In just five years, the Spanish Harlem Orchestra virtually has become an institution in Latin music.
Performing before tens of thousands at the Montreal International Jazz Festival in 2003, taking a Grammy Award for its CD “Across 110th Street” earlier this year, the band hit its stride early on.
Though the music world does not lack for first-class ensembles of this kind — Lincoln Center’s Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra in New York and the 911 Mambo Orchestra in Chicago stand out — the Spanish Harlem Orchestra ranks as something of a phenomenon.
The reasons were apparent over the weekend, when pianist Oscar Hernandez’s sonically explosive yet tautly disciplined ensemble made its Symphony Center debut.
With three exceptional singers chanting and dancing in front of the orchestra, a mighty brass section screaming from the rear and a battery of percussionists telegraphing mostly medium-tempo dance beats, the Spanish Harlem Orchestra very nearly overwhelmed the senses. So many musical ideas played out in such profusion, powered by so much rhythmic energy, it’s no wonder listeners danced at their seats throughout Friday night’s show.
A large part of this band’s popular appeal surely owes to its trio of male singers, who phrase, breathe and think as if with a single sensibility. In one of the evening’s great boleros, vocalists Ray De La Paz, Marco Bermudez and Willie Torres harmonized sweetly, while unfurling melody lines of remarkable complexity and urgency.
Among them, De La Paz proved particularly effective, his piercing, imploring tenor as ardent as one might hope to encounter in such a setting.
Add to this the vivid, often theatrical trombone solos of the great Jimmy Bosch, the hard-driving bass work of Hector “Maximo” Rodriguez and the corporate virtuosity of the brass and rhythm sections, and you have the makings of a band that sounds bigger, brawnier and more imposing than listeners might expect.
Yet a great deal of its allure also comes from the pen of pianist-bandleader Hernandez, who has a knack for writing pieces that embrace the conventions of Afro-Latin music without becoming slaves to them.
In “Pa’ Gozar,” a cha-cha that appears on the band’s first CD (“Un Gran Dia En El Barrio”), the singers’ traditional vocal lines were punctuated by angular, dissonant shouts from the horns.
Though no one is going to accuse Hernandez of being a technically brilliant pianist, he clearly plays well enough to inspire everyone around him. Moreover, he presents this music with a seriousness of intent that underlies even its most extroverted dance scores.
Its repertoire of mambo, rumba, cha-cha and other classic musical forms, in other words, often persuades listeners to move, but the band’s high performance level encourages a deeper level of engagement.
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hreich@tribune.com
