EFG London Jazz Festival Presents: New Regency Orchestra

Curated by Lex Blondin (Total Refreshment Centre / Church of Sound), The New Regency Orchestra (NRO) is a 18-piece big band on a mission to take the music of the Afro Cuban musical saints and reinvent it through a 2021 London filter. This is hard-blowing music for hard times featuring a storming twelve-piece horn and eight-piece rhythm sections. Taking inspiration from New York’s melding of jazz and latin from the 50s to the 70s, the band’s core repertoire features pillars of the genre from Machito, Tito Puente and Chico O’Farrill as well as more obscure gems recovered by deep-mining. Musical Director is master percussionist and Afro-Cuban don, Adé Egun Crispin Robinson, with new arrangements from pianist/composer Eliane Correa and the Catford Quincy Jones, Nathaniel Cross, who is putting down his trombone to conduct the roaring big band.