A Conversation with Victor Wooten

The last time we saw legendary bass player Victor Wooten in Madison it was March, 2012, on Bela Fleck and the Original Flecktones’ knock-it-outta-the-park farewell tour show at the Wisconsin Union Theater (now Shannon Hall). As I wrote about it then, Wooten’s funky, funky bass mirrored the collective heartbeat of both the band and the cheering, full-house crowd. The Flecktones were one of the greatest, most musical, most genuine – and generous – bands ever, making music with the kind of unfettered joy I usually associate only with my dog. Wooten is everything the Flecktones were on his own, and he brings all of that delight to getting people – top-shelf pros, passionate beginners, and everything in between – to make their own music. You’ll see what I mean when he takes the stage at Shannon Hall on Thursday, April 18, with a very different kind of show – the Wooten Woods Experience Tour.

Wooten’s got a very Zen philosophy of music that stems from his remarkable background; he’s the youngest of five brothers, including Roy “Futureman” Wooten, also an Original Flecktone. As the story goes, the brothers started a band when they were just young kids, but they lacked a bass player. So when Wooten was two, his oldest brother, Regi, put a toy guitar, missing the two top strings, into his hands, and that was that. Wooten learned to play bass the way most babies learn their first language, and I leave you to his TED talk for more on that.

The way he learned (if you watched the TED talk, above, you already know this) is the way he teaches. He’s on faculty at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, but most importantly this year marks the twentieth anniversary of his first holistic, interactive music and nature camp and the tenth of the founding of Wooten Woods, a retreat for musicians that he and his wife own on the Duck River west of Nashville. There, joined by a faculty of prominent players including his brothers and a slate of guest artists to die for, Wooten runs a variety of summer music camps so enticing I’m ready to go myself.

The Wooten Woods Experience Tour brings a taste of the place to Shannon Hall. I got to ask Wooten about it on the phone last week.

CulturalOyster: Thanks so much for taking my call. Last time you were in Madison was during the Flecktones’ farewell tour, so it’s been a while since we’ve heard you live. And this is a very different kind of concert. What should the audience expect from the Wooten Woods Experience tour?

Wooten: Yeah, it’ll be very different from a Flecktones show, except you’ll still experience a high level of musicianship and you’ll be able to tell we’re having fun onstage. A couple of my brothers are on this tour – not Roy “Futureman,” but Regi on guitar and Joseph on keyboards – plus my quartet, some teachers from the camp, and five or six students. We’ll perform together and showcase the students. We’ll also address the audience and show them some of our approach to teaching music, and how we make it easy for everyone. We’ll include the audience, too – we want to give people a taste of who we are and what we do.

CulturalOyster: Let’s move on to you. These days everyone wants to talk about your philosophy of music and teaching, and we’ll get there in a second – but musically you sort of defy description, and I want to take a stab at it. You’re a master of many styles and techniques, and whatever you call the style you’re playing at any given time – is it jazz, is it funk, is it fusion, is it funky bluegrass? – doesn’t matter. But whatever you play, it’s inevitably funky, it’s always spontaneous, unselfconscious – there’s a “dance like nobody’s watching” spirit – and it never feels aggressive or mean-spirited in the way that some rock and especially post-bop jazz – like, say, to use another bass player, Charlie Mingus – can feel. Did I get any of that right?

Wooten: Sure, absolutely. There’s enough mean spirit in the world. I don’t want to add to that. I will say this – my style can be aggressive, I can hit the bass pretty hard, but from experiencing the whole picture you know my attitude is not aggressive in a mean-spirited way. I understand what the black jazz musicians of the ‘60s were going through, I really do, but I’m not living that, so I don’t express myself that way.

CulturalOyster: You’ve gotten a lot of Grammys, a lot of accolades – but what stands out most in your lifelong history in music, the way you see it?

Wooten: Wow, that’s a good question – a big thing I get a lot of fulfillment from and I’m very prod of is running my music camps. I have four kids. My whole attitude – what drives me – has changed. It’s not about what I can do but more about helping people find out what they want and to succeed at what they’re doing. It’s more the teacher / parent / mentor role than the performer role and I feel fulfilled every time I get to teach and share – I love it.

