Sly5thAve & Roberto Verastegui: Agua de Jamaica

Despite its title, this genre-busting album has nothing to do with reggae or Jamaican dancehall. In fact, it's a fresh-as-paint melange of jazz, electro-pop and hip-hop. Agua de Jamaica is the work of a Texan and a Mexican: Sly5thAve (real name Sylvester Uzoma Onyejiaka II) and Roberto Verástegui originally met as jazz students in Texas, and the album came together in Mexico City during the first Covid-19 lockdown.

Sly5thAve may not be a familiar name to many, but he spent two years as a member of Prince's New Power Generation, and has also collaborated with Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, Dave Brubeck, and even Taylor Swift. Verástegui, for his part, is a former director of the Orquesta Nacional de Jazz de México, and in the US he has worked with the likes of Bill Laswell and Linda May Han Oh.

Agua de Jamaica owes a major debt to early Seventies Herbie Hancock, particularly Thrust (Columbia, 1974), with its mix of downtempo drums, Afrobeat, acoustic piano, Rhodes, a mass of synthesized keys, tenor sax and bass clarinet, all of it both funky and melodic. The direction of the music is not instantly apparent, requiring several hearings, as its sophisticated layering masks hidden depths.

The opening track—"Tie Break"—was released as a single at the end of January, and has been getting airplay since then, but the album reveals the full extent of the pair's vision. The electronica is softened by Sly's plaintive tenor saxophone and occasionally by the wordless glissando voice of Silvana Estrada, notably on a floaty bolero version of "Poinciana," the only non-original track on the album. Refreshingly, this one also features a real five-piece string section.

There are hints of early psychedelia: in "El Momento," for example, one hears echoes of Soft Machine in the Lowrey organ sound, before cinematic strings take over. A babble of children's voices, a couple of retro synth beats, another wash of keyboards, and we've reached "The Wanderer," the final track, with its sweet, meandering woodwind melody. With any luck, this intriguing joint project is also a harbinger of things to come.

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