Garabatos Volume One, the 2009 Cuneiform label debut album by New York's ten-piece
Positive Catastrophe "little big band," is touted as a confluence of
Sun Ra and
Eddie Palmieri. Co-led by
Taylor Ho Bynum on cornet and flügelhorn and percussionist
Abraham Gomez-Delgado,
PC feature some of N.Y.C.'s best and brightest creative jazz talent, who bring enthusiasm and chops to the realization of the co-leaders' vision. This outfit seems to understand how to win listeners over to the fiery side of free jazz, just as
Sun Ra did;
the Arkestra's
Gilmore and
Allen could blister the paint off a wall as effectively as any of the horns on
Coltrane's
Ascension, but
Ra knew that a big-band swing arrangement and "space is the place" chant could get pretty much any audience dancing in the aisles, even those without a single free jazz disc in their home libraries. While not quite as incendiary as the aforementioned,
PC bring the avant-gardist pedigree from
Bynum and the Latin groove quotient from
Gomez-Delgado, and the mixture usually clicks. The complex multi-layered Latin groove and interlocking horn and rhythm section parts of the opening "Plena Organization" jab with unison stops and starts before segueing into a percolating vamp beneath
Bynum's flailing cornet solo buildup -- the tight punctuating horns soon give way to looser groupings along with the up-front unbridled saxophones of
Michaël Attias and
Matt Bauder before the entry of unaccompanied rambling percussives. The transmogrification of Latin into something else is already complete, and the album has scarcely begun. Singer
Jen Shyu opens "Travels, Pts. 1-2" with some spacy vocalizing over the ensemble members' free-form probings, and soon she is singing about interplanetary travel over a mellow but increasingly unsettled jazzy backdrop in a way that brings the
Sun Ra connection front and center. "Plena Sequiro" begins with high spirits and punched-up ensemble workouts until
Shyu brings her erhu -- another element of pancultural surprise -- into the mix as all the instruments join in a murmuring, skittering dialogue before they once again coalesce.