CulturalOyster: As a teacher, you seem pretty fearless. You’ve gone where no musician has gone before, at least not in public – deep into the zen proposition that music is something everyone carries within and can access. You’ve talked about how you were born into a band, and learned music the way we all learn our first language – but how do you get people who weren’t born with a toy bass in their hand to access that natural musicality?

Wooten: By convincing them that they don’t have to do it right. That’s the problem – you’re learning that if you play wrong they slap your hand, and no child wants that. But I’ve been able to get people to play their best literally by asking them to play their worst. I get students at Berklee – they’re trying so hard to sound good playing jazz and they do sound good, but there’s no emotion at all. It’s like listening to a politician speak. So I’ll say that was good, now let’s have a contest to see who can play the worst – and all of a sudden you can feel the joy and emotion. Finally the listener feels something. It’s really amazing to witness. That spirit gets lost a lot of times because of the way we learn and what we’re told to learn. We’re copying somebody else’s lifestyle. Mingus and the musicians of his generation were different because they played the way they lived, but usually we’re not taught to play like that. We’re taught that we have to learn Chopin and Bach – someone else’s language. But in speaking, your first words are your own – which is why you have your own voice. You speak just like you. The process is easy and you have no trouble doing it.

CulturalOyster: I’ve been critical of formal jazz programs in universities because of that – because blues and jazz didn’t come out of the academy and academic jazz has no real soul. I’ve said I think they should kick those kids out on the streets and let ‘em learn to play the way the old jazzmen did.

Wooten: I don’t think kicking ‘em out on the street is the answer, ‘cause you wouldn’t do that to your baby child. It’s just about allowing them to express what they want to express. We don’t sit our babies in a room and tell them to practice their words. A baby doesn’t know it’s a beginner. It’s about the process of guidance, of allowing them all the freedom in the world to make mistakes. It’s the same with teaching music.

CulturalOyster: So you’re teaching music in this gentle, egalitarian way – and yet people, or at least a certain set of them, are doing their best to murder nature, and that natural musicality you say everyone has is constantly getting beaten to bits by bad parents, bad music teachers, poverty, war, drugs, charlatans in politics and elsewhere – so how do you transcend that?

Wooten: The main thing is that when I started being asked to teach during the early Flecktones years I had to figure out how to teach as well as what to teach. I’d never taught anything and I compared the way I learned to play to how everyone else seemed to be teaching and found a big disparity. I realized that although the traditional approach was good I found it very lacking because it was squeezing the individuality out of the musician until they learned someone else’s method. If they keep at it, eventually students are asked to find themselves again, but a lot of times they give up along the way. The way I learned was like learning your first language, where you never lose yourself and neither do you lose interest – you never say “man, I’m giving up on English,” and quit.

CulturalOyster: Are students surprised when they first experience the way you teach?

Wooten: Yes, very surprised, which is why I wrote my novel, “The Music Lesson.” For years my students were asking for the information I was giving them in book form and for years I resisted, until the idea hit to write a story and put the instruction into it. But yes, it surprises people all the time.

CulturalOyster: When you do your Wooten Woods shows you sometimes ask people who aren’t musicians to get up onstage with you. Is it terrifying when you ask people with no formal training to just play?

Wooten: Oh yes, most people are terrified the first time. They’ll get up onstage and don’t know where they’re going or what they’re doing. If you come to our show you’ll probably see it. Every time I’ve done this I’ll ask who in the audience has never played an instrument before and we’ll pull someone up onstage and I’ll hand them a bass or a guitar with no instructions. And every time, they’ll put the strap around their neck and stand there looking like a professional, so I always point that out to the audience – “look, this is not a beginner...”

CulturalOyster: When you do that can they just play, sort of like autonomic writing?

Wooten: Of course not correctly, but is it correct emotion? Yes. A baby can speak, but it’s not correct so people discount it. The same thing happens with bass or guitar – people discount it until it complies with the rules and they can understand it. But I’ll have you look at that one different way. Let’s say a ten-year old comes to take piano lessons. Here’s what most teachers will do. They’ll treat that ten-year old as a beginner, which is normal – but if you think about it, that child has been listening to music for almost eleven years already. If a song comes on the radio, whether it’s Michael Jackson or Taylor Swift, that ten-year old will know that song better and faster than the teacher will. They’ll know the lyrics and likely sing it in the right key.

