I bought "Travesia," from David Sanchez and Columbia, for $7.99 at my local used CD store when I saw it featured both tenorman Sanchez and altoist Miguel Zenon, two younger sax players whose CDs "Coral" and "Jibaro" were among my favorites last year. "Travesia" is a mix of standards and compositions from Sanchez and Zenon rendered as modern hard bop with, for the most part, only a taste of Latin jazz.
"Prince of Darkness" is done Jazz Messengers-style. But the saxophone soloing is more Wayne Shorter with Miles Davis (it's Shorter's song for Davis' second classic quintet, after all) than Shorter with Art Blakey's crew, which is to say at the border of the outside (and sometimes over it). "La Maquina" sounds Latin bluesy in places and has touches of Ellington, along with more excellent sax solos. "Paz pa Vieques" by Sanchez starts out like Latin bop and includes some nice interplay between he and Zenon, as do Zenon's "Joyful," which cooks, and several of the other songs on the CD. The standard "Ill Wind" gets a mildly avant-garde reading in a lengthy Sanchez solo. Nice piano and bass throughout, from Edsel Gomez and Hans Glawischnig respectively, but the saxes rule (check out the fetching solo work on "No Quiero Piedras en mi Camino" and "Pra Dizer Adeus," two very different songs).
It's a five-year-old disk that I would characterize as mostly controlled risk, but these guys already were showing the stuff I think places them near the top of the younger lions list. I wouldn't be unhappy if I had paid full price.
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