opens with the sublime bass line of John Murray, creating space for Joshua White’s piano magic. The horns follow with beautiful notes that give us permission to both relax and groove – can’t hold the head and shoulders still: the trumpet and sax saying “this is how we hear you Brother John”.
The title track Esperame En El Cielo (featured twice on the cd) is by the fabulous Boricua composer Paquito López Vidal. This is a flowing/flying love song that takes us to the gates of heaven, it is an open-your-wings song, with that unmistakable Raza ritmo, to the sublime joy that Latinos can experience despite our oppression. It is a song that reveals in the most mellow flow that our spirit, our dreams, our love will never die. The end notes from Gilbert’s trumpet can be heartbreaking, but also hearthealing. The other tracks – Totem Pole, New Delhi, La Puerta, and Big P are all outstanding examples of this amazing art form – it is a collaborator of equals with monster chops and HEART.
Kreutel and Murray demonstrate on every track why the rhythm section is so often the soulful glue that holds a great work together, allowing White’s piano to show to what incredible ends those black and white keys can be put, to encourage the joy and heartbreak and power of Castellano’s trumpet, and the sonic energy and creative lines of Maestro Hollyday. Gracias Hermano Gilbert, for the wonderful regalo that you and your folk are sharing with our challenged world.
Espérame En El Cielo (Bonus)---Gilbert Castellanos
