Quemar las Naves (1988)

This hip fantasy for seven musicians is a funky fusion of Free Jazz, Salsa and Classical Minimalism. The echoes of rhumba and swing mix with the menace of mambo in a musical military junta, which creates a sophisticated confluence of the elegance of Classical music and the controlled chaos of Latin Jazz. The composer writes the following:

“Imagine for an instant that one of your manuscripts, the fruit of many months of hard work, has inadvertently caught fire. After putting the fire out, you try to piece the remaining bit together, but to no avail: too much has disappeared into thin air. So you set off to reconstruct your work from the fading memories of what could have been. But memories are changing animals and all you seem to recall is the character rather than the specifics.

This imaginary situation, however, is somewhat tangential; the truth is that in Quemar las Naves (loosely translated ‘burning your bridges’), I set out to compose a piece by mixing riffs from Latin music (Latin jazz and salsa, as characteristically as I could imagine) with fragments of my own invention--something similar to mixing letters from newspaper clippings with your own handwriting on a blank piece of paper. Yet, whatever my source of inspiration might have been, I intended to write a piece of clear rhythmic profile and continuous drive. I, therefore, superimposed the short melodic riffs and fragments on to a number of repetitive rhythmic patterns of unequal lengths. This resulted in constantly changing rhythmic and melodic accents, giving the piece, I believe, a character at once relentless and reiterative. I took the title, Quemar las Naves, from a book by Mexican poet Homero Aridjis. The piece was commissioned and first performed by the British Ensemble Metanola during the 1988 Contemporary Music Network Tour with funds provided by the Arts Council of Great Britain.”