Edition: U.S. / Global

The Sound Of Cultures

Published: November 7, 1996

As Latin music's horizons and listeners expand, it seemed inevitable that it would arrive at the Knitting Factory, the downtown venue whose ambitions grow ever outward. On Tuesday night, the charanga band Orquesta Broadway played the first concert of a series at the club sponsored by Absolut called Smokin' Latin Jazz.

During its first set, the nine-piece band (which would later become 10 with the addition of a second violin) worked with various degrees of dance-music gentility. Charanga bands mix vestiges of the European influence in Cuba with the dominant Africanisms of the last 50 years: violins and flutes interact with rhythms that can suggest courtly contradances or intensified rumbas.

Still led by the brothers Zervigon, who have been in the band for 30 years, Orquesta Broadway was joined for the evening by the flutist Jose Fajardo, an old-guard pioneering Cuban improviser. He created intricate double-flute patterns in quick-firing rhythms with Eddie Zervigon, while the violin played counter riffs and Julio Salgado's sung choruses worked in insistent tandem with three percussionists. In a danzon, the old French-derived Cuban dance that these bands were made for, the rhythm eased into gentle cycles, becoming a countrified lilt.

The series continues on Tuesday at the Knitting Factory (74 Leonard Street in TriBeCa) with a concert by Jimmy Bosch and the Masters. BEN RATLIFF