Havana-Paris-Dakar

The Cuban pianist Harold López-Nussa and the Senegalese singer and bass player Alune Wade came together in Havana in late 2012 to record this lovely album of easy-listening world music shortly after they had met in a German nightclub. There's nothing challenging or new about their gentle sashaying through a collection of rumba, chachachá, Latin jazz and Afro-pop as original tunes are augmented by songs associated with Le Grand Kallé, Laba Sosseh, Manu Dibango, Salif Keita and Cesaria Evora plus the chaabi standard ‘Yarahya’. Wade sings in a melodic voice that's like the softest caress, while López-Nussa tinkles the keys with a breezy, cocktail-lounge swing that, on ‘Guajira’, evokes Rubén González at his most playful. Sara Tavares adds her attractive voice to the swaying morna of Evora's ‘Petit Pays’, Orquesta Aragón shuffle elegantly across three tracks and Reinaldo Melian's trumpet injects a welcome blast of brass, heard to particularly fine effect on Salif Keita's ‘Seydou’, which is probably the most dynamic of the dozen tracks on a record that tends to simmer without ever reaching boiling point.