David Buchbinder & Odessa/Havana featuring Hilario Duran: Walk To The Sea

Walk To The Sea is award-winning trumpeter David Buchbinder's sophomore album with the Odessa/Havana band, featuring Grammy-nominated pianist and musical director Hilario Duran. It's a spot-on world music venture that stylizes indigenous concepts and applications from Spain, amid Jewish folk, Arabic and Afro-Cuban structural components, woven into a majestic concoction of radiant jazz-centric fare. With triumphant and impacting horns, frothy percussion vamps, alternating pulses, and probing ballads, Buchbinder persuasively excites and entertains.

The trumpeter links a festive outline into the mix, primarily designed with memorably melodic choruses and intricately arranged works, featuring densely populated layers to parallel the frontline soloing and sinuous passages. On "Landarico," vocalist Maryem Hassan Tollar kindles imagery of an ancient love song, colored by the leader's drifting notes that provide a significant amount of depth and a multidimensional aura. But they shift gears into a brisk Latin-jazz groove topped off with a bold and brassy movement leading to closeout. Elsewhere, the band executes breezy Afro-Cuban patterns, topped off by John Johnston's whispery flute lines, and an aggregation of compositions that integrate balladry with assertive breakouts.

It's a buoyant program where the strings section seamlessly aligns with Buchbinder and Johnston's sax parts. Moreover, Jamey Haddad and others employ the Middle Eastern oud on various tracks to instill numerous contrasts, forming a holistic world-beat vibe and signaling a union of disparate musical cultures into a cohesive and largely, fluid whole. Harmonically attractive, dense, layered and brimming with unanticipated surprises and minor shifts in strategy, Buchbinder and his cohorts operate in 10th gear. They spark innovation and execute a throng of contrasting tonalities, spanning an extensive body of musical formations and polychromatic mosaics.