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Master trombonist Conrad Herwig ignites Jazz at Lincoln Center with a thirtieth-anniversary celebration of his pioneering Latin Side series.

A Trombone, a Clave, and a Living Lineage.

When Conrad Herwig lifted his trombone before a packed house at Dizzy's Club on the first set on Thursday, Manhattan glittered through the bamboo curves of the room, while a different cartography unfolded onstage. Furthermore, the evening carried the burden of three concurrent occasions. First, the centennial year of John Coltrane and Miles Davis—two architects of mid-century modernism whose 1926 births shaped nearly everything that followed in jazz. Second, the thirtieth anniversary of Herwig's epoch-making Latin Side series, launched in the mid-1990s with The Latin Side of John Coltrane on Astor Place Records. Third, and most quietly, the simple fact that this band remains one of New York's most authoritative ensembles—an All-Star outfit whose collective bandstand mileage is measured in decades rather than years.

Bill O'Connell, Piano, and Conrad Herwig and the Latin Side All Stars at Dizzy's Jazz Club, NYC. Photo by Edward Kliszus

Mauricio Herrera Sets the Floor on Fire

Notably, the evening opened not with a horn but with a hand. Cuban-born percussionist Mauricio Herrera, a Grammy- and Tony-honored master of folkloric and modern Afro-Cuban traditions, conjured a conga pattern while singing in Spanish, immediately drawing the room's attention. Indeed, his palm-cracked tumbao established the night's argument before anyone else played a note: rhythm is the bedrock, and the gospel besides. His opening echoed arguments LeRoi Jones advanced in Blues People concerning African cultural continuities in American music—Herrera's pattern was less a flourish than a declaration that we had stepped onto traditions rooted in a far older historical continuum, the very lineage Eddie Palmieri has spent a lifetime championing.

Sketches, Steps, and Sheets of Cuban Sound

Subsequently, Herwig and his charts went to work. The band tore through Davis's "So What" and a reimagined "Sketches of Spain" with the swaggering confidence one earns only by genuinely internalizing both bilineages. Coltrane's Giant Steps and the ravishing Naima soon followed—the former recast in Afro-Cuban dance rhythms that tested every chord-change-eating musician on the bandstand, with Handy's tenor threading the three-key cycle against Ameen's clave-anchored drive; the latter caressed into a bolero of aching tenderness, Bill O'Connell voicing the changes in patient block harmonies that left ample air for Herwig's burnished slide work. Crucially, Herwig and co-arranger O'Connell understand that translating Coltrane's modality is no sleight of hand. Rather, the arrangements suggest intriguing resonances between modal jazz and Afro-Cuban traditions—son montuno, danzón, and rumba guaguancó—where harmonic stasis becomes the loom on which rhythm weaves its figures. One hears less a borrowing than a rediscovery, a dispatch from a shared root system that pre-dates the borders critics later impose.

Mauricio Herrera, Percussion with Conrad Herwig and the Latin Side All Stars at Dizzy's Club, NYC. Photo by Edward Kliszus

The Front Line: Herwig, Handy, and Norris

Herwig himself is a marvel. Moreover, his tone proves umbrous and humane, a baritone confidence coupled with lyric grace, with a slide articulation that finds the precise consonant attack one associates with the very best mainstream players. Having encountered the influence of Trummy Young during his formative years in Hawaii, and later earning what Palmieri calls his salsa badge across countless Bronx bandstands, Herwig brings two histories into a single voice. Saxophonist Craig Handy, a Berkeley High graduate who studied at the University of North Texas, brought a tenor that was at once forensic and rhapsodic. His Coltrane lines stayed mostly within the warm middle register, favoring harmonic substitutions and motivic development over altissimo fireworks—the judicious restraint the late Leonard Feather praised in the best of his contemporaries. Indeed, Handy's solos never overplayed the moment, instead letting line and intent emerge with structural inevitability. Meanwhile, trumpeter Alex Norris—a Peabody-trained virtuoso and longtime veteran of Manny Oquendo's Libre—shaped Miles's lines with a centered, slightly veiled tone and precise rhythmic displacement, giving the heads their unmistakable cool.

