Band in the USA

Cubanismo bring red-hot sound to LBC

By Greg Cahill

THEIR NAME REFERS to a phrase unique to the Cuban way of speaking Spanish. And to read the press packet, you’d think that Cubanismo had invented Latin jazz. Of course, that would be the wrong assumption. Still this razor-sharp aggregate of Cuban all-stars–led by honey-toned trumpeter Jesus Alemany–has put its own accent on that genre. During the past four years, Cubanismo have played a major role in reviving that sizzling sound and exporting the embargoed island nation’s hip-shaking grooves to a world-music- savvy American public.

Cubanismo–which perform Wednesday, March 31, at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts–is no mere New York salsa act. Instead, their music is rooted in the long-lost traditional form known as son, the big-band music of the ’30s and ’40s that has been described as being to salsa what honky-tonk is to country and western. In other words, the conventions are similar on the outside but far different underneath.

Alemany, 36, studied at Cuba’s Conservatorio Amadeo Roldan at 13, and joined the brass section of the legendary revival band Sierra Maestra, which helped awaken younger Cubans to their musical heritage.

With his own band, Alemany has created a powerful vehicle for descargas, or jam sessions, that allow players to kick back and blow while the grooves stay danceable. That has landed Cubanismo in the forefront of the Cuban music revival.

IN 1995, Hannibal Records label chief and producer Joe Boyd (Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson), a longtime folk music fanatic, met the expatriate Alemany in London. The two traveled to Havana with plans to make Cubanismo, a one-shot Cuban revival album with the best Cuban players. The project proved a huge success. They followed up with 1997’s critically acclaimed Melembe and the first live concert tour, featuring an electrifying mix of old masters and young Turks.

That 15-member lineup–which just released its third CD, Reencarnacion–includes Latin percussion legend Tata Guines on congas, veteran timbalero player Emilio del Monte, tres guitar soloist Pancho Amat, classic Cuban vocalist Rolo Martinez, and bass giant and Irakere founder Carlos del Puerto, among others.

“I have a sound that’s been in my head since I was a child,” Alemany told Pulse! magazine in 1996. “I balance what’s happening on the street with the rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic strengths of our Cuban cultural identity.”

Cubanismo performs Wednesday, March 31, at 8 p.m. at the Luther Burbank Center for the Performing Arts, 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa. Tickets are $21.50 for adults, $17.50 for students. For details, call 546-3600.

From the March 18-24, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Sax Appeal

ROBERT ASCROFT

Jazzman Joshua Redman hits his stride

By Greg Cahill

FOR ME, music is an emotional and spiritual experience,” says jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman. “When everything is right, there’s a connectedness that runs between me and the other musicians and the audience. There’s a feeling that the music that is being played isn’t simply the accumulation of all our individual impulses and motivations as musicians–instead it has a collective identity.

“In some ways, if things are going right, it feels as if the music is playing you as much as you are playing the music–you feel like an integral part of a collective experience.”

A lot of folks can relate to that in Redman’s music–fans and critics alike have hailed this 30-year-old jazz star. In the past seven years, the much-in-demand tenor and soprano saxophonist, a Berkeley native, has garnered a Grammy nomination and top jazz honors in just about every prominent music poll, from Rolling Stone to Downbeat. As one of the much ballyhooed young jazz lions–whose boyish good looks earned the saxophonist a lucrative sponsorship from the trendy DKNY clothing line, making him the first jazz musician to fuse with a fashion firm–Redman has leant a certain flair to the genre. He even landed a small film role in Robert Altman’s 1997 film Kansas City, portraying jazz sax legend Lester Young, and reprised the role in a PBS-TV Great Performances episode.

His most recent release, Timeless Tales (for Changing Times) (Warner), features covers of new standards by Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Stevie Wonder, and Prince. “These songs don’t just move me as a listener; they engage me as a player, improviser, arranger, and bandleader,” he explains in the disc’s liner notes. “They’re just 10 great songs, written by 10 great songwriters.

“Ten great songs resilient enough to change with the times and with the artists who change with them.”

THE SON OF BEBOP saxophone great Dewey Redman, Joshua surged onto the jazz scene in 1992 when the Jazz Times Readers Poll named him Best New Artist. A year before, Redman had graduated, not from some toney music conservatory, but summa cum laude from Harvard College with a bachelor’s degree in social sciences. The following year, he toured the United States and Europe for several months with his famous father, from whom he was estranged as a youth.

“Yes, my father was an influence on me, but an influence from afar in the same way that other great saxophonists also influenced me,” he says, citing John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and Cannonball Adderly as among those who helped shape his visceral style. “I had his records, listened to them, they moved me–his music touched me.”

