Latin Jazz Wednesday: Grupo Escobar

Cuba has long been a hotbed of cross-pollinating musical styles, especially when it comes to dance. This quartet — featuring Steve Jarosz (guitar and tres), Brian DiBlassio (piano), Eddie Caraballo (bass), and Owl DiBlassio (congas) — specializes in Cuban salsa and timba, seizing the spirit and energy of those forms, but allowing them to evolve by fusing them with cumbia, jazz, Arabic traditional and modern tropical rhythms. With  musicians of diverse nationalities and backgrounds from Detroit and Ann Arbor, the members of Grupo Escobar deliver rich, high-energy music that brings all of these influences to bear.