What the child doesn’t know is how to play the right notes on the piano. Most teachers are teaching the kid to play the instrument, where what the kid really wants is to play music. When we teach them to speak we don’t start with grammar, but that’s the process most music teachers take. That works, but it’s slower. So my process, that I learned from my brother Regi, who taught me, is to get straight to the music – we’ll get to the instrument later, ‘cause if you can make sound you’re playing rhythm and if you’re playing rhythm you’re playing music – and we’ll fill in around you and it’ll sound good. People can start playing right away, ‘cause everybody has rhythm.

CulturalOyster: But eventually you have to learn notes and chords, right?

Wooten: I’d say no. My dad loved to sing and hold a guitar and strum while he was singing and he never learned a chord. He strummed the guitar for feel. What’s right or wrong is up to the listener. Do you ever have to learn notes and chords? If you want to fit in the box that most Americans call good, then yes. But if you have a one-year old, every note she plays will sound good to you. You also have to remember that what we call good in America may not be good in another country.

CulturalOyster: But if you want to play, say, a blues, or a folk song, you have to learn how to make it sound right.

Wooten: We get there with our students, but starting there makes it hard. Learning correct English takes time – it takes years to learn to ask mom for more milk. But a baby can ask the same thing with pure emotion and the mom learns the baby’s way, and that just takes a few minutes.

CulturalOyster: How did you figure all this out?

Wooten: I figured it out because Regi never told me anything I did was wrong, and then as I became a teacher I started watching him. He’ll tell a student “that’s great, but let’s learn it another way, too.” So when I started paying attention to that, as well as having such a love for the students, I discovered that the individual way I needed to get through to a particular student would just show up on its own. My teaching is not about my teaching. I’m more invested in the student than I am in my method, and like a jazz player who has to go outside themself to play what the music is asking for, I to go outside myself to find what the student needs.

CulturalOyster: ‘Cause you’re very receptive.

Wooten: Yeah. That’s what a high-level musician is.

CulturalOyster: So – the Wooten Woods Experience Tour is short. What comes next for you?

Wooten: Bela Fleck and the Flectkones will be next – that’s all of June.

CulturalOyster: I thought that was over?

Wooten: We’re doing it again [it’s a thirtieth anniversary reunion tour, according to Google]. It’s the original lineup – Howard Levy, Futureman, Bela and me. Also, I teach every month at Berklee, so I go up to Boston. And soon it’ll be music camp season. But right now it’s all about this tour – it’s a twelve-city tour and I’m really looking forward to it. We have some people who’ve never toured before – students of all different ages and playing levels. I want the audience to see a wide variety of what we do and to show you that you don’t have to be a virtuoso to play great music.

  _____________   interview by SK. Parts have been slightly edited for clarity.

Pedrito Martínez: Twenty-First Century Rumbero

Pedrito Martínez is the new face of an old Cuban tradition. His guarapachangueo – an open, heavily improvisational, polyrhythmic rumba that evolved from guaguancó, one of three twentieth-century rumba styles – is steeped in the multicultural cross-currents of New York, where he’s lived for twenty-two years. But Martínez’s roots lie deep in the Cayo Hueso secction of Centro Habana, the cradle of modern rumba. Martínez made his Madison debut at Overture’s Capitol Theater in February, 2015. Next week, on March 27, he returns – this time to the Wisconsin Union Theater’s Play Circle.  It’s a small venue for such a major musician, but that gives us an intimate, almost club-like opportunity to hear Martínez’s quartet, and that’s gotta be good. 

Martinez is a wondrous percussionist who’s taken the States by storm. Two years after coming to the States he won top honors in the Thelonious Monk Institute Afro-Latin hand percussion competition, and he’s reaped many more medals since. He’s both classic rumba vocalist and surprising innovator. His instruments of choice are tumbadoras (congas) and the hourglass-shaped, double-headed batá – for performace, a secular version of the sacred drum used to call up the Efik spirits of Afro-Cuban Abakuá. 

