I do love a tuba. I love when at New Orleans-styled shows, the tuba, or sousaphone, serves as bass. And it's usually some big fat dude with the tuba draped all his body and he wiggles like jelly and the sound pierces any resolves I may have about attracting attention to myself. Oh yes I love a tuba. I also love hot spicy Latin music of any variety. But, heretofore, my tuba-lust and my yearning for Latin have been diametrically opposed vernaculars. Until now. Enter Yo! (Bassett Hound Records) by Jim Self and the Tricky Lix Latin Jazz Band.
Yo! -- sub-titled Featuring The Music of Francisco Torres -- has the tuba of Jim Self, a Hollywood soundtrack guy whose horn served as the "Voice of Mothership" in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, all over it. He's performed on over 1,500 movie scores and 13 solo albums. Yo! features the cream of the Los Angeles crop of Latin stalwarts (many from the band of Poncho Sanchez). Trombone man Francisco Torres played, composed and arranged much of Yo! which includes Mambo, Cha-Cha, an Afro 6/8 and a Bolero. Self not only blows into a tuba but also a fluba which is a tuba/flugelhorn mix.
Material includes Tito Puente's "Old Arrival" as well as originals by Self and Torres, and three more Latin classics including "Poinciana," the 1936 Nat Simon tune based on a 19th Century Cuban folk song and covered extensively by dozens of artists including Glenn Miller, Johnny Mathis, Nat King Cole, Keith Jarrett, Manhattan Transfer and Ahmad Jamal.
The CD ends with "Dog Tags," a six-second howl from label mascot Stanley The Basset Hound.
