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Like many middle-class kids growing up in Quito, Ecuador (and thanks to a three hundred-year colonial legacy left by Spain and cultural alienation instigated by commercialism and American pop culture), Alvear hated everything Ecuadorian: he could name and recognize any rock band from the '60's through the '80's but could not hum one Ecuadorian song. He began playing rock 'n' roll to later discover not only an array of Latin American musical styles but embracing Ecuadorian music without shame or prejudice. Fully adopting the rock rebel lifestyle, he lived off of an alley in a “hole in the wall” and used music to speak out against the government's unjust practices. While still in Ecuador he co-founded the ground-breaking Promesas Temporales, a group that incorporated Rock and Jazz elements into traditional music, recording only 1,000 LPs at the time and later becoming an icon in the development of Ecuadorian music. As he became exposed to jazz and fusion, he wanted to learn more, but there were few opportunities at home so he started saving money with the hope of studying abroad. In December of 1985, he was kidnapped in broad daylight by the secret police of then right-wing president León Febres Cordero. His captors erroneously thought he was linked to a growing guerilla group, but because of their imprudent daylight capture, public protest led to Alvear's freedom by the end of the day. Less than two weeks later Alvear bought a one-way ticket to the US. Soon after, Alvear found himself enrolled at the Berklee School of Music and launched into a career in Afro-Latin funk, Latin jazz, and salsa music in the Boston area. He recently realized, however, that something was missing. “When I wrote a recent pasillo [an Ecuadorian song form], I said, ‘Hold it, I already have six pasillos and all these sanjuanitos and albazos … this could be an album!” explains Alvear. “I also realized I had come full circle. All these years, I played Cuban music, but I'm not Cuban. I played Brazilian music, but I am not Brazilian. I played North American music, but I'm not really North American. I had been writing Ecuadorian songs for myself, as a way to remember. And now this is what I want to do. This finally makes sense with who I am.” Anyone who has heard Andean music will hear familiar elements on Alvear's Equatorial , from pentatonic melodic motifs to Indigenous flutes like the dulcet bamboo quena and Ecuador's unique brand of panpipes played by Quechua master flutist Roberto Cachimuel, from the syncopated beats of the sanjuanito cadence to the rhythmic use of acoustic guitar. But the most immediate reaction to Alvear's two-decade slow sonic brew is that of timelessness and melodic soulfulness. Just as Peru's Susana Baca and Colombia's Totó La Momposina researched and updated the roots music of their homelands to reach new audiences, Alvear delicately brings in elements like jazz harmonies, tango instrumentation, Brazilian sensibilities, funky bass lines, and pop melodic structure to build a bridge between old and new, sometimes even sounding Beatlesesque. An early turning point in Alvear's appreciation of Ecuador's musical heritage occurred when he accompanied a filmmaker friend to the pueblo of Peguche in the northern province of Ecuador called Imbabura. “I brought my guitar and as soon as we stepped out of the van we were in the midst of a huge Indian celebration,” recalls Alvear. “It's a weeklong solstice party they have every July with all this symbolism everywhere and, while it was officially the celebration of Saint John (San Juan, thus the name for sanjuanito ), it had more to do with ancient beliefs than with Western religion. I had envisioned this little getaway, writing another pop ballad under a tree somewhere; I had no idea what I was getting myself into.” An old man with a harp caught the eye of Alvear. The man was playing a repetitive mantra-like motif and asked Alvear to join him. “I started jamming with him, but it's just two chords ad nauseum ,” Alvear remembers. “He was playing this simple pentatonic melody going around and around in circles. For five minutes, I was thinking, ‘What am I doing here?!' But then it was like someone hit me in the head with a pan. Everything clicked and I realized how removed I was from a whole, amazing universe undervalued by the mestizo and white cultures that was under my nose the whole time.” Alvear spent the rest of the week in a joyous stupor playing music door to door with Ecuadorian and Bolivian musicians. The instrumental titled “Sanjuaneando”, which was born during that celebration captures the spirit of that experience. The more personal “Ausencia,” which means “Longing,” started out being about the sadness of a long-distance relationship. Writing it was like an exorcism of sorts, but later it took on a broader meaning of longing for anything. It could be longing for a place or anything that you love. Like many songs on the album, this one is extremely melancholic. “ Pasillos are sort of like the blues,” explains Alvear “They are fatalistic. The blues will go, ‘My baby left me, life sucks, but here I am.' But pasillo takes it a little further. Like tango it can often be tragic and fatalistic, but also unique for an underlying sense of sorrow. To help illustrate this Alvear says: “Most love songs talk about ‘ If you ever leave me…' A pasillo would more likely say, ‘the day you leave me.' Pasillo , in some cases, will have a middle part that switches to a major key, where the mood gets kind of happy, but eventually the minor mood returns for the final blow.” Another song takes its name from Taita Imbabura, a striking mountain about a kilometer tall overlooking a lake in the province Imbabura, where many of the songs on the album were inspired. Taita in Quechua means “father,” and this mountain carries a lot of mystical weight among the surrounding people. “Taita Imbabura” is based on the yumbo rhythm which Alvear first heard performed by an Imbaburan group called Ñanda Mañachi. “I think of yumbo as war like,” says Alvear “It's very earthy, like people stomping on the ground.” As the melody is repeated the arrangements shift, giving it a different feel each time around, eventually leading to one of the heaviest, rock feels on the album. Other highlights of the album are the vocals of Marta Gomez and lyrics by Margarita Laso on “Soñando con Quito,” a tribute to Alvear's birth city; the cumulative grooves of “Esta Historia no es de Risa,” by Juan Carlos Gonzalez, one of the first to inspire Alvear to write original music; and, the very few jazz chords in “Flor de Kikuyo,” a song considered heretical when Alvear and Promesas Temporales first played this in Ecuador. The lasting impact of the collection of tunes is one of respect of tradition as well as pure song form. “I have been here in the States for twenty years,” says Alvear. “I think I have blended as much as any immigrant can blend and continue to contribute my part as a member of this society. But deep down inside there's always been an undertone that as much as I have made a home here there is a longing for something I left behind. Ecuador is not a paradise. But it is still home, it is always with me. As much as I have blended into this culture, there is always something that reminds me, ‘You are not from here.' I think that is the common immigrant experience. Writing this music for me was perhaps a subconscious way to not forget, to not lose that connection.” For the rest of us, Alvear has opened a door into a soulful, rich music tradition. In the process of soothing his own soul, Alvear has created a sonic bridge from America to a small underexposed diverse musical nation.