Robby Ameen, Drums, and Mauricio Herrera, Percussion, with the Latin Side All Stars at Dizzy's Jazz Club, NYC. Photo by Edward Kliszus Photo by Edward Kliszus

The Rhythm Section: Architecture of the Hot

Of course, no Afro-Cuban front-line soars without a chassis to lift it. O'Connell, the Oberlin-trained Grammy nominee whose career has included significant work with Mongo Santamaria, played montuno figures whose right-hand octaves and left-hand bass pedal pulses made the floor breathe. Bassist Ruben Rodriguez—East Harlem and Puerto Rico raised, a documented veteran of the Fania All Stars, Tito Puente, Machito, and Palmieri—anchored every tumbao with the patient, foundational gravity of a man who has logged more salsa dates than the calendars can hold. Drummer Robby Ameen, a Yale literature graduate and Rubén Blades' right hand for two decades, alternated between cymbal lyricism and clave-fluent Afro-Cuban thunder, while Herrera answered every Ameen comma with a conga period. The conversation between them was a refined musicianship rendered as architecture in time.

Conrad Herwig, Trombone, Alex Norris, Trumpet, Craig Handy, Tenor Saxophone, with the Latin Side All Stars at Dizzy's Jazz Club, NYC. Photo by Edward Kliszus

Why This Music Matters

Importantly, the Latin Side project is no pastiche. In Albert Murray's conception, articulated throughout Stomping the Blues, jazz at its highest is an act of stylization—the elegant ritual that turns hardship into grace. Therefore, when this band lights an Afro-Cuban fire beneath Naima, what we hear is not appropriation but conversation: two traditions recognizing themselves in each other. Coltrane's sheets of sound and Davis's modal vocabulary did not arise in a vacuum. Miles crossed paths professionally with Mongo Santamaria's circle, and Coltrane's explorations often naturally intersected with rhythmic and modal practices long central to Afro-Cuban traditions. Consequently, Herwig—having earned his salsa badge after the proverbial thousand Bronx gigs—simply restores conversations that history sometimes pretends to have forgotten.

A Centennial Honoring Two Innovators

In fact, this engagement remains both a jubilant party and a history lesson. Miles arguably redrew the borders of jazz several times over—as a bebop sideman, cool architect, modal revolutionary, and electric futurist. In parallel and complement, Coltrane reimagined harmony with Giant Steps and later moved beyond conventional harmonic structures into the searching grandeur of A Love Supreme. Both men made musical advancement an ethical pursuit: a discipline of unending practice fused to an open-ended universal curiosity. Herwig and his All-Stars stand as living witnesses to both legacies, demonstrating—repeatedly, set after set—that the road in jazz runs as inevitably through Havana, San Juan, and the South Bronx as it runs through Birdland.

Ruben Rodriguez, bass, and Craig Handy, Tenor Saxophone, with Conrad Herwig and the Latin Side All Stars at Dizzy's Club, NYC. Photo by Edward Kliszus

Looking Forward: The Latin Side of Chick Corea

Finally, the band offered a tantalizing glimpse of The Latin Side of Chick Corea, Herwig's upcoming Savant Records release dropping July 3, 2026. A reading of Chick Corea's Matrix—a 1968 gem few besides Chick have dared revisit—suggested that volume nine in this remarkable series will arrive with the same authority and joy that defined the night. Audiences ought to mark their calendars; on the strength of what was previewed at Dizzy's, this album promises to be a worthy entry in a catalog already brimming with riches.

The Latin Side All-Stars at Dizzy's Club

Conrad Herwig — trombone, bandleader

Craig Handy — saxophones

Alex Norris — trumpet

Bill O'Connell — piano

Ruben Rodriguez — bass

Robby Ameen — drums

Mauricio Herrera — percussion

Venue Information & Tickets

Dizzy's Club at Jazz at Lincoln Center

Frederick P. Rose Hall, Broadway at 60th Street, 5th Floor

New York, NY 10019

CenterCharge (tickets): 212-721-6500

Customer Service: 212-258-9877

Email: [email protected]

Tickets for Conrad Herwig's Latin Side of Miles and 'Trane at Dizzy's Club (May 21–24, 2026): ticketing.jazz.org/20819.

Browse the full 2025–26 Dizzy's Club season.

Conrad Herwig's upcoming performances and latest recordings, including pre-order information for The Latin Side of Chick Corea (Savant Records, July 3, 2026), are available at conradherwig.com or dusty groove.

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