From Amazon.com
Buena Vista Social Club bassist Orlando Cachaito Lopez busts out of the senior activity center with an out-there release worthy of a youngster that draws on five decades of professional cool. Instead of trying to compress the history of Cuban dance music, Cachaito elongates it into a shape-shifting amoeba that can swallow and absorb almost any influence. On "Redencion," reggae-inflected electric organ jabs throw open the door to dub effects. Massed
charanga violins stutter and echo as the bottom drops in and out of the mix. The project gets a jolt from figures not usually associated with Cuban music, like Jamaican organist Bigga Morrison, French DJ Dee Nasty, South African flugelhornist Hugh Masekela, and saxophonist Pee Wee Ellis of James Brown Revue fame. But it's the Cubans who provide the disc's most unexpected performances. The pizzicato strings on "Oracion Lucumi" fall like snow in a glass globe shaken hard by a gritty
tres solo. Groove-heavy "A Gozar el Tombao" spills in on Manuel Galban's reverb-laden surf guitar. Ibrahim Ferrer comes out of nowhere with a short ascending cameo vocal on "Wahira," the sole noninstrumental track onboard. Cachaito is the only artist to have played on every track of every Buena Vista Social Club release. In lightning-rod fashion, he's accumulated so much energy from those sessions, it flashes all over this gorgeous, mixed-up masterpiece.
--Bob Tarte