Virtuoso trumpeter/composer Gabriel Alegría’s latest release with his Afro-Peruvian Sextet, Social Distancing, chronicles a raging pandemic and the justified rage over racial injustice, and it offers uplift without ignoring the harsh reality of these difficult times.

Gabriel Alegría Afro-Peruvian Sextet
Social Distancing (Saponegro Records)
A review
Some musicians and composers have the ability to pour the full measure of their humanity into their work, salving our battered belief in the fundamental goodness of humankind and reinvigorating our hope for a planet that is both kinder and healthier. Trumpeter/composer Gabriel Alegría is such an artist, and his Afro-Peruvian Sextet is populated with similarly gifted colleagues: saxophonist Laura Andrea Leguía, percussionist Freddy “Huevito” Lobatón, bassist Mario Cuba, drummer Hugo Alcázar, and acoustic guitarist Yuri Juárez. The special guests on the sextet’s latest album, Social Distancing, include pianist Russell Ferrante, electric guitarist Jocho Velásquez, and poet Kitty O’Meara.

A spoken-word composition opens the album, with O’Meara reciting her poem “And the People Stayed Home,” which has gone viral in its discovery of silver linings in the dark folds of the pandemic. Invocational and soothing, the piece reveals Alegría to be a thoughtful and generous composer and band leader, and a musician of deep feeling. The composition also closes the album, with one difference: the opening track is in English, the closing track, in Spanish.

A percussion-driven album—with Lobatón and Alcázar laying down beds of festejo, landó, and panalivio rhythms—Social Distancing also delivers lyrical melody and compelling improvisations. At its center is the four-part “Social Distancing” suite. The suite opens with the jagged, out-of-joint “Covid 19,” which is constructed on a 12-tone row, a compositional technique called serialism, which Alegría describes as “cold, atonal, impersonal,” an apt description of the coronavirus. A wailing sax solo and an anguished trumpet solo underscore the pain inflicted by the virus. The darkly hypnotic “The Mask,” driven by the bass, drums, and percussion, features a chilling spoken-word interpretation by Lobatón of the Peruvian Son de los diablos, a traditional Peruvian dance with its roots in the colonial era. The funky “George and Breonna” makes a call for justice, with shining solos from Alegría and Cuba. “The New Normal” closes the suite with a funky, off-center blues that features the guitar of Velásquez and marches us all right out of the pandemic.

Other highlights include Alegría’s uplifting “Mirando el Shingo,” with fine solos from Alegría and Leguía; Leguía’s dancing, rhapsodic composition “Amaranta;” and Alegría’s lively, smiling, polyrhythmic “Octavio y Natalia,” named after Juárez’s son and Alegría’s daughter.

Social Distancing combines a memoir of the pandemic and its dislocations with a social justice consciousness, and it delivers a thoughtful, satisfying, and highly musical chronicle of a dark time, a chronicle that bears seeds of light for the future.

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© 2021 Mel Minter