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Only a few weeks after he was born in South Africa, Indian musician Deepak Ram's family home was bulldozed. In fact the whole town was razed thanks to South Africa's Group Areas Act, which formally segregated people according to the government's racial classifications. Sophiatown, the mixed area where Ram's parents, uncles, and brothers lived, was the same area that many of South Africa's best jazz musicians originated. So even after they relocated to the all-Indian town of Lenasia, jazz had made its impression on the family. “When I was thirteen, my older brother spent his wages every week on a jazz LP: Coltrane, Miles, but also Ravi Shankar,” remembers Ram. “When he wasn't around, I would sneak and play his albums. My mom and dad would listen to Bollywood, Kirtan, and Bhajan music, and my other brother was making guitars with oil cans like the African kids.” But at age fifteen, when Ram discovered Indian music, starting with his first formal bansuri and tabla lessons in South Africa, he immersed himself completely for the next 20 years. “When I started those lessons, I was born again,” says Ram. “I forgot about high school. I read every music book in the local library and wanted to play music all the time.” At age 17, Ram - whose grandfather was brought to South Africa to work on a plantation in 1860 -moved to Bombay to study with one of the greatest flute makers in India. “We didn't have family left in India, so I stayed in one of the poorest slums in Bombay and shared a room with nine other people,” says Ram. “The household head was a famous flute maker named Suryakant V. Limaye. I was very close to him. He was like a father, a friend.” Ram kept going back and forth between South Africa and India studying and practicing. One day Ram got word that his 65-year old teacher had died and left his collection of flutes to Ram. It was four years until Ram could gather the funds to return to India. The flutes were stored in the attic until Ram's return. “Though they were somewhat reluctant, eventually his family brought all the flutes down and cleaned them up,” says Ram. “That night there was an electrical problem causing a fire in the attic. If I had been a day later, the flutes would have been gone forever.” Ram went on to study with world renowned bansuri master Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia starting at 21. “My technique is informed a lot by my teacher,” explains Ram, who is considered Chaurasia's senior disciple and has 400 recordings of the maestro. “For twenty years I listened to my teacher every single day; very concentrated listening.” Steps finds Ram taking his mastery of Indian music and applying it to the jazz he heard as a child. The latest chapter may have begun when Ram was interviewed for a book about flute technique. The author posited that it would be impossible to play “Giant Steps” on the bansuri. Ram took that as a challenge. “Jazz and Indian music have one thing in common: improvisation. The first American musicians to respond to the earliest Indian musicians that came to the West were jazz musicians. Miles and Coltrane were drawn to the improvisation,” Ram explains. “In Indian music you explore a raga for a length of time following melodic convention within a set group of notes. But in jazz the set of notes moves all the time. It's possible to play that way on the bansuri, but it's not designed that way. When you improvise in the raga system it is very concentrated. You explore one mood for as much as an hour in a concert. In a piece like ‘Giant Steps' every four beats you have to think of something different because the chords are changing, the harmonies are different. It's a very tricky thing to do. “The greatest thing gained by doing Steps is I have this newfound love for jazz. I grew up listening to it, but now I can understand what's happening more. It opened this new door to different kind of beauty for me. You can take ten jazz standards and spend your whole life on them, like ten ragas. It keeps evolving as you mature.” Ram's mastery in Indian music influences how he approaches jazz. He applies the aesthetic and melodic philosophy of raga within the chord and harmonic changes of jazz. “When jazz students study ‘Giant Steps,' they have certain patterns they study for each chord,” Ram reveals. “I looked at Coltrane's transcriptions and thought ‘I can't do this. If I do this, it's not me.' Also, I have to play within the limitations of this bamboo flute. So I did my own thing against the chords; I created my own counter melodies.” This marks a different approach than most Indian-jazz collaborations which are often done on the fly, without merging the philosophical underpinnings of the two improvisational styles. Beyond this breakthrough, Steps is an opportunity to hear a profound new element to Ram's playing, regardless of genre; an element well-suited to the human, breathiness of the bansuri. “If you listen to my playing for a long time, you will start to hear subliminal passages,” Ram explains reluctantly. “I'll play a phrase more than once, but when it comes time to play that passage again, I might drop out half of it, but you will still hear it. It's like coasting down a hill. You can't hear it, but you do hear it because of what I played before.” From Miles-inspired blues changes over an Indian 14-beat folk rhythm, to Coltrane's India-inspired ‘Naima,' Ram's musical shading gently bridges the connection from ragas to jazz standards. Like any two notes in a musical scale, Ram shows that the seemingly disparate music styles are only steps away; even less so with the bent notes of the bansuri.
