Steven Oquendo Latin Jazz Orchestra - A Centennial Salute to Tito & Tito

Steven Oquendo Latin Jazz Orchestra - A Centennial Salute to Tito & Tito (Audio CD)

For more than a decade, the Steven Oquendo Latin Jazz Orchestra has been one of the most precious hidden treasures of the Bronx, New York City’s majority Hispanic borough. The trumpeter-educator Steven Oquendo founded SOLJO while working as a music instructor at Harlem School of the Arts. The orchestra performed alongside Celia Cruz, Rubén Blades, and Eddie Palmieri, initially as a rehearsal band. At the behest of impresario David Maldonado, the ensemble soon found itself working regularly with a weekly residency across the river in the restaurant Babalu, around the Throgs Neck neighborhood, where the group, until today, regularly holds fort on Tuesday nights at its now successor, Mamajuana.

This recording finds the band tearing it up, celebrating the centennial of Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Dizzy’s Club, located just a few blocks uptown from the old Palladium Ballroom, where the two Titos made history at the home of the mambo.
The orchestra closes the set with the same blue-hot fire with which it opened, burning things up on Puente’s arrangement of Antar Daly driving onomatopoeic ”Babarabatiri,” on which Pete Miranda, the veteran Baritone saxophonist, and Michael Pallas, trombonist, are the featured soloists.