When he first came to Madison he had one album out – Grammy-nominated The Pedrito Martínez Group (Mótema Music, 2013).  Now he has two more: Habana Dreams (Mótema Music, 2016) and Duologue, a soulful improvisation on themes both island and Yuma with classically trained Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodríguez (Mack Avenue Music, 2019).  Both albums are touring right now, but it’s the Habana Dreams group (minus the star-studded list of guest artists featured on the album) that’s coming to the Play Circle. 

I caught up with Martínez by phone on a bitter early February day.

CulturalOyster: When I interviewed you in 2015 you told me your music is Afro-Cuban “con mucho de Nueva York,” but that at heart you’re a folkloric musician, a rumbero from the marginal streets of Cayo Hueso.  When you played here that year you’d been in New York eighteen years, your group had a single, eponymous album out, and you were playing guarapachangueo bastante neoyorkizao, if there is such a word.  I’ve only heard a little of Duologue so far, but the other new record – Habana Dreams – is definitely more Cuba than New York, maybe because it was recorded at Egrem.  Do you see it that way? 

Martínez: Definitely. The fact that we recorded it in Cuba makes it completely different in flavor.  The folklore is more present and direct, very clear.  It was a big inspiration to be in the studio with my brothers and friends I haven’t seen for a long time.  It was a very emotional recording.  And it was a dream come true to have [master Cuban percussionist] Román Díaz, who was my inspiration growing up, and Isaac Delgado, and Wynton Marsalis, Angelique Kidjo, and Telmary Díaz guesting in the studio with us. Ruben Blades was there for one track, too.  He was amazing. And Edgar Pantoja [Martínez’s former pianist] did two tremendous arrangements for that album. It was great. That record is definitely better than the first one.

CulturalOyster: Almost all the best Cuban musicians are expats now, but Cuba is so beautiful – Havana is so beautiful – after that trip didn’t you want to go back and live there?

Martínez: You know, I know the US more than Cuba, I’ve been here so many years.  It’s kinda weird, every time I go to Cuba I feel very emotional and sad that I don’t live there but my family is here now and my daughter was born here and all the recognition I’ve had as a musician has come from the US.  In Cuba nobody knew who Pedrito was until Pedrito got out of Cuba.  All the awards I’ve been getting here – I owe a lot to the US.  Every time I go to Cuba I absorb the energy – it’s a blood transfusion, and I continue with that force of nature, trying to do new music and use new ideas I bring from Cuba. But I belong to both, fifty-fifty.

I’ve learned a lot from the US.  I’ve been on so many records and collaborated with so many great musicians.  The Thelonious Monk award opened so many doors for me. In 2014 and 2018 I got best jazz percussion player of the year awards.  And in 2014 I got the Sphinx Medal of Excellence [Sphinx is an organization dedicated to supporting the power of diversity in the arts].  I was never going to have that in Cuba, and I was never going to play with Paul Simon, with Bruce Springsteen – none of that ever would have happened. I thank Cuba for the many things it gave me, the knowledge I have of folkloric music from the island – and thanks to that I’ve had all these opportunities outside of Cuba.  Maybe in the future I can go back there to live, but not at this point.

But I just came back from there a week ago – I played at the Jazz Plaza Festival with Harold López-Nussa and others, it was a tribute to Tata Güines, who I played with in Cuba for three years – he was one of my icons, one of the greatest congueros who ever lived – so that was amazing.  I’m going more often to play music there now, but I’d like to go soon and play for the public with my own group.

CulturalOyster: Juan de Marcos once told me that you come straight from the source, and that you will conserve rumba for the future. And in one of the videos on your website – the one called “Havana Cultura” [it’s at the top of this post] you say that in your youth you were seen on the island as a rumbero, not as a musician – but that now rumba is in style.  What was the personal journey you had to take to love the rumbero that you are?

