Podía ser que estuviera en La Fonda Boricua Lounge –el semi-famoso Latin jazz antro del Barrio de Nueva York– para olvidarme de algo. Pero no fue así. Cuando los hermanos Andy y Jerry González, el corazón del conjunto llamado Fort Apache, se botaron interpretando el “Nefertiti” de Miles, y quizás más importante, el “Evidence” de Monk, se hizo claro que esta noche no era una para olvidar, sino para revivir la historia, y re-hacerla a la misma vez.

Andy is always the bass, the interpolator between Barretto-Palmieri and bebop, cool, walking bass, and Jerry is two people at once. Jerry is the height of modernist blues, the cool jazz superstructure breathing through the flugel horn like someone at the midpoint between eternal life and slow death, like Miles at Birdland, only Birdland was in Spanish Harlem, and when he cradles the congas it’s because the rumba guaguancó needed to be imported from La Habana by way of New Orleans and all the way up the Mississippi to 106th Street, and the express train was not running –it never does on weekends.

Read the rest here.

Today’s post in memory of Augusto Marín.