Customer Rating:  
Summary: Energetic Tjader Album
Comment: Mambo is Cuban, NOT Mexican music. It was the most popular Cuban rhythm (cha cha cha is a type of mambo), and salsa was the result of the experimentation in the US of Latin jazz and Latin fusion. Cal Tjader was one of the most influential practitioners of Latin jazz, and although he himself was not Latin, his music sounds just as authentic as that of Tito Puente and Ray Barretto. Although some of the covers on this album sound like, well, covers; other tracks, like Guachi Guara (later titled Soul Sauce), Tjader's composition Mambo Macumba, and Fascinating Rhythm, have a fresh, authentic sound that will get you dancing. This is much more than just a cover album, and suitable for true Latin fusion fans.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not essential but funny
Comment: I can't give this album five stars, even if it's funny. I think all of you already know Cal Tjader, vibist, jazz and latin player. Here you'll find both these styles mixed up in one of his earlier efforts. The year is one of the good ones, 1954. The enthusiasm is there, the music is light, not pretentious entertaining fifties orchestra music. The program consists more or less only in standard tunes here with mambo, latin arrangements. The music is light, unpretentious, funny, the tunes are short and kept simple and the solos are short and focused too. The orchestra arrangements not much elaborated. This record is not essential but it's a funny listening anyway. Or better, it may be essential but only for the cool fifties cover because sometimes the music turn to mexican flavour and .. you know, mexican music is not the coolest thing in the universe!
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Total Gas!
Comment: Count Basie once was asked to define "swing". "It's music meant to make a dead man tap his feet". Whew, this album is a total gas. Swining salsa rhythym messed up in great Jazz standards that will make you tap your toes and shake whatever else you got going, brilliantly recorded sound and Jazz cooking on a slow burn,Mama!
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Great Compilation
Comment: This may be one of the great period pieces of its time: witty, fun, with a serious dose of kitsch.
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