Orquesta Akokán

★★★★ 16 Rayos DAPTONE. CD/DL/LP

Second outing from Daptone’s “giant Cuban rhythm machine”.

IT WOULD be ridiculously easy to dismiss Orquesta Akokán as retro, but at a time when looking back is often a greater sin than being competent, the big band makes no concessions to the streamlined modern age in which we live. Having paid their dues playing with the illustrious likes of Compay Segundo, Chucho Valdés and Arturo Sandoval, José Pepito Gómez et al were never going to dumb down their mambo. If their self-titled debut was a convincing calling card, the second album, recorded at Egrem Studios in Havana, has had to up the game: the horn arrangements are old school, the strings cinematic and the rhythmic interplay seductive. True, that declamatory, Ben Moréstyle vocal hasn’t aged particularly well, but if you want to convince yourself it’s happy hour in El Floridita, this is what the house band would sound like.