Billboard : 10/07/1957
Score of 72

Essentially an Afro-Cuban drum session that features percussionist Sabú Martínez and a battery of conga and bongo drummers. Set emphasizes the Africa-rooted, primitively exciting rhythms. The chanting and vocals here lend authenticity. Sales could be strong in Latin market, and with jazz fans who go for percussion sets.

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Down Beat
Don Gold : 11/28/1957

from the “Tangents” column
Assorted Rhythms: Several worthwhile LPs based on concepts of rhythm have been released recently. Some of these are not justifiably categorized as jazz, for review in that section of the magazine, but they do deserve mention here.

Palo Congo (Blue Note 1561) features the Afro-Cuban rhythmic fury of a group headed by Sabú L. Martínez. Sabú has worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk, but is more concerned with Afro-Cuban percussion than jazz here. Joined by five percussionists and two vocalists, Sabú leads the group through a fascinating series of tunes. A variety of drums are employed, including the quinto, golpe, tumbadore, and llamador. The product, as annotator Hsio Wen Shih points out, is “a happy trip to a musical world with rather different rules.”

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Liner Notes by Hsio Wen Shih

The emotional kinship between the world of this recording and the world of jazz seems to strong at times that the distance between the worlds seems no wider than the pavement of West Fifty-Fourth Street which separates the Museum of Primitive Art from the Museum of Modern Art. Yet the step from Afro-Cuban music to jazz is a long step, for the European elements of jazz are always in the foreground, while here the latin elements of “latin” music are often imperceptible. It is mostly Africa that we hear in this recording: some rituals dedicated to African Gods, a good deal of singing and chanting in African antiphonal style, and all the instruments, whether obviously African like the quinto, a Cuban version of the slit signal drum, or as apparently European as guitar and bass, played like their African prototypes in African musical tradition. Still, the kinship is there to hear, for Afro-Cuban music shares with jazz the intense motor excitement, the rhythmic fluidity that Andre Hodeir calls vital drive, and the striving for ecstatic communion which supplies much of the motive force.

Sabú, the leader of this date, is one of the many musicians of both traditions who have tried to find common ground. He has played with such jazz musicians as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, J.J. Johnson, Gigi Gryce, and Art Blakey. For this purely Afro-Cuban record Sabú has drawn more on the other half of his experience, the many latin groups he has worked with since he made his professional debut at the age of 11 in 1941. Before he formed his own quintet this year Sabú worked with the bands of Marcelino Guerro, Esy Morales, Noro Morales, and Miguelito Valdez. He was a member of the original Joe Loco trio, accompanist to dance Josephine Premice and singer Harry Belafonte, and played in the Broadway show, “House of Flowers.”

Arsenio Rodriguez is features as guitarist, drummer, and chanteur. Arsenio and his two brothers, Raul “Caesar” Travieso and Israel Moises “Quique” Travieso, grew up in Cuba with Miguelito Valdez and Chano Pozo, often worked together, and composed many Cuban pop songs together. Before coming to New York nine years ago, Arsenio led one of the finest bands in Cuba. He now leads his own band in New York, in which Caesar and Quique both play, as does bassist Evaristo Baro. Ray “Mosquito” Romero has played with Miguelito Valdez and accompanied Eartha Kitt. The singers are Sarah Baro, Mrs. Evaristo Baro, and Willie Capó, both of Arsenio Rodriguez’ group.

El Cumbanchero begins with a vocal introduction by Sabú, asking everyone to listen to the drum which expresses his soul, followed by two Sabú solos on the woody sounding quinto, sandwiching a rhythmic guitar solo by Arsenio.

Billumbia – Palo Congo is a fragment of religous ritual, with Arensio preaching in an Afro-Cuban cult dialect to antiphonal responses by the group. The rhythmic pattern which accompanies the chanting is a multivoiced 8/8 with a series of accents on conga by Mosquito varying from single quarter notes on the downbeat, to off-beat triplets, to the syncopated 1/8-1/16 – 1/8 – 1/16 – 1/8 pattern of the cinquillo.

Choferito – Plena is in a lighter groove, with Willie Capo singing lead in a little Puerto Rican plaint:

Little chauffeur, Little chauffeur, I’ll give you money for gas
Little chauffeur, Little chauffeur, to take me to my beloved.

Notice here Sabú’s playing of gourd, in which the swish serves the same function as Freddie Greene does in Basie‘s rhythm section, or as sand paper does in cabinet making.

Asabache is a four-drum seminar with Quique on golpe, Arsenio on tumbadore, Caesar on quinto, and Sabú on llamador. The two middle voices combine to play a pattern of two 8/8 bars, against higher pitched free accents and a bottom of a 3/4 pattern, often played with only the first quarter sounded.

Simba is a fantasy describing a lion hunt with Sabú chanting out the story against a shifting rhythmic background, beginning in 8/8 moving to 2/2 , and then alternating while Sabú plays cowbell with off phrase shifts between 2/2 and 6/8.

Rhapsodia del Maravilloso is a guitar solo by Arsenio Rodriguez, whose lines are far from the world of modern jazz, but who shows an emotional authority and rhythmic sureness comparable to such a traditional jazz artist as Pete Johnson.

Aggo Elegua is another fragment of ritual, a choral salutation of the Yoruba (Nigerian) deity, called Saint Elegua in the Cuban cult, who guards the crossroads and human fertility, sung in an Afro-Cuban cult dialect led by Caesar while Sabú plays a 2/8 pattern on quinto against the 6/8 of the voices.

Tribilin Cantore is the most latin of the pieces here, a gentle pastoral tribute to the scenery, climate, and products of beautiful Cuba, with more guitar by Arsenio and an extremely manic bass solo by Evaristo Baro.

Altogether a happy trip to a musical world with rather different rules, but neither artless nor lacking its own brand of musical sophistication.