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Thursday, July 24, 2025

Pure Pleasure in the midst of Carnival

by

20140213

It's four Sat­ur­days be­fore Car­ni­val 2014. Not far away, east steel­band gi­ant, Ex­o­dus, is go­ing through its paces for pre­lim­i­nary judg­ing of Panora­ma in two days. Andy Nar­rell is jazz­ing with Bird­song a few cor­ners to the east and Curepe Scherzan­do can be heard from here if you lis­ten care­ful­ly.

We're at the Learn­ing Re­source Cen­tre at UWI, St Au­gus­tine. What a time and place to launch sax­o­phon­ist/flautist Pe­dro Leza­ma's Pure Plea­sure smooth jazz al­bum.

Re­spect­ed, pi­o­neer­ing pro­duc­er, Sime­on San­di­ford, has some­thing to do with this and the faith­ful ap­pear. There are few peo­ple who have put their fi­nan­cial and pro­fes­sion­al necks on the line for lo­cal mu­si­cians span­ning as many gen­res, pan in par­tic­u­lar, as has this body, mind and soul be­hind Sanch Elec­tron­ix.

Tonight, it's Pe­dro Leza­ma's turn. Lead­ing pan play­er, Ken "Pro­fes­sor" Philmore's name is on the tick­et but his pans nev­er mount the stage. Leza­ma apol­o­gis­es. The on­ly pan you hear will come from the guy on the board in the sound con­trol booth.

No big deal. There's al­ways Orville Roach, his key­board and his trum­pet and the hit of the night–a rous­ing ren­di­tion of KMC's Soul on Fire, which stirs an oth­er­wise se­date au­di­ence. Leza­ma's ver­sa­til­i­ty is on dis­play in this piece and should pos­si­bly have set the stage for a col­lec­tion more fo­cused on his abil­i­ty to har­ness time­less in­dige­nous melodies. In that event, the launch date would have made more lo­gis­ti­cal sense.

That's un­less the pro­duc­ers had cho­sen to ex­tract from Roach more of his orig­i­nal ma­te­r­i­al–along the lines of the mu­si­cal­ly chal­leng­ing Nev­er Again which is it­self rem­i­nis­cent of Chuck Man­gione's 1970s of­fer­ings. It's ar­guably the best track on the Pure Plea­sure al­bum.

Pitt de­scribes Leza­ma's record­ed col­lec­tion as an "eclec­tic mix" of mu­si­cal gen­res–but not more so than the show to launch the al­bum.

En­ter gospel/coun­try and west­ern croon­er, Joel John. Some mem­bers of the au­di­ence know the words to Blake Shel­ton's Is this Austin. Many have prob­a­bly nev­er heard it be­fore. But John's per­for­mance is sharp and even those who came with pan and even some jazz in mind are not re­gret­ful.

MC Sharon Pitt seems im­pressed enough, fol­low­ing the per­for­mance by a record­ing artiste who was once in line for a Cott mu­sic award in the Gospel cat­e­go­ry.

Leza­ma al­so clear­ly does not have hard­core jazz fans in mind. The mu­sic that has won the du­bi­ous dis­tinc­tion of be­ing de­scribed as "smooth jazz" is some­times neg­a­tive­ly de­scribed by some who ar­gue that you will know what is jazz when you hear it. This now ubiq­ui­tous, sac­cha­rin genre is clear­ly not "it", they would de­clare. With some jus­ti­fi­ca­tion.

Ad­di­tion­al­ly, not that Sanch did any­thing wrong, but the live ren­di­tions of the tracks on Pure Plea­sure at UWI out­did the HD­CD ver­sions by yards, if on­ly be­cause Leza­ma brings mag­net­ic charm to his stage per­for­mance and Roach's self-ef­fac­ing bril­liance comes to the fore more of­ten than not–even when he gropes for his miss­ing spec­ta­cles.

Pure Plea­sure might not be all that pure, some might con­clude, but it cer­tain­ly has its mo­ments of plea­sure and is worth a lis­ten.


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