PRICE:
$37.50
IN STOCK
ARTIST
TITLE
Top Soul
FORMAT
LP

LABEL
CATALOG #
MYE 119LP MYE 119LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
6/16/2023

Reissue, originally released in 1975. Enrique Luna was the son of Peruvian diplomats settled in Chile. He had lived and studied art in New York and for that reason he had first-hand knowledge of the current jazz scene: the last years of John Coltrane in the avant-garde and the mutation of Miles Davis to electric jazz. He had studied at Berklee College of Music in Boston and had an important collection of records by Davis himself and his disciples: Joe Zawinul, Herbie Hancock, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, Miroslav Vitous. While Matías Pizarro, who had appeared in the mid '60s as a very young pianist, of outstanding technique, advanced ideas and notorious musical culture, was also returning from a period of study at Berklee. The workshop meetings, jam sessions, and auditions of new music were held at Pizarro's house, on Hernando de Aguirre and Eliodoro Yánez streets, and there was no jazz musician during those years who did not go through the experience of attending the initiation sessions. According to Chilean musicologist Álvaro Menanteau in his book Historia del jazz en Chile (2003), from the youngest (pianists Manuel Villarroel and Mario Lecaros, or drummers Patricio Villarroel and Pedro Greene), to the most experienced (saxophonists Patricio Ramírez and Sandro Salvati, or drummer Jaime Farfán), they frequented Pizarro's house and consolidated the core of musicians that faced the hard decade of the '70s. That was the seed of the foundation of Fusion, a group that adopted its name directly from the generic topic that began to understand and describe the music promoted mainly by Miles Davis in those years. In 1972, Fusion launched its project with the Luna-Pizarro-Salvati trio, using electric instrumentation, experimenting with rhythmic patterns of soul, funk and rock, but keeping intact the impulse of the original jazz improvisation and an important factor of Afro-Latin music, full of percussion. Although to record the album Top Soul (1975), the band ended up with soloists like David Estánovich (tenor sax) and Lautaro Rosas (guitar), plus a rhythm trio with Mario Lecaros (electric piano, ex-Village Trio), Enrique Luna (bass), and Orlando Avendaño (drums, ex-Nahuel Jazz Quartet), plus guests like trumpeter Daniel Lencina, and the young percussionist Santiago Salas (from the group Santa y su Gente).