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Artist: Steve Reid Title: Daxaar Label: Domino Records The album takes its name from an earlier spelling of Dakar, the Senegalese city where the record was made. Bronx-born drummer Steve Reid was a “militant” Black Panther back in the heyday. In the late '60s, he “reversed the slave trip” by taking a 17-day cargo ship back to Africa, where he lived for three years, and was thrown in jail upon returning for resisting the Vietnam War draft. He left America's racism for a more-tolerant Europe. On paper, he sounds like a pretty heavy cat, someone whose bad side you would not want to get on. But the truth is that Steve Reid is one of the most joyful and hopeful people on the planet, still optimistic that “bringing music to the people” can help solve the world's problems. After the emergence of a Steve Reid cult following among both jazz and dance vinyl collectors, the risk-taking indie label Domino Records (Animal Collective, Arctic Monkeys, Franz Ferdinand, Robert Wyatt) releases Daxaar , a spontaneous jam with African players and longtime collaborator Kieran Hebden (also known as Four Tet) on electronics. “To me, the roots of all music is the rhythm,” says Reid. “A lot of drummers use drums that don't sound like drums. The industry used to push the drums into the back; they'd turn it down. Now they're turning it up again, which is cool. The rhythmic concept is back, so it's a new age. It brings the music back to the people because it means dancing and moving and shaking your ass, and changing your mind possibly. The music comes out of the streets and it belongs to the people.” And Reid should know. He grew up across the street from Thelonius Monk (“It was what we called real ghetto.”). He tells of a musical renaissance, a time when there was live music accessible every night. Reid's discography reads like an A to Z in Black music from Motown to Sun Ra. He even played with Jimi Hendrix once and, when he was in Africa, with Fela Kuti. Reid, Hebden, and keyboardist Boris Netsvetaev showed up in Africa last January without too much planning. “I write the pieces after I play them,” says Reid with a pause and then his signature burst of laughter. Although he speaks earnestly about writing the pieces down and sending them to performance rights organizations after DJ Shadow lifted the drums and bass from Reid's “Kara Suite” without credit or payment. Reid likes to tackle life spontaneously and he took that spirit into this project. “Jazz is just like the newspaper of the music world,” laughs Reid. “When you can improvise on the rhythms you can't go wrong. People need some regular happy music right now. This is what I wanted to bring from Africa, just regular groovy, happy music.” The album takes its name from an earlier spelling of Dakar, the Senegalese city where the record was made. Joining the session are Jimi Mbaye , who has played with Youssou N‘Dour's Super Etoile since 1979, and who is known for making his Fender Stratocaster mimic the sounds of local Senegalese instruments. On electric bass is Dembel Diop , who is known for his work with Senegal's Omar Pene and Super Diamono. Rounding out the session are trumpeter Roger Ongolo and percussionist Khadim Badji . The
players gathered and wanted to know what Reid wanted them to play. He
said, “Just play.” After they played the first tune, everyone became
comfortable with this concept. They played a couple of gigs, performing
at night and recording during the day. “Dabronxaar,” which brings Da Bronx to Daxaar, gets some flavor from the era of Herbie Hancock's Headhunters and Weather Report. “That one reminded me of the train going up to the Bronx,” comments Reid. “Big G stands for God,” says Reid about the song titled “Big G' Family.” “We are all in Big G's family,” says Reid with a big laugh, “although some of us are fighting each other. The curse of the planet is selfishness. That's the stuff we gotta work on. People gotta work on the love. It's the most powerful thing on the planet.” The album closes with “Don't Look Back,” a rhythmical anthem that always swings back to the center. The track ties the album altogether in Reid's own brand of rhythm as philosophy. “It's a rhythm thing! Stay in the rhythms!” says Reid, who comes from a line of preachers. “When you go out of the rhythms, you get into a whole lot of problems. This record is a balancing thing. Put it on once a day and it will keep your life balanced.” But not letting his joy be overshadowed from his philosophy, Reid closes with “That's from the doctor!” and bursts out laughing one more time.
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