The Masters of Cuban Spirit, The Limelight, Belfast: Sunday night at The Limelight. Outside, it's a cold, drizzly Belfast evening. Inside, the bare wooden boards and raw brick are bathed in Caribbean sunshine. For the city's keen-as-mustard amateur salsa dancers, this is as good as it gets. They may not be able to get to Cuba, but tonight, Cuba has come to them, courtesy of 10 virtuoso musicians, led by the molasses-sweet vocals of Evilio Galan, known in the business as "The Man with the Golden Voice".
An evening with the Masters of Cuban Spirit - making their first visit to Ireland - is not a spectator event; it's an occasion for getting down and dirty on the dance floor. And the dark, intimate surroundings of The Limelight - oozing atmosphere and energy in the way that the original Ulster Hall venue could never do - is where the show begins.
A couple of lithe, sinuous Cuban dancers get the crowd up on their feet, to musical rhythms that send the blood pulsing and the head spinning. In no time at all, the joint is jumping as people of all ages and from all walks of life shrug off the inhibitions of their day jobs and burn up the floor, looking for all the world as though they are right in the very heart of old Havana.
Then come the performers, straight out of the mould of the Afro Cuban All Stars, Ibrahim Ferrer and Omara Portuondo, re-discovered in Ry Cooder and Wim Wenders's landmark documentary about the Buena Vista Social Club and returned to their rightful place centre-stage, at the core of Latin music. The musicians are a mixture of dreadlocked and shaven-headed young men in tracksuits and sneakers, and older guys, resplendent in a glorious combination of satin suits, embroidered jackets and peaked caps, playing that infectious blend of son de Cuba, cha-cha-cha, salsa, rumba and conga that they've been steeped in all their days. A night to remember.
The Masters of Cuban Swing are on tour this week: The Forum in Waterford tonight; the Savoy Theatre, Cork tomorrow; the Black Box in Galway on Friday; The Nerve Centre in Derry on Saturday
Jane Coyle
The Baby Doll Project, The Project: Recently, several performers with disabilities have risen to modest prominence. British actor Mat Fraser, who has flippers for arms, has toured a successful show, Seal Boy, and in comedy, Philip Patson and Francesca Martinez, both in wheelchairs, and Alex Valdez, blind, have found much to laugh at in their plight, and society's attitude to it.
Rosaleen McDonagh, who has cerebral palsy, brings a uniquely Irish dimension to her story of wheelchair life because she is also from the travelling community. She brings to mind Sammy Davis Jr's response when he was asked on the golf course about his handicap: "I'm a one-eyed Jewish negro - what's yours?"
McDonagh defies you to see her as a victim. The pitiful details of her early life in and out of institutions and day-care centres are not presented tear-jerkingly but as a necessary prelude to her inevitable politicisation. Now, she says, after years of various therapies, all she's interested in is retail therapy.
As a child she knew she was being disrespected and patronised, and a streak of stubbornness hardened: at speech classes she refused to talk because she sensed the teachers wanted to eliminate her traveller accent. Other girls called her a smelly knacker, and while times have changed, as she pertly observes, political correctness has not yet reached the stage where Hello! magazine does a colour spread on travellers' bathrooms.
Baby Doll was McDonagh's pet name, and her story is told in her "special place" - the garish and kitschy bathroom where she can fantasise about another Baby Doll, a ridiculous alter ego something like a superpowered Avon Lady. She trundles around the stage, to country music or, movingly, The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies, telling her anecdotes with immense good humour, although her black eyes glitter with rage when she tells the story of another girl who had excrement smeared on her face after soiling herself: "They rubbed her nose in it - isn't that what they do to train animals?"
The Baby Doll Project, directed by Vici Wreford-Sinnott, has gaps in the narrative (McDonagh's astonishing leap from halting site to an MA in Ethnic and Racial Studies isn't adequately explained) but is nevertheless an often very funny show from a new voice that deserves to be heard.
The next stage in the empowerment of performers with disabilities has to be an unselfconscious integration into mainstream entertainment: we see people in wheelchairs every day - when are we going to see them in The Queen Vic, The Rover's Return and McCoy's in Carrigstown?
The Baby Doll Project ends tonight
Stephen Dixon
Wolfgang Muthspeil Trio, Whelans, Dublin: Organised by The Improvised Music Company, the visit of the Wolfgang Muthspiel Trio provided a rapt Monday night audience at Whelans with as fine an exhibition of high-calibre jazz as anyone could wish to hear. Considering the reputation for diverse musical adventures held by each member of the group, the music was comparatively straight-ahead, albeit filled with freshness, invention and surprise.
It was also executed with breath-taking individual and collective skill by players with an enviable pedigree. The leader is by now one of the world's finest guitarists, bassist Marc Johnson has consolidated a reputation first made with the late Bill Evans, while Brian Blade, in an era when great young drummers are seemingly commonplace, is simply pre-eminent.
The whole added up to the sum of its virtuosic parts. This was the start of a European tour and already the trio was playing with astonishing cohesion and mutual responsiveness, all the more remarkable given that each member is a stellar performer in his own right.
Muthspiel has a subtly personal sense of line and time, with a notable awareness of the value of contrast and space; moreover, as a guitarist he now seems indebted to no one. Like Muthspiel, Johnson is a great melodist and a commanding soloist who can also fit impeccably into ensemble demands. And Blade? Beyond category. What both he and Johnson did as part of the trio was to engage with the leader in a three-way conversation in which each voice was of equal value, epitomised in a "free" piece, Floater, carried off with immense aplomb and imagination.
As a whole, the music was engrossing and, at times, utterly beautiful. Some of the material - Solar, Thelonious Monk's tender Ask Me Now, a very fluidly handled All The Things You Are, J. J. Johnson's gorgeous ballad, Lament - were drawn from the trio's début CD, Real Book Stories on the new Quinton label. But there was also a generous amount of originals, including a superb mini "suite" of linked pieces, Snare, Tourists and Air, Love And Vitamins, a lithe, dancing Around That Time and a three-tempo flourish called Up.
In a second set, which was even better than the first, they also unveiled two début live performances; Kind Of In Between had a flowing, loose feel that contributed to its attractiveness, and Panis Angelicus, an original by the superb composer/arranger, Vince Mendoza, was beguilingly lovely. Comparatively speaking, these were careful performances, yet of such beauty that one wonders how much better they - and the trio - will be at the end of this tour. It was a privilege to hear musicians of this class.
Ray Comiskey