Since then, Redman has recorded four albums and played with everyone from jazz pianist Dave Brubeck and the retro Groove Collective to bandleader Quincy Jones and jazz-hop heavyweights Us3. Along the way, he has often strayed from such lionized neo-traditionalists as Wynton Marsalis, Roy Hargrove, and Terence Blanchard–a trio of young trumpeters who have captured the bulk of the jazz world spotlight.

He balks at being touted as the leader of the young-lion jazz movement. “I see it as a marketing and media category,” he says thoughtfully. “Something that’s been latched on to by people in the record industry and writers and critics as a way to describe a very wide-ranging and varied group of young musicians. I don’t see it as an artistic reality.

“I am a young man who is trying to express himself through music and who has up to now chosen traditional jazz as the primary style with which to express himself. But it’s never been my goal to re-create a past tradition or to relive the past. I mean, I’ve always listened to all styles of music, all styles of jazz.

True to his word, he has explored a broad range of musical styles: R&B, soul, funk, rock, Latin, African. “It’s not like I sit back and think that I want to write a song that is a little bit funky with a dose of Latin–you know, music isn’t chemistry to me; I’m not trying to form new musical compounds,” he explains. “I’m just trying to experiment with grooves other than swing-based music.

“It’s not going to be a smorgasbord,” he adds. “It will be far-ranging, but hopefully also an identifiable group conception.”

The Joshua Redman Quartet performs Thursday, March 25, at 8 p.m. at the Luther Burbank Center, 50 Mark West Springs Road, Santa Rosa. Tickets are $22.50/adult, $18/student. For information, call 546-3600.

From the March 11-17, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Last Exit

Native sons: Eric Lindell, right, and the Reds have been major players on the local music scene. But after this month, they’ll join the crowd of other bands that have left the county, bound for the big music centers.

Do local musicians really have to leave the county to hit the big time?

By Patrick Sullivan

IT’S A WET January night in Cotati, and a long line of people are pressed up against the outside wall of the Inn of the Beginning, trying to stay out of the rain while they wait to fork over their $6 and get their hand stamped. Inside, the band is taking the stage, the music is beginning, and a crowd of all shapes, sizes, and sobriety levels is starting to sway to the bluesy sounds of Eric Lindell and the Reds.

You don’t have to go snooping through anyone’s CD collection here to figure out that this is a group of faithful fans: As the sinewy, tattooed Lindell launches into his first song of the evening, the words are already on the lips of half the people in the audience. The general enthusiasm isn’t dampened by the weather, or the crowded path to the bar, or even by the fact that this might one of the last times Lindell plays a gig in the county that has made him a local favorite.

Lindell, who grew up in Santa Rosa and Forestville, has built up a loyal following in his long career on the Sonoma County scene. From his early stint with funk-band Grand Junction to his current, blues-based outfit, which leans heavily for inspiration on British-invasion-era blues rock bands like the Yardbirds, Lindell has consistently pulled in big, enthusiastic crowds, and his bad-boy good looks have made him into a local heartthrob.

But a month ago he moved to New York City, and after his upcoming farewell concerts, he’s back to the Big Apple to stay, hoping to hit it big on the other side of the continent (although a New York-based fiancée also played a part in the decision).

“I’m not going because I don’t like the area,” Lindell explains. “This is just what’s right for me right now.”

Lindell’s departure is just the latest in a series of high-level defections from the local music scene over the past several years. The rock group Hangman’s Daughter, singer Diane Swann, and folkster Joanne Rand, among others, have also headed for greener pastures. These are musicians who have spent years building a passionate local following, only to head off to the country’s big music centers, to such places as Nashville or Los Angeles. When asked why, they tend to make the same, rather obvious, point: If you want to achieve success in an increasingly competitive industry, you have to take any advantage you can get, especially proximity to a few hundred record company execs.

“There’s been a ton of young musicians that have moved on, and Eric’s just the latest one,” says Tom Gaffey, manager of Petaluma’s Phoenix Theatre, where Grand Junction used to play regularly.

BUT DOES IT really have to be this way? Some people involved in Sonoma County’s music scene say no. They look at our county’s pool of musical talent, eager fans, and steady stream of weekend visitors and see an opportunity to craft a local version of the flourishing music scenes in Seattle or Austin, a scene that could be the launching pad for major-label careers.

Leading the charge is the newly formed Sonoma County Music Association. Since it was formed last year, SCMA has picked up several hundred members, established office space in the Luther Burbank Center, and instituted an ongoing series of talent showcases to spotlight local musical acts. But organizers admit that these are just the first tentative steps.

