James Galway Meets Latin Jazz Downtown

September 17, 1:40 PMNY City Life ExaminerMona Molarsky

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 James Galway at Drom. Photo: Mona Molarsky 2008

To celebrate the release of his new album, O’Reilly Street (Sony BMG Masterworks), Sir James Galway, the renowned master of the classical flute, played a gig with Tiempo Libre at Drom on Manhattan’s Lower East Side on Monday night.

O’Reilly Street is Galway’s first foray into the world of Latin jazz and the gig at Drom was his first public performance in New York with these artists. The sixty-eight-year-old flutist, who’s soloed with the world’s greatest symphonies and been knighted by the Queen of England, carried off his downtown Latin debut with great aplomb, introducing the numbers with humorous anecdotes, told in an endearing Irish brogue.

Unlike his Cuban collaborators, who played the music from memory, Galway followed the score--a stack of papers he frantically thumbed through several times. “I need a librarian up here!” he quipped.

Although the classical virtuoso stumbled once on a frantically-paced jazz riff, everyone in the audience seemed to agree Galway displayed remarkable grace… or, as the Cubans would say, gracia.

Tiempo Libre’s pianist, Jorge Gomez, arranged O’Reilly Street, an Afro-Cuban take on Claude Bolling’s Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio, which was first recorded in 1975 and became a classical crossover hit that spent ten years on the Billboard top 40. In addition to the Bolling suite, Gomez rounded out the album with several pieces he composed especially for Galway and the Latin group.

When not playing with Galway, the Grammy-nominated Tiempo Libre perfoms timba, an infectious, hard-driving blend of Afro-Cuban, jazz, hip-hop and house that was born on the dance floor.  The new album was named for O’Reilly Street in Havana, a symbol of the many cultures that have made Cuban music the force it is today.