Garabatos Vol.1

Touted as a confluence of Sun Ra and Eddie Palmieri, Garabatos, Vol. 1, the debut album by New York's ten-piece Positive Catastrophe little big band, presents a canny blend, and is a somewhat unusual entry for the generally more prog rocky Cuneiform label. Co-led by Taylor Ho Bynum on cornet and fl?gelhorn and percussionist Abraham Gomez-Delgado, PC feature some of N.Y.C.'s best and brightest creative jazz talent, who bring enthusiasm and chops to the realization of the co-leaders' vision. This outfit seems to understand how to win listeners over to the fiery side of free jazz, just as Sun Ra did; the Arkestra's Gilmore and Allen could blister the paint off a wall as effectively as any of the horns on Coltrane's Ascension, but Ra knew that a big band swing arrangement and space is the place chant could get pretty much any audience dancing in the aisles, even those without a single free jazz disc in their home libraries. While not quite as incendiary as the aforementioned, PC bring the avant-gardist pedigree from Bynum and the Latin groove quotient from Gomez-Delgado, and the mixture usually clicks. The complex multi-layered Latin groove and interlocking horn and rhythm section parts of the opening Plena Organization jab with unison stops and starts before seguing into a percolating vamp beneath Bynum's flailing cornet solo buildup -- the tight punctuating horns soon give way to looser groupings along with the up-front unbridled saxophones of Micha?l Attias and Matt Bauder before the entry of unaccompanied rambling percussives. The transmogrification of Latin into something else is already complete, and the album has scarcely begun. Singer Jen Shyu opens Travels, Pts. 1-2 with some spacy vocalizing over the ensemble members' free-form probings, and soon she is singing about interplanetary travel over a mellow but increasingly unsettled jazzy backdrop in a way that brings the Sun Ra connection front and center. Plena Sequiro begins with hig