Martínez: It was a long way to go.  Rumba was a way to live in Cuba when I was young.  I discovered that I love Cuban folkloric music more than anything.  Unfortunately, because of the economic and political and social situation then, being a folkloric musician wasn’t great – there weren’t as many opportunities as there are now. But I learned from the real ones, and that’s essential to the knowledge I have now as rumbero, as batalero.  A mission I have now is to pass along that spirituality and knowledge – to pass along the legacy of all the rumberos who’ve passed away – to keep alive the African diaspora.  In every record I try to incorporate Yoruba chants and play some of the rumba patterns I learned when I was little.

I’m still learning and it’s a long way to go, to inject this culture into the new generation – but I want to make sure they know this is a beautiful culture that can give them so many alternatives.  People used to think that because I didn’t go to music school I wasn’t going to be an amazing musician or a great composer or singer, but the opposite is true – in Cuba if you go to music school they teach you classical. If you want to learn modern styles like timba, or the folkloric styles, you need to go to the street, and my school was the street.  I’m very happy about that.

CulturalOyster: That same video reveals the Abakuá in you, the babalao, the echoes left by the Muñequitos de Matanzas and all the other great rumberos of a now-gone era.  But rumba has always been open to new influences, that’s how guarapachangueo came about. You aren’t a young musician any more – you’re a lauded master of Afro-Cuban percussion.  So tell me, what’s the future – where is rumba going now, entering the third decade of the twenty-first century?  This is a musical question but also a social one – some of the songs you wrote for Habana Dreams have very socially conscious lyrics.

Martínez: I’m extremely happy that rumba is at such an amazing level right now.  People recognize it all over the world.  Everybody wants to be a rumbero, which is something that’s never happened before. When I lived in Cuba being a rumbero was something marginal.  No one wanted to be a rumbero.  But now in any kind of music people want to incorporate some rumba.  We need to continue innovating, but we cannot lose the identity of old-school rumba – we can’t lose what all the great rumberos did for us.  We’re students, we’re just contiuing the history book they put on the table for us to use, to keep building on, to keep it alive.  I’m not doing anything new.  I’m just continuing to build on all the ideas they had for us.

CulturalOyster: What’s been the highlight of your musical career, to date?

Martínez: When I was young and in Cuba I used to listen to Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen, Elton John – and some years ago after I moved to the States I was part of a fundraiser Elton John does for the AIDS Foundation. I played that event three times. They always invite big stars – Lady Gaga was there once when I was invited, and Springsteen was there and asked me to do two albums with him, and then I played with Paul Simon twice at Lincoln Center.  That’s a big deal for a rumbero from the middle of Havana. It’s insane.  It’s a big step.

CulturalOyster: Last question – who’s coming with you this time?  It looks like the singer and percussionist Jhair Sala, who was with you last time, is on the bill – he’s Peruvian, right?

Martínez: Yes.  He’s been with us for over fifteen years. The bass player who’s coming this time is new for me, though – Sebastian Natal, from Uruguay.  He’s a virtuoso – a great singer and a unique human being. I really love this band.  I’m not saying I didn’t love the previous one, but this one is very special, and everyone’s very humble and down to earth. 

            Our keyboardist is Isaac Delgado – junior, that is, not the timbero who started NG la banda. He was playing with his dad but he decided to come to New York and coincidently my former pianist was leaving, so he’s been with us a year – he sings just like his father. We were together in Harlem just last night and Isaac senior was there, singing with us.

CulturalOyster: Pedrito, gracias.  Aquí te esperamos. 

_________________ interview by SK. Text has been slightly edited for clarity. 

             

Asere's Story

Asere started out as a bit of a mystery.  Not the word, an unmistakable cubanísmo of West African origin with fluid meaning but generally glossed as bro, dude, amigo, right-hand man.  I mean Asere: The Havana All Stars, coming to Overture Hall on March 15 and billed as a traditional Cuban son orquesta updated for the twenty-first century. “Son” is an umbrella term for multiple, related rhythms, but if you’re not sure what it is think Buena Vista Social Club. I’ve been into son for 40 years; it’s an addiction I picked up from my asere, Ricardo González, proud Camagüeyano and proprietor of the Cardinal Bar until he sold it a couple of years ago to a corporation that turned it into a soccer dive with a different name. I’ve heard a lot of son over the years, danced to all of it, written about some of it, scoured the record store on Calle Obispo in Havana in search of it. And yet – I’d never heard of Asere, the band. I wasn’t the only one; recently, over dinner with friends, the concert came up. “I never heard of them before,” said Ricardo.

