Alfonso Soliano // Tiga Trombone

Malaysian jazz did not need to be discovered. It needed to be heard outside Malaysia. Tiga Trombone, the inaugural release from Habibi Funk sister label Audible Beauty, makes that distinction clear through 11 recordings by composer, arranger, and pianist Alfonso Soliano, one of the foundational figures in the country’s modern musical history. Originally recorded for Radio Television Malaysia and pressed in quantities of only a few dozen copies for broadcast, these pieces reveal a musical language already fully formed, drawing jazz, Latin rhythms, and traditional Malay ideas into arrangements that rarely waste a note. Soliano’s gift is partly one of proportion. Most tracks last three or four minutes, yet “Masth Chantani,” “Surya Pagi,” and “Petaling Jaya” contain enough melodic turns, rhythmic shifts, and ensemble color to suggest much larger worlds, while the more spacious “Rohana” lets that vocabulary stretch without sacrificing its shape. Johari Salleh and Ahmad Nawab are among the musicians appearing across the sessions, placing Soliano at the center of a broader creative community rather than presenting him as an isolated rediscovery. Listeners familiar with Mulatu Astatke, Salah Ragab, Ahmed Malek, or Dollar Brand may recognize the broader impulse to make jazz speak in a distinctly local voice, but Tiga Trombone makes its strongest case on its own terms. As Audible Beauty’s opening statement, it does more than rescue scarce recordings from obscurity. It begins filling in a part of the jazz map that was there all along.