David Buchbinder
Album: Odessa/Havana
Label: Tzadik Records
Release Date: November 20, 2007
Website: www.davidbuchbinder.ca

Trumpet/flugelhorn player David Buchbinder and classical jazz pianist Hilario Duran show that the union of Klezmer/Sephardic jazz and Latin music is a marriage that beams with joy for musicians and audiences alike. The duo’s latest collaboration Odessa/Havana, which is produced by the band’s bass player Roberto Occhipinti, crafts a fusion of traditional music from North Africa, South America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East making Odessa/Havana into an expressive form of cultural arts. The album is much more than an academic study of cultural music, the songs move audiences through customary Jewish dance patterns, emotive laments and soulful phrasing juxtaposed by lines of Afro-Cuban rhythms and Latin jazz wonderment. The song “Cadiz” is emblematic of a beautiful Jewish-influenced melody, and “Rumba Judia” pulls out all the stops on the excitement that Cuban jazz stirs. The compilation is made up of compositions written by Buchbinder and some written by Duran, and then there is one track “Colaboracion” which is written by both that creates an epicenter of charming nightclub jazz revelry. Taking its name from the seaport of Odessa located along the Black Sea in the Ukraine and the Cuban city of Havana, Odessa Havana has figuratively brought together these two homesteads and made the album a virtual metropolis.

- Susan Frances, 2008