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| Gecko Turner's new album  Guapapasea! was produced by Lovemonk Records and is being released by Quango Music Group, the label created by Bruno Guez, the popular LA-based DJ, producer and tastemaker. With over 45 records released through Island Records and Palm Pictures, and now independently, Quangohas championed the emerging sounds from around the globe and developed a tastemaker brand with a cult following. Guapapasea! is a new album of Spanish singer, songwriter, producer, guitarist and visionary Gecko Turner. His omnivorous appetite for the groove is evident on every track of Guapapasea!, his stunning debut album. His unique blend of jazz, blues, samba, reggae, hip hop, rock, Spanish and Arab music with songs in English and Spanish is unlike anything you've ever heard, and yet there's something strangely familiar about it too. There's even a Spanish language reggae swing version of “Subterranean Homesick Blues.”It's an album full of unexpected juxtapositions and deliriously mixed up break beats, none perhaps more surprising to American ears than the track that opens the album, his Spanish language re-make / re-model of Bob Dylan's “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. A tropical flute blows long floating notes over a swinging one-drop reggae rhythm. Then Turner comes in with a sing / say vocal performance that maintains all the song's wild internal rhymes, making a case for Dylan as an early rapper. “[Subterranean] was Dylan's first rock song, ” Turner says. “I was crazy about it since I was 15, so I played with the words and tried it with a reggae swing groove. The author, or his business people, approved it, so I was lucky.” Turner sings and composes in English, Spanish and Portuguese and is backed by his 12 piece band, The Afrobeatnik Orchestra. Musicians include some of the best from the Afro-Cuban jazz scene including Ruben Dantas, Rodney Dassif and the great trumpet player Irapoam Freire. Guapapasea! has already won Spain's Premio Extremadura a la Creacion, given each year to writers and musicians who have created work that furthers the recognition of the Spanish language as a creative medium. The title track “40.000 (Guapa Pasea)” was recently used the Spanish movie Obaba, nominated for 2005's Best Non-English Language Oscar. write your comments about the article :: © 2006 Jazz News :: home page |