According to Overture’s website, Asere is “back by popular demand” – but while this is the band’s second US tour (the first, apparently wildly successful, was in 2016), the upcoming show is Asere’s first Madison appearance. Do not mistake Asere: The Havana All Stars for the Afro-Cuban All Stars, led by the great Juan de Marcos González, who spearheaded the Buena Vista groups. The ACAS has played Madison three times over the years, and Juan de Marcos was the UW-Madison Arts Institute’s artist in residence in 2015.

By digging deep I found a couple of Asere’s albums on Amazon – one released in 2009, the other from 2013 – with teensy audio clips and absoutely no information – plus the official Asere 2018 tour video on YouTube, which I pirated for this post. This small evidence leaves no doubt that Asere is as Cuban as rum, cigars, and ‘50s Chevrolets, but it didn’t clear up the mystery. Who are these musicians, and why aren’t we familiar with them? 

Online I found a few tiny interviews with bandleader and trompetista Michel Padrón, but nothing substantive – I was left with a whole lot of questions. Luckily, Asere’s manager, Peter Dake, who happens to have been born in Oshkosh and raised in Waupaca, set up an interview with Padrón for me. Here’s what I found out:

CulturalOyster: I don’t know much about this band, so let’s start with you. I read somewhere that growing up you studied at the Conservatorio Amadeo Roldán.  So many great Cuban musicians studied there – Juan de Marcos, Chucho Valdés, Paquito D’Rivera, Arturo Sandoval, Gonzalo Rubalcaba... What else can you tell me about growing up in Havana? Were your parents musicians? 

Padrón: I’m the son of a TV and movie actor – my father – and my mother was a choral conductor.  My sister, who also went to Amadeo Roldan, conducts an opera orchestra.  Many members of Asere were at Amadeo Roldan with me, we were friends then – but I got into traditional Cuban music before that because “Cachaito” [Orlando López, Buena Vista bass player and nephew of mambo maven Israel “Cachao” Lopez] was my teacher when I was only fourteen. We had a combo – two trumpets, sax, drums, congas, piano and bass. Cachaito used to say “I don’t have the theory – what I have is the music.” He did the arrangements for our group.  I learned more from him in a few months about improvisation than I ever did in the conservatory.  That was a very important stage for me. I had other amazing teachers too, like [Irakere drummer] Enrique Plá.

CulturalOyster: That’s as Havana as it gets!  But what about outside influences? Every Cuban musician I’ve ever interviewed has told a story about sitting on a Havana rooftop listening to clandestine radio from Florida. But you’re a younger generation – did you do that too?  And if you did, what made you decide to play son despite influences from la Yuma?

Padrón: Cachaito is one answer.  The trompetista Jesús Alemañy [an early member of Juan de Marcos’s other band, Sierra Maestra, who went on to found another son outfit, ¡Cubanísimo!] was also a teacher of mine. And even as a little kid, I always loved son.  But I’m also a jazz trumpeter.  Latin jazz. The music of my generation in Cuba is timba, and I respect timba, but I’ve tried to avoid it as a musician. 

But yes, I was influenced by US radio. When we were kids we were a little more sophisticated than the ones who came before us when it came to listening to foreign radio.  We had friends who had careers in telecommunications.  They sold a kind of antenna that could grab FM stations from Florida. I had a friend who had a very potent antenna. There was an emcee who played Latin jazz – Machito, Maurio Bauzá, Tito Puente. We’d be out late at my friend’s house in Guanabacoa pirating music – we’d record our own cassettes right off the radio.  Those cassettes were like gold.  When I could get my hands on a factory-made cassette we’d spend hours looking at photos and memorizing names – someone would ask “Who played with Ray Barretto?” and we could all answer.  It was fantastic.  Today there’s so much music on the internet – kids now have it easier than we did, but they listen to worse music! 

