Sly5thAve, born Sylvester Uzoma Onyejiaka II to a Nigerian father and African American mother from Detroit, grew up in Austin before moving to Denton to study jazz piano at UNT. It was at UNT that he met another brilliant pianist and composer from Monterrey, Mexico, Roberto Verástegui. The roots of the album were born during Sly’s first visit to Mexico, where he and Verástegui began mapping out their collaboration over sips of agua de Jamaica – a drink made from water, hibiscus flower, and sugar. They returned to the project during lockdown in Mexico, where the album was finally written and recorded, Agua de Jamaica.

If you’ve spent the time with either artists’ career, you know that one of the thing that makes them obvious musical partners is the ways in which they are both interested in how jazz overlaps and is influenced by different genres. Sly, in particular, has flirted with the crossover of hip hop and R&B with jazz in his career. In working with Verástegui, he’s now being pushed to explore the roots of Afro-Latin music in particular, although you can see over the course of this album just how broad their musical interests are. That’s because while jazz is always their home base, we are getting hip hop, neo-soul, electro-boogie, Afrobeat, prog, fusion, salsa, classical, and so much more. It’s an ambitious album, to be sure, and the playing is top notch, just like you would expect from two artists of such pedigree. What really makes the album work, though, is the clever arrangements that these two came up with to put all of this music in dialogue with each other and to find the right balance between letting all of the musicians explore the space and experiment and making sure each song, and therefore the album, was still a tight and cohesive listening experience. And ultimately, that’s what you get. There are incredible grooves, brilliant melodies and solos, and just fantastic musicianship from top to bottom, but the way that Sly and Verástegui are able to synthesize and distill all of these different influences and make an album that bumps is to be commended.

Agua de Jamaica is a great collaboration between two friends who also both happen to be brilliant musicians. They cover a lot of ground on this album, using jazz as a common language and then continuing to push the boundaries with each composition until they have created a musical world that is all their own.