When he was at Ronnie Scott's in midsummer, Craig Handy - the big, rangy California-born saxophonist who has worked alongside some high-wattage celebrities including Abdullah Ibrahim, Roy Haynes and the late Joe Henderson and Art Blakey - was frontman for the hard-hitting Mingus Big Band.
Back at the club for a week as a small-group leader, Handy might be wishing he had some of the Mingus ensemble's firebreathing brass players and its general full-on brio to help him back up the title of his own outfit, the Latin Explosion.
Handy's group exploded only intermittently on an opening night in which a supporting band led by the skilful expat British pianist Roy Powell also played well inside its potential.
Powell is an intriguing composer as well as a bold improvisor, who has worked with ballet companies, free-improvisors, avant-garde composer/players and classical ensembles, but his band occasionally sounded muted in its ruminative phases and stiff in its uptempo playing. But the first-set finale, a piece of lateral mid-tempo funk, brought a phenomenal guitar break from the underrated Mike Walker.
Handy then took the stage with the Latin Jazz Explosion, an American/Cuban/European sextet hovering between genial Buena Vista territory and rugged postbop. Cuban business was taken care of by a sonorous vocalist, who sang as if she'd like to let more of her hair down than was so far apparent - and by a genuinely explosive young dreadlocked Cuban pianist who often turned the usual chordal piano mantras of the idiom into furious, orchestral storms of sound. Handy played tenor and soprano saxes and flute, confirming the late Betty Carter's opinion of him, that he possesses a lyrical imagination and an appetite for the dramatic.
The group uneasily bridged its Latin persona and the more wayward rhythmic shapes of jazz by playing Thelonious Monk's spiky theme Evidence as a semi-Latin outing, followed by a suave-sounding but otherwise unresolved exploration of Monk's Pannonica later on. They might warm to the task through the week, but it's an idea that probably looked better on paper.
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