Jazz Articles about Maurice El Medioni

Maurice El Medioni meets Roberto Rodriguez: Descarga Oriental: The New York Sessions

by Chris May
June 6, 2006

The less-traveled byways of cross-cultural exploration sometimes reveal the most fascinating new horizons, and this meld of Cuban and Algerian musics does exactly that. For Descarga Oriental, Cuban-born, New York-resident percussionist Roberto Rodriguez meets Marseilles-based Algerian pianist Maurice El Médioni at the grass roots of Andalusian music, and a rainbow-hued romp of a party breaks out.

The liaison isn't, in fact, as strange as it might appear. Southern Spain's Andalucia region contributed some of Cuban music's formative influences, a consequence ...