Chano Dominguez, the Spanish pianist, came to the Jazz Standard on Saturday with an unusual quartet for a jazz club. From left, there was Mr. Domnguez on piano; Israel Surez, known as Pirana, on a percussion setup designed around the wood box called the cajon; the flamenco singer Blas Cordoba; and Tomas Moreno Romero, known as Tomasito, who deserves his own paragraph.
Tomasito is a palmero, with the flamenco-tradition job of clapping through the music’s variously accented 12-beat cycles. He also reacted to the music while he was sitting, shouting and moving abruptly to those accents, outlining excellence where it happened. And at four or five points in the late set, he stood up and stepped forward--in complete, decisive motions framed by stillness, like a bird or a lizard--to the front of a stage, on a miked platform, to dance.
Mr. Domnguez, born in Cadiz, locates his work between a modernist jazz-ballad tradition and wanting his instrument to be a guitar. He keeps outside jazz’s normal routes. As recombinant as his music can be, mixing with Cuban son and jazz-fusion and Bill Evans and Thelonious Monk, it remains intensely Spanish, and he has never played in a jazz club in New York before. No surprise, then, that his show was scheduled as the marquee apex of last week’s Catalan Days, the festival of Catalan music and food at clubs, theaters and restaurants around the city.
Tomasito is a palmero, with the flamenco-tradition job of clapping through the music’s variously accented 12-beat cycles. He also reacted to the music while he was sitting, shouting and moving abruptly to those accents, outlining excellence where it happened. And at four or five points in the late set, he stood up and stepped forward--in complete, decisive motions framed by stillness, like a bird or a lizard--to the front of a stage, on a miked platform, to dance.
Mr. Domnguez, born in Cadiz, locates his work between a modernist jazz-ballad tradition and wanting his instrument to be a guitar. He keeps outside jazz’s normal routes. As recombinant as his music can be, mixing with Cuban son and jazz-fusion and Bill Evans and Thelonious Monk, it remains intensely Spanish, and he has never played in a jazz club in New York before. No surprise, then, that his show was scheduled as the marquee apex of last week’s Catalan Days, the festival of Catalan music and food at clubs, theaters and restaurants around the city.
