Havana Classic

One day someone should write a feature on music tourism – me perhaps! By this, I mean groups of Brits and/or random expats who have fallen for a foreign tradition – say, Cuba – and have turned that into their hobby or livelihood. What are they doing, exactly? What are they looking for? Who are they playing for? Classico Latino is comprised of Brit Graham Walker on (the very un-Cuban) cello and Colombian pianist Iván Guevara – they're the ‘classico’ and ‘Latino’ components – as well as Polish concert violinist Barbara Dziewiecka. For their sixth album, these three formidable musicians booked the legendary EGREM Studios in Havana and hooked up with jazz violinist Omar Puente and assorted lesser-known Cuban virtuosos to power through modern and contemporary standards such as ‘Químbara’, best known for Celiz Cruz's sweatily scintillating rendition; ‘Siboney’ and ‘María la O’ by famed Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona (‘Cuba's Gerswhin’); and Beny Moré's ‘Bonito y Sabroso’.

With energetic rhythms, plucky percussion and some tasty turns on the tres and marímbula, the 13 tracks zip along with zest and zeal. The strings add something to all this – but is it all good? Tey're so far to the fore that this is less fusion and more ‘classical versions of,’ and that drains the vitality somewhat out of the originals. Walker is a conductor and the album bears the stamp of being heavily directed, rather than a truly collective enterprise. Only on later tracks, such as gutsy Afro-Cuban changüí ‘La Rumba Está Buena’ and the free-form son montuno ‘Se Quema la Chumbambá’, do the band let their hair down, but this is mainly music for a wedding feast, not a carnivalesque fiesta.