“We don’t quite have a scene around here,” says Jim Corbett, a local country musician on the SCMA board. “Quite honestly, I don’t think we’ve got it up and running yet. It’s going to take two or three years before that happens, but I believe that it can happen.”

Until things do change, however, Corbett says he can understand why Sonoma County’s big musical fish go looking for bigger ponds. But he’s not sure moving is all it’s cracked up to be.

“We miss guys like Eric,” Corbett says. “He’s kind of the top of the food chain here. But, of course, it won’t be the same in New York. You’re not going to be the big dog there. You’re going to have to jump in and work your way up the scene. But Eric has the charisma and talent to do well wherever he goes.”

Not everyone is as understanding of these departures. Some local musicians view relocation as a kind of desertion, a move that’s bad for both the scene and the departing band.

“I’m really disturbed that people are feeling they need to leave,” says Christine Alexander, lead singer of the local ska-flavored pop band Little Tin Frog. “Musicians need to realize that if the music scene is dead, it’s because we’re making it dead. We have to get people interested, we have to get fabulous and do interesting things.”

For three and a half years, Little Tin Frog has been doing just that, playing local gigs, pressing a quirky CD called Brilliant Ideas, and going on the road around Northern California. Alexander thinks bands need to work together to spread the word that Sonoma County has more to offer than scenic beauty and good wine.

“Of course, we have thoughts of leaving, when things get slow,” she says. “But I think that if you’re really good enough, people will notice you, wherever you are. … You don’t have to flee the county. I don’t agree with this fleeing thing.”

BUT WHAT HAPPENS to those who do make the move? Some, of course, wind up washing dishes or waiting tables while they wait for a break that never comes. A lucky few find success. It’s increasingly clear that Hangman’s Daughter should be counted among the latter.

“We love Sonoma County so much–that’s why it took us so long to leave,” says Sherry Phillips of Hangman’s Daughter, speaking by phone from Nashville, where the band moved about a year ago. “But it just became very apparent that if a music career is what we’re going for, we needed to go to it, ’cause it wasn’t coming to us.”

But the band’s Nashville move got off to a bad start. After a grueling five-day trip, the band members discovered that the house and backyard studio they had rented sight unseen was, as Phillips puts it, “a complete dump.”

“The ceiling was caving in, and there was mold on the walls,” she recalls with a chuckle. “The studio in the back was even worse. It was this broken-down garage that was leaking and they had just put carpet over mud. It was just horrific. So we ended up staying in an Econo Lodge for a week.”

But once properly situated, the band quickly made a splash in Music City. The owner of one of Nashville’s major recording studios has come on board as the group’s manager, and band members believe a major-label recording deal is not far off.

So what does Phillips think about plans to build up the scene in her old stomping grounds? Can the fickle attention of the music biz be brought to bear on the Redwood Empire?

“That’s hard to say, because I think there’s something really magical about Sonoma County the way it is,” Phillips says. “The fact that there’s not industry there, well, that’s probably a good thing.”

Of course, Sonoma County clearly has a long way to go before it can either hope or fear becoming even a miniature musical hot spot. High-profile local music scenes tend to coalescence around a topnotch indie label (such as Sub-Pop in Seattle) or a critical mass of nightclubs like the one on Austin’s Sixth Street. Sonoma County, on the other hand, has a small number of venues scattered in different cities and towns.

The county does boast such popular clubs as the Inn of the Beginning, the Mystic Theater, and the Moonlight. But low turnout and, many club owners argue, strict monitoring by local law enforcement have turned much of downtown Santa Rosa into a ghost town on weeknights. The closure of Magnolia’s two years ago exemplifies the problem. Can even the best organizational effort overcome those obstacles? And is it even possible to consciously create an Austin-style scene?

“Those things seem to mature naturally with the music, rather than someone actually trying to put them together,” says Bill Bowker, who is a DJ and the musical director at KRSH-FM (98.7), as well as a longtime observer of the local music scene. “It’s an admirable thing to try, but I don’t know if it can actually happen.”

But Jim Corbett and the rest of the folks at SCMA are determined to give it a shot. Austin and Seattle, they say, weren’t just accidents.

“Those things didn’t just happen,” Corbett argues. “There were people working to make it happen, getting the word out.”

In any case, it’s clear that the county continues to exert a powerful pull on its wayward sons and daughters. The four members of Hangman’s Daughter, for instance, hope to return after they hit the big time.

