Cuban composer, cellist, and singer Ana Carla Maza makes a freedom-fulfilling musical reconnection to her Havana upbringing and Latin American roots with the release of Caribe.
Self-produced and featuring a brass-heavy sextet, it’s a throwback to the Afro-Cuban descarga jams of the 1950s, with plentiful and joyful paths to the rumbas of the Caribbean, the tangos of Argentina, and flirts with Brazilian bossa-jazz and samba.
With over 150 concerts performed in 2022, following her second album, Bahia, Ana Carla’s immersion in her music has always been absolute (starting from a very young age).
In Caribe, she has thrown caution to the wind and, unlike her previous solo work, has solar-powered her songbook and brought together a Latin jazz band, allowing her to re-color and patch together her joyful memories of growing up during the late 1990s in the wildly exuberant city of Havana.
It was a seismic time for the city that had a profound effect on Ana Carla, as a worldwide craze for boleros and cha cha cha had taken hold following the momentous popularity of the Buena Vista Social Club music and film.
Caribe is a record that was conceived, written, and recorded ‘on the road,’ on a plane trip to Mexico, by the shores of Lake Annecy, from a castle in Portugal – a predictable and perfect creative method to match Ana Carla’s lightning energy and restless philosophy to life and music.
She has grouped a tremendous set of musicians to reflect this fresh Latin chapter: A Guadeloupean drummer, Arnauld Dolmen, two Cubans, percussionist Luis Guerra, and saxophonist/flutist Irving Acao, Norman Peplow, a German who loves Honduras on piano, a Frenchman from the south called Fidel Fourneyron on trombone, and Noé Clerc on accordion. And of course, Ana Carla is on cello and this special love-letter’s lead voice.