New Regency Orchestra: Fiesta Time!

Sitting among London’s vibrant music landscape is an ever-growing Latin jazz scene and at its heart is the Afro-Cuban jazz group New Regency Orchestra. Their self-titled debut album is a reworking of tracks from the Latin music scenes of 1950s NYC. Its founder, music curator and DJ, Lex Blondin, discovered his love for the greats of 1950s salsa, mambo and Afro-Cuban jazz in his late teens. “I was very obsessed with hip-hop and jazz,” Blondin says. “I recognised that the same energy that’s in hip-hop was in salsa too. That was my way in.”

Fast forward to lockdown and, with a lot of time on his hands, Blondin started looking through Discogs for more of the music from that golden era. And the more unknown the better. “I’ve always wanted to do a project with [Afro-Cuban jazz]. During lockdown, I was writing down ideas, selecting tunes and decided I very much wanted to prove that this music was worth people’s time because, for me, it’s the best.”

Performing live in 2022 (photo: Anna Francesca Jennings)

And then came New Regency Orchestra – the origins of the band started with one pivotal phone call between Blondin and festival booker Noah Ball, when Ball approached Blondin for ideas for a big band to play at a new London festival. Blondin got straight on the phone with Eliane Correa, a composer and pianist who splits her time between Latin music projects in London and Havana, to get her on board as bandleader for his new project.

It will come as no surprise that organising an 18-piece big band can, at times, be a logistical nightmare. “We’ve involved around 60-70 musicians in this project,” Blondin says. “It takes a lot of Google polls.” But with the musical talents of people like Eliane, who arranged the tracks that Lex selected for the record, New Regency Orchestra’s debut album was completed in under a year.

“We recorded all of this in our studio, which fits like seven people,” says Blondin. “Getting everyone to be there in the same room at the same time was pretty impossible. So [Eliane] organised it in chunks and recorded all the parts at home on her computer, so that any part of the band that came in had something to work from. Honestly, I would have never been able to do it without her.”

The tracks on the album are a mix of famous salsa, mambo and Afro-Cuban jazz hits, and some that are a bit more niche. In the latter category is ‘Scarlet Mambo Hour’, a track from the 1956 crime film The Scarlet Hour. “I stumbled upon that track by really just scraping the bottom of Discogs. It makes me move my head as if it were a grime track – it’s got the same tempo. But it’s also got this epic kind of film noir, Gotham City vibe, with dark crazy arrangements. The whole album is crap, but that track blew my mind.”

Blondin explains that the aim of reworking the tracks is not to turn them into something completely new but to pick out the best parts and make them bigger by using the power of modern-day technology. “I think the musicians would dig [the reworked tracks] because if they recorded them in our age, they probably would have gone for a similar sound,” he says. “And so hopefully Tito Puente would approve.”

This June, the group perform at Scala in London. But how will the reworked tracks – mostly spiced up in post-production – translate live? “It’s a bit more fluid, a constant work in progress, but the live shows are getting to a good place where arrangements are tight as hell, but there’s still enough looseness so that there can be some breathing and self-expression. Mostly it’s just about keeping [the music] cooking for moments when one person shines with a killer solo.”

While this is a passion project for Blondin, there is something bigger at work. With jazz acts like Mercury prize-winners Ezra Collective incorporating Latin genres into their latest album Where I’m Meant to Be, it’s clear Latin music is having a moment in the UK. “Part of the hidden goal of this is that we’re gonna blast some Latin music to a wider audience. But also, I want everyone that comes to play in the band, that wasn’t aware of this music before, to be influenced in some way.” With New Regency Orchestra growing in confidence – and planning a follow-up album of original songs – this scene has plenty of room for growth yet.

New Regency Orchestra play London’s Scala on June 27. Tickets and more info here

This article originally appeared in the July 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today