URGENT! Not To Be Missed Slow Food & Music Event

Stop Press! New Cuban Night Event 29 June! Birth of Slow Music!

Please click on the flyer for the basic facts or here for the juicy details.

We need people to organize groups of friends to reserve if this ambitious and highly promising event is to be as successful as the last ones.

Call Phil Sweeney on 0117 904 1530

or Sue Miller on 07843 037074

Noche Cubana,  Monday 29 June

Full Briefing

A first for modern Bristol nightlife: music, ambience, food and cocktails all of the same standard (high).  The opening salvo of Slow Music nationwide combines a top class band direct from Havana, Cub

an food interpreted by one of the West’s finest chefs with cocteleria to match, a cigar terrace, and a comfortable stylish venue with table seating around the stage.

The music comes from Son del Tropico, another classic example of Cuba’s inexhaustible supply of great bands , on their first visit to play the Barbican: this is their only date outside London. A nine-piece in the trumpet-rich sonora configuration, Son del Tropico consists of veterans of some of Cuba’s most historic ensembles, led by arguably Cuba’s finest exponent of the tropical electric guitar, Pedro Justiz, generally known as Peruchin Junior. Peruchin is a musician’s musician, a jazz aristocrat and scion of one of Havana’s lesser known but most eminent musical dynasties. This the first event co-promoted by Slow Food Bristol, the gastro-activists with a healthy dose of hedonism, and the food will be created by Slow Food leading light Chris Wicks, chef-proprietor of Bells Diner, who is designing a special menu of evolved Cuban dishes and rum cocktails in the style that made him a regional star. All this in the spacious and well converted premises of the elegant old 1930s Cheltenham Cinema, or Jesters as it’s currently known.

The Band

Son del Tropico is resident in the Taberna del Benny, a colonial bar and restaurant beside Havana’s  Plaza Vieja. Six nights a week a jovial crowd of Cuban aficionados and tourists, some knowledgeable and some just lucky, is treated to as good a show as you can find in Havana. A magnificently declamatory old style bolero singer does the rounds of the tables, attracting gleeful applause at the end of a particularly histrionic verse. The bass, congas and bongos, the two trumpets, keyboard and tres keep the tumbaos churning away. To one side, Peruchin Jr slouches on a stool, picking his Yamaha guitar impassively, mixing a dense strand of faintly distorted rhythmic sound into the weft. Occasionally a bohemian couple takes the floor in front of the band for an entwined dance. The music consists of a long menu of the classic styles – sones, boleros, guarachas, mambos,danzones – interspersed with Peruchin’s own compositions and passages of exciting but controlled descarga, the Cuban term for improvisation, when Peruchin’s moustache still scarcely twitches despite the shouts of approbation from the audience and the quickening pace of the two chorus singers’ steps. Peruchin is a master of the descarga, which came into currency in the 1950s thanks to the pioneering sessions in which his father, one of Havana’s most sought-after pianists and arrangers, participated with legendary names such as Cachao Lopez, Guillermo Barreto and Tata Guines. Peruchin Jr studied piano at Conservatory and imbibed the craft of arranging from his father, but prefers to concentrate on guitar, and his style is so individual on this unusual instrument for Cuba that only the great Manuel Galban, of later Buena Vista Social Club fame, springs to mind as comparison:   Peruchin is funkier though, and more deeply Eastern Cuban. For decades Peruchin’s taught music and played in a succession of well thought of bands and at jazz festivals abroad with stars of the stature of John Mc Laughlin. At the Taberna del Benny, Son del Tropico’s work is brilliantly attuned to the location, tireless, neither too loud nor too soft, sensitive to the point of self-effacement when appropriate but as dynamic as a New York salsa outfit if they choose to put their foot down, consummate practitioners of the subtle craft of supper club entertainment rather than aspiring stadium monsters. For this, as much as their musical excellence, they are the perfect partners for Slow Food.

Slow Food Bristol

Slow Food Bristol is the local branch of the Italian-founded food and drink pressure group, now an international phenomenon with hundreds of thousands of members. Slow Food aims to promote good farming and production practice, and safeguard traditional foods and cuisines against global standardization, but also have fun: Slow Bristol organises meals, tastings and much more. Slow Food Italy has for some time run interesting musical events and this is Bristol’s first toe in the water, or actually rum, organised by a new music promoter, Escargophone Productions. The aim is to showcase music which is high quality, individual, human in scale, rich in cultural and geographic links, and also has an affinity with good eating and drinking, whether in cafes, pubs, brasseries or nightclubs. The antidote to Styrofoam crisps, wide screens and junk interior design. For more on Slow Food Bristol see www.slowfoodbristol.org.

Chris Wicks and Cuban Food

Since he took over Bells Diner round the corner in Montpellier, Chris has transformed a corner bistro into one of the West’s premier outposts of haute cuisine, while still retaining an attachment to local sources and traditions. His pot roast pork with squid, bok choy, orange and spicy tomato ketchup,  or two hour poached duck egg with Iberian ham jelly, asparagus and hot mayonnaise, have attracted comments such as “highly original, with impeccable technique” from the Good Food Guide and “enquiring mind and sound sense of taste…” from the Guardian. Recently, his more informal establishment One Thirty, across the road from Jesters, has added tapas, simpler dishes and cocktails to the offer. Cuban food , basically Spanish with additional input from Africa, China and the Caribbean, is beginning to ascend from the depths it sank to under State direction, but has a long way to go before it catches up with the range of both traditional and New Latin restaurants of Miami. The aim of the Noche Cubana food is not to mimic a Havana menu but to present a creative Bristol take on one, and this reason, plus the fact that his own kitchens are three minutes’ walk from Jesters, make Chris Wicks the perfect man for the job. He’ll be creating a short Twisted Cuban menu, based on the market, at £7-50 a dish. New Latin cuisine, flourishing elsewhere, is as rare in the UK as in Cuba, so this is an event not to miss.

The Venue

Jesters is at the junction of Cheltenham Road and Ashley Road, at 135-137 Cheltenham Road, Bristol BS6 5RR. Street parking in Cotham or Montpelier or the NCP at St James Barton, 10 minutes walk down Stokes Croft . Doors open 7.00, band  starts 8.30, finishes by 11.30, for taxi ordering, recorded music till later.

Tickets £10 - please email phil@slowdfoodbristol.org with details of names, and then send cheque, made out to Slow Food Bristol, to SLOW MUSIC, 71 Lower Redland Road, Bristol BS66SP. It would be helpful if you could also indicate whether intending to eat.

Further information

From Philip Sweeney, phil@slowfoodbristol.org, 0117 904 1530

or Sue Miller, 07843 037074