CulturalOyster: That’s a great background story!  I also have a lot of questions about Asere. I’d never heard of it before this tour! There’s not much online – there’s a lot of advertising, but no real substance. I did see that the group started in 1996, which would be twenty years after Juan de Marcos founded Sierra Maestra, and the same year that Ry Cooder went to Havana and picked Marcos’s brain about traditional musicians and together they started making the Buena Vista recordings.  You’re a different generation, of course – much younger than Marcos and much, much younger than the Buena Vista musicians, many of whom are gone now. But how did that phenomenon affect you and what you do?

Padrón: Lots of people think we started at the same time, but really Asere existed before Buena Vista.  I wanted to bring my friends from the Amadeo Roldan together to play traditional Cuban music. We had a vision, but we had no opportunities to record outside of Cuba, and in Cuba there wasn’t much interest in traditional music.  We didn’t have the money for the releases that Buena Vista had, so our process was much slower. We never had the support of the Cuban cultural authorities and it cost us a lot of work but we had the luck to do what we do anyway.  In Cuba we’d play and people would say wow, wow, ¡que rico! and dance – the people on the island have good musical taste, but the problem is politics.  If you play the music the people will dance; son is irresistible.  So we played and it wasn’t important that we didn’t have support – sometimes you have to take the challenges to get what you want. 

But we were young and enthusiastic and in 1997 the British producer John Hollis was in Cuba searching for the great traditional singer Celina González.  We saw that as an opportunity – we went to meet him and invited him to come hear us play and he ended up giving us contracts – we went to France, to play at the Womax festival, and then we started playing at festivals all over Europe. And that’s the beginning.  We’ve played all over Europe ever since, but we’re just getting started in the US now. 

CulturalOyster: Tell me more about your life in music beyond Asere.  From what I could find online I know you’ve played with Cesaria Evora and Billy Cobham, among others.

Padrón: Cesaria was a total surprise.  I was home with my family in Havana having Sunday dinner when I got a call – the caller said they had an African lady at Abdala Studios recording and needed a trumpet player.  I went and met her – Rolando “Maraca” Valle was there – I was 22 and I thought I was dreaming.  I’m Padrón – I thought they were confused, I was sure they thought I was [Irakere and later Chucho Valdés trumpeter] Julio Padrón. I said are you sure you want me?  And they said sí, so I said let’s play. It [Café Altántico, RCA 1999] had a lot of Brazilian rhythms – I didn’t love it, but I learned a lot from that experience.  And then the great jazz drummer Billy Cobham wanted to rescue his Latin roots because he’s Panamanian but it was hard being black and Latin in Brooklyn, where he grew up. So he came to Havana to record and they called me at home – I couldn’t even believe it! – they said do you want to play and I said sí, sí, sí! I went to Spain on tour with him – it was unforgettable.

CulturalOyster: Like so many Cuban artists, you’re now an expat.  Where are you based?

Padrón: I moved to England.  I live in Bristol and I play Latin jazz with several different bands.  I lead a jam session where everyone goes, so Billy Cobham has played there.  I’ve played with Sting and others – I’ve played pop and reggae as well as jazz. But son cubano – when I’m too old to play jazz I’ll keep on playing son.  I can say I live doing what I love – I’m very privileged. 

At this point we’d been on the phone so long Peter Dake interrupted to tell Michel he had another appointment.  I hadn’t gotten to ask the requisite basic questions about the band, so I emailed them to Dake, who kindly answered. He has a long, star-studded history in performing arts management. These days he works with Columbia Arts Management, and he’s the one who ran Asere’s first US tour, in 2016. It went so well, he says, Columbia offered it to him again. 

Asere’s a 12-piece outfit: congas, bongos, cowbells, cajón, drum kit with timbales, plus a lot of small percussion. Three guitar players; one is the tresero, who also plays regular six-string guitars. Double bass and electric bass; two violins; trombone. Padrón, of course, is on trumpet; sometimes the trombonista also plays trumpet, to get that classic two-trumpet sound.

The band is accompanied on this tour by five dancers. Barbarito Montagne is one of the best choreographers to come out of Cuba; he runs his own studio and teaches, and at Asere’s request he’s come back to the stage after 17 years of teaching. With Montagne are two young couples – this is their first time out of Cuba and they’re loving the experience, Dake says. “Well, not the cold so much.”

