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Orquesta d'Soul spiced up a lovely summer evening in Menlo Park. The band is solid and smooth and infectiously fun. Even playing on the unlikely stage set in center field of the newly renovated field in Burgess Park, to a crowd of under-5 kids and their preoccupied, picnicking parents, Orquesta d'Soul's lively music turned a small-town gathering into pure festival.
The crowd came to watch a show but Orquesta d'Soul did well, drawing up the reticent adults to dancing by the last half, after much coddling by Lisa Jimenez, the very talented lead singer, who introduced the merengue with dance instructions: "Just move your feet, like this...like a little march but with alotta hips."
Orquesta d'Soul is nothing if not versatile. They use traditional Latin styles of music, salsa, rumba, mambo and ranchera, merengue as inspiration and framework but layering over rock influences, hip hop and R&B and arrive a lively, tropically stained music that demands dancing.
The bandleader, Marina Garza, has a background in blues and hip-hop and blends in jazz strains and blues notes. "World of Confusion," for example, intros with the distinct sound of r&b before the band turns up the Latin beat. Nikki O'Shaughnessy, a vocalist, broke into Japanese rap over the tango influenced "Mi Amor" and "The Power of Love." O'Shaughnessy's voice is so smooth that, even with the punctuated quality, the rap seamlessly blends in with the rest of song. Besides being an affable and skilled stage woman, Jimenez is a talented vocalist and shows the range of her seemingly bottomless vocals on "Cafe por la Manana."
That Orquesta d'Soul can so easily transport a suburban ball field to tropic dancehall is truly amazing.
Copyright 2005 The Owl Mag
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