The charanga orchestras started in the brothels of Havana in the early years of the twentieth century playing danzon, the most genteel and European-influenced of Cuban styles, for middle-class clients. Initially small ensembles built around violin and flute, by the 1920s they had expanded to take in larger string sections and more percussion and it is this golden era, which saw charanga dominate Cuban music for the next two decades, to which Daniel Guzman looks here.
A companion volume to Nimbus’s earlier “Contradanzas and Danzones” (reviewed in Gramophone’s World Music Supplement, 11/97) which chronicled the nineteenth-century prede- cessors of charanga, Guzman traces the development from the more formal compositions of the early years by the band-leaders Antonio Maria Romeu and Electo Rosell (“Chepin”) to the livelier swing of 1940s compositions by Orestes Lopez and Enrique Jorrin. The album culminates in Jorrin’s La enganadora, widely regarded as the first cha cha cha composition and effectively marking the end of the danzon era.
The Rotterdam Conservatory students combine technical dexterity with a sensitivity for the material. The strings sound rather timid but there is no doubting the authenticity of the flute-playing of Enrique Navarro from Santiago and the flair of Marc Bischoff in a series of incendiary piano solos.'