            If you’re inspired to get up outta your seat, it’s OK with them, adds Dake. “The band loves it when people in the audience dance.”

___interviews by SK; edited for clarity and length; bracketed comments are my own.
PS -- Dake says Asere's new CD will be available after the show!

Is it Ballet, or is it Flamenco?

by Susan Kepecs

One night a couple of years ago I chanced across a jaw-dropping video on Canal Once, out of Mexico City.  Seven men, dancing brilliantly.  I kept asking myself – is this ballet, or is it flamenco?  Is it flamenco, or is it ballet?  I made sure to pay attention to the credits at the end; it turned out to be a Spanish troupe called Los Vivancos, starring in their own production, Siete Hermanos. Some months later, Canal Once ran the video again, and I was still transfixed. And now we all get to experience the thrill, because Los Vivancos are coming to Overture Hall on February 21 with their current spectacular, Nacidos para Bailar.

The Madrid-and-Barcelona-based company formed in 2007; Siete Hermanos – so named because the members of Los Vivancos are blood brothers – was its first production. Nacidos is the third.  Los Vivancos are beyond ripped, and brimming with brio. Their current work, from what I can tell via YouTube, looks heavier on sheer entertainment than their first, which – though I like my dance pure – won’t matter to most folks.  And, in fact, the Vivancos brothers are such terrific movers that it doesn’t really matter to me, either. Besides, you can’t quite characterize what they do as “dance.”  Their shows are a multimedia artform; all of the brothers are crazy good at ballet, flamenco, music, aerial acrobatics, martial arts, lighting, set design, and costuming. The choreography on which everything else rests has the distinct Euro-contemporary flavor of Nederlands Dans Theatre. There’s Balanchine in their movement style. You might call their music flamenco metal. There’s an abundance of spirit – the brothers leap and spin; they dance upside down; they flaunt theatrical machismo, challenging each other to duels onstage.

The Vivancos have an intriguing backstory. Old Spanish newspapers you can find online claim their father was the leader of a bizarre cult. It doesn’t often come up in their press coverage, and they denied the story in an interview to a Spanish reporter a few years ago. Cult or not, the Vivancos call Nacidos para Bailar a trip between the sacred and the profane, and their names come straight from the Bible – Elías, Aaron, Israel, Josua, Cristo, Judah, Josué. Elías is the oldest; Josué, the youngest, is taking a break – so, for the moment, onstage they are six. I called Elías Vivancos at home in Spain last week. Our discussion was short because his baby son, who he was in charge of at the moment, wasn’t happy about the interview, but here’s the text:

CulturalOyster: Let’s start with you – what are your outstanding characteristics, and how old are you? My readers like to know.

Vivancos: I’m 42. I think what I bring to the table in particular is creativity – behind the scenes I put out many of the ideas and romantic sentiments that end up in our art.

CulturalOyster: You all have similar artistic training, though there are some differences – from what I can see on your website your story is really complex. Can you fill me in a little on your family, your artistic development, and how you came to form the company that carries your name?

Vivancos: Well, our father was a major artist – a great dancer and musician. So what we do continuation of what he was, and of how we grew up. We began when we were very little, with music and martial arts, so without a doubt the martial arts are very present in our spirit and our attitude. We all studied in musical conservatories, and at Nederlands Dans, and ballet of course is fundamental to what we do.

CulturalOyster: Besides the shared background, how does the fact that you’re brothers play into what you do?

Vivancos: It’s the most important thing for us. Each of us has his own trajectory – before we formed Los Vivancos sometimes some of us were in the same place at the same time but other times were in different companies, doing different kinds of shows. But now we put almost everything into our mutual enterprise. While each of us has his strengths, in the end we work very much in concert on all the aspects of our spectaculars.

Being brothers also means we’re very competitive when we’re choreographing.  Each one puts something out there as a challenge. We like to see who can who can heel-tap [taconear] faster, who can fly higher.

CulturalOyster: I’ve seen Siete Hermanos twice (on TV). I’ve only seen YouTube fragments of your second and third productions, but from that it seems like you keep creating new fusions, new inventions. Can you