Next dates: South: Club 85 Letchworth Sunday 1 October North: Brudenell Social Club, Leeds Saturday 7 October
Next dates: South: Club 85 Letchworth Sunday 1 October North: Brudenell Social Club, Leeds Saturday 7 October
Charanga del Norte perform at London’s CLF (Chronic Love Foundation) on Saturday afternoon 15th July.
IT’S CHARANGA TIME (LIVE) UP ON THE ROOF! Sat Jul 15 (1pm-6pm / £10 Entry) – LATIN JAZZ BRUNCH LIVE host DJ JOHN ARMSTRONG welcomes the one and only charanga and pachanga band in the land, live up on the roof. Get ready for the brilliant 12 piece live band CHARANGA DEL NORTE who are here to guarantee an exquisite good time live audio session up on the roof, all afternoon long at The CLF Art Lounge & Roof Garden.
www.clfartlounge.com/upcoming-shows
Charanga del Norte live performance at Leeds School of Arts Theatre Wednesday 29 March 6.30pm until 9pm
Tickets
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/charanga-del-norte-performance-tickets-541115851077
Leeds/UK salsa/Cuban/Latin music pioneer DJ and promoter Lubi Jovanovic celebrates 40 years working in music this year (1982-2022). He’s throwing a few special parties in Leeds to celebrate this landmark including a big live Cuban/salsa/Latin jazz event at The Wardrobe on Friday 10th June. The venue has been the centre of Lubi’s live Latin music shows for over 2 decades now, ever since he brought his legendary ’90s night Casa Latina here in 1999. This gig will also be in the fringe program for inaugural Leeds Jazz Festival which is happening across the city from 1st-12th June.
There are two bands playing. One he has worked with since 1999 (Charanga Del Norte) and one which is a brand new band of musicians studying at Leeds Conservatoire today (Rumberos De Palo). A hot night of Cuban music and rhythms, New York pachanga sounds and smoking Latin jazz. Definitely the live Latin music show of the summer in Leeds.
The research is based on the analysis of a live performance on Cuban television of ‘Los Problemas de Atilana’ by Orquesta Aragón in the early 1960s, where musical gestures are shown to be embodied in the flute and dance solo ‘duet’ performed by Cuban flautist Richard Egües and dancer Rafael Bacallao, revealing the shared memories of a community bound by common cultural experience. Interdisciplinary in nature, analysis is undertaken by a musician-scholar, a film scholar-practitioner and a professional Cuban dancer-animator in order to unearth details of this embodied repertoire, thus translating and making overt culturally implicit knowledge for those outside of the artistic community of practice, and, in some cases, within it.
I am known as both an academic and as a professional flute improviser and musical director of ‘Charanga del Norte,’ a band I formed in 1998.
I am many things – an academic, a writer, a professional musician, a linguist (French, Spanish, Hindi, Linguistics) and a teacher; I combine my professional work as a performer with my academic career.
This practice research by Prof. Sue Miller, Guillermo Davis and Dr Sarah Bowen is based on the analysis of a live performance on Cuban television of ‘Los Problemas de Atilana’ by Orquesta Aragón in the early 1960s, where musical gestures are shown to be embodied in the flute and dance solo ‘duet’ performed by Cuban flautist Richard Egües and dancer Rafael Bacallao. Through re-performance and re-presentation in the form of a recording and short animations, the many meanings embodied in the original performance are examined through analytical text, musical notation, visuals, recordings and animation film. The article will be published soon in the British Forum for Ethnomusicology Journal and below are some of the animations made to go with this article. Animations are by Cuban dancer-animator Guillermo Davis and the music is recorded by Sue Miller (flute) and her band Charanga del Norte.
Have contemporary technological changes in recording and the search for perfection been to the detriment of musical skills? Do today’s digital approaches create recordings that are too mechanical and lacking in the human touch? While older unedited recordings maintain their ‘liveness’ in the case of many Latin recordings of the mid-20th century, is it possible to go back to those days, now that digital layering and editing are part of the creative process? What is lost by removing the ‘imperfections’ of live performance in the mix?
In this post musicians from Charanga del Norte reflect on their recording experiences on this British Academy funded project which involved studio recordings with some live takes (for the rhythm section and then the string section) and then the live takes at All Hallows Church, Hyde Park, Leeds at the end of 2019. In these reflections, musicians talk about the pros and cons of live take recording and about capturing that all important element of spontaneity and sabor essential to Cuban/Latin dance music performance.
This is the first of several live music documentaries of Sue Miller and her Charanga del Norte made by Tim Blackwell and recorded on ribbon microphones by Paul Thompson and Barkley McKay. This forms part of a research project funded by the British Academy. Here is a live take of Sue’s arrangement of ‘Bronx Pachanga’ with a cheeky little Watusi middle.