London Jazz Festival: Roberto Fonseca & Mayra Andrade

I have seen Roberto Fonseca play before – in Havana backing Omara Portuondo and in London with the incomparable Ibrahim Ferrer - so although I was well aware of his ferocious talent I had no idea of how he would fare as a solo star. And I have seen plenty of jazz before, including Latin-style jazz – but only in venues the size of pub function rooms, generally full of nicotine-stained old men, so I had some trepidation about how it would come over in a venue as clean and swanky as the Royal Festival Hall.

But before Fonseca's “jazz Cubano” came the young, cosmopolitan and – let's be frank – gorgeous Mayra Andrade. The Cuban-born, Cape Verde-raised, Parisian-dwelling 24-year-old was definitely not short on sophistication, with a rich and seamless combination of influences from highlife to bossa nova, salsa to Jacques Brel-style chanson, and a band that couldn't have been slicker. Andrade's stage presence was hugely charismatic and her vocals unaffected and emotionally engaging, particularly when that chanson influence was at its strongest and lyric was piled upon lyric with rising and falling intensity so we got a strong sense of storytelling within the songs despite complete inability to understand her Portuguese / West African creole lyrics.

Unfortunately, though, all too often that slickness of musicianship detracted from the emotional enagement. A problem I find with “global” music is that its practitioners sometimes take on the worst elements of those in western Europe who have reached out to them – most often the 1980s the over-clean over-production of global superstars like Sting and Peter Gabriel, and the 1990s clunking dance beats of the rave-hippies. In Andrade's case it was very much the eighties sound that dominated, with her band so muso-ish and so produced that they occasionally simply sounded like The Police. It was a shame because there were fabulous dynamics in many songs, and in particular when, as in their penultimate song, the band locked together in a dance rhythm and got a bit of showbiz razzle-dazzle into what they were doing instead of earnestly showing off their “chops”, it grooved like a mother. Andrade is a fabulous performer – but could be so much greater if her backing band could cut loose a little more.

Fonseca's band also seemed like they might be slick to a fault. Coming on in matching outfits, and intro-ed with the sound of a disembodied singing voice, they began with a simple piano motif and congas which built into a synchronised groove that threatened Weather Report levels of jazz fusion professionalism. But just as it seemed too together for words, first Fonseca's bouncing chords began to fracture, Thelonius-style, then Buena Vista Social Club veteran Javier Zalba's saxophone lines took flight and he really began to blow. From that point it became very clear that this band was anything but predictable, and their set was absolutely, wonderfully gripping.

They proved able to build Love Supreme-style, quasi-spiritual atmospheres, wafted along on Ramses Rodriguez's sighing cymbal washes, but then turn on a dime back into choppy Cuban rhythms. High falutin compositional sophistication and down'n'dirty nightclub frugging were proved related in a way few bar Mingus have managed, and the Cuban insistence on combining the intensely sentimental with the deeply dark and weird ran through the veins of every tune like overproof rum. And it neither sounded beholden to the past nor coldly modernist: Afro-Latin chords and grooves being so etched into our pop culture from Tin Pan Alley through Studio 54 to house music that the rumbas, sons and boleros can touch a nerve in listeners with no knowledge of their origins in a way 'straight' jazz often can't.

At the heart of it all was Joel Hierrezuela's congas, played with finger-rippling virtuosity to match Indian tabla masters. Not only because they added the unsettling voodoo strangeness of Cuba's Santeria religion (the syncretic collision of African Yoruba traditions and Catholicism) to everything, although the occult thrill of their rhythms is potent and undimmed by association with a thousand exotica / easy listening records. But on a purely sonic level, because where uptempo jazz relies on the ear-jingling cymbal rhythms for its energy, the frenetic parts of this music hit right at the level of the solar plexus – those congas gave the sound some oomph (yes, that is a technical term). When the tracks became sparse, Hierrezuela and Rodriguez's rhythms somehow remained inhumanly complex and impossibly entangled without losing their groove, locked down by Omar Gonzalez's perfectly underplayed bass while Zalba took up a flute and danced around Fonseca's increasingly liquid piano runs.

Fonseca was the star, though. There was no need to worry about his ability to step out from the shadows, his showmanship was total: conducting, singing, telling suggestive jokes, he was the epitome of jazz cool, and his playing was by turns transporting and hilarious, gut-punching and dreamy. Andrade joined them for a song, matching any of the high points of her own set, and Fonseca himself left the piano to lead the audience in singing – surprisingly well – another. Encores wherein Gilles Peterson introduced some Havana rappers who had recorded with Fonseca for a romping track with slightly too much “woo yeah” in it for my tastes, and then Fonseca's band rattled through some Buena Vista riffs, were undoubtedly great fun. But the real meat of the set came before these light confections in a set that showed that depth and glamour, intensity and showmanship are not exclusive and that jazz can be very much a living medium as long as it gets an injection of hybrid vigour now and again.