Bobi Cespedes: Rezos

(Herald rating: * * *)

Here's a Cuban album with a difference.

Singer Cespedes who lives in California has worked with Grateful Dead/world music missionary Mickey Hart and for this enjoyable album puts Havana musicians (piano, flute, percussion, trumpet) alongside the chiming West African style of guitarist/producer Greg Landau, and drops in some hip-hop, funk attitudes and beats from Oakland homeboy programmer One Drop Scott on original material which straddles the traditional and contemporary with ease.

She is not the most distinctive of singers but is evocative, so the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

It's pretty cool to hear a tight, penetrating trumpet soaring over brusque funk beats, Latin percussion, and trickling guitar. Cuba into the future.

Label: Elite