Saturday 25 March 2017

Carmen Souza Trio live

Sometimes, life in Las Palmas presents impossible choices for a jazz lover. For example, yesterday. Should I go to see Xerach Peñate with her new project Tizziri in CICCA or Carmen Souza in the Auditorio Alfredo Kraus? (Incidentally, the tickets cost exactly the same, so that did not help.) I was pondering this dilemma for a couple of weeks till it resolved itself on Tuesday when Xerach wrote that her event was sold out. This finally prompted me to rush to the box office. Luckily, there still were five or six tickets left for Carmen Souza. So Timur and I headed to the Auditorio.

And it was good. The Trio (Carmen Souza: guitar, piano and vocal; Theo Pascal, double bass and electric bass; Elias Kacomanolis, drums) were presenting CS’s latest album, Creology (as in “creole”), but also some of oldies-goldies such as Parker’s Donna Lee, an up-tempo drum-less, vocal+guitar+bass version of Moonlight Serenade, and Calú Princezito’s Lua (which, until now, I only heard performed by Mayra Andrade). Carmen was charm incarnate, chatting away in fluent Spanish, making the audience laugh, clap, sing (in, I presume, Cape Verdean Creole) and dance. For an encore, the band played probably the most beautiful song of the set, Xinxiroti.

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