“We’ll be back,” says Phillips. “The lifestyle in Sonoma County, that’s who we are. We’re California people.”

As for Eric Lindell, the consensus seems to be that he’ll land on his feet no matter where he goes.

“He’s a pretty smart guy and extremely talented. Pretty much wherever he lands, he’ll make himself a party,” Phillips says with a laugh. “The party is where Eric Lindell is.”

Eric Lindell and the Reds play at the Inn of the Beginning (8201 Old Redwood Hwy., Cotati; 664-1522) on March 12, at 9 p.m.; $8. On March 13 at 9 p.m., they’ll be at the Forestville Club (6250 Front St., Forestville; 887-2594); $5. On March 14 at 8:30 p.m., they’ll take part in a farewell jam at the Tradewinds (8210 Old Redwood Hwy., Cotati; 795-7878 ); $5.

From the March 11-17, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Hot Trax

Slip another quarter into the jukebox

By Greg Cahill

J. J. Johnson Heroes Verve

A WELCOME RETURN by the former Basie sideman and bop-era trombone great who waxes mostly melodic on this strong outing (accompanied by pianist Renee Rosnes, reedman Don Faulk, bassist Rufus Reid, and drummer Victor Lewis). But listen to him growl and groan on “Thelonious the Onliest,” an angular and dangerous-sounding track inspired by Thelonious Monk. At a mere three minutes and two seconds, it’s the shortest song, but worth the price of admission alone.

Snooky Pryor Shake My Hand Blind Pig

I WOULDN’T GIVE you 10 cents for Blues Traveler and that hyperactive harp player that fronts the band. But I would walk through hell in a gasoline suit to catch this pioneer of the amplified harmonica, a man who understands the true art of saying more with less. Every track on this blues-drenched CD epitomizes the blue-collar grace of postwar Chicago blues. His cover of the Hank Ballard chestnut “Work with Me Annie” simply drips with conviction. Buy one for yourself, and a friend.

Aston “Familyman” Barrett Cobra Style Heartbeat

AS LONGTIME bassist to Bob Marley and the Wailers, Burning Spear, and many other reggae legends, the Familyman delivered a drop-dead bottom that helped define the genre. “Distant Drums” is the kind of laid-back ganga-soaked instrumental dub (Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Wailer contribute special effects) that marked those glorious pre-dance hall days when nobody was making any money at this and the production was profoundly primal.

Abbey Lincoln Wholly Earth Verve

OK, it’s a cliché to say that someone could sing the phone book and make it sound soulful, but with Abbey Lincoln it’s true. Case in point: Who else could take a ditty like “If I Only Had a Brain” and–thanks in no small part to the enchanting vibes playing of the underrated Bobby Hutcherson–transform it into a spellbinding lament utterly devoid of any childishness while playfully wrapping her voice around the melody? With the recent deaths of jazz vocalists Ella Fitzgerald and Betty Carter, Lincoln steps to the forefront as the reigning jazz diva. Hail!

Gary Floyd Backdoor Preacher Man Innerstate

SINGER, SONGWRITER, and guitarist Gary Floyd made a pretty big splash (in cult circles at least) a couple of years ago as the driving force behind the Bay Area-based Sister Double Happiness. Here he mixes a handful of originals with such traditional country and blues as Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful” and Willie Nelson’s “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground.” But Floyd gets down and dirty on the soon-to-be-a-rockabilly classic “A Better Man,” a feverish lament full of woe. Pass the Lord, and praise the bottle, pardner.

Dave Biller and Jeremy Wakefield The Hot Guitars of Biller and Wakefield Hightone

LES PAUL meets Speedy West at a western swing hoedown. Labelmate Big Sandy drops in for a guest appearance, as does San Francisco alt-country heavyweight and co-producer Deke Dickerson. The track “Guitars on Fire” tells the boys’ story, with lots of twangy telecaster helping to make “all that racket from wood and wire.” The lo-fi production is a real charmer. Crank it way up.

Red Garland I Left My Heart … 32 Jazz

DO YOU THINK God loves jazz players? Heaven knows there are some sweet sounds on high if they had the good sense to give the late Red Garland a set of keyboards. This Dallas-born pianist, who worked in Miles Davis’ band from 1955 to 1958, was known as an idiosyncratic stylist whose tinkly right-hand solos were, well, divine. Need proof? Check out the soulful rendition of Percy Mayfield’s classic “Please Send Me Someone to Love,” newly released on this live 1972 date recorded at the Keystone Korner in San Francisco (and featuring Sonoma County bass player Chris Amberger). It’s simply to die for.

From the March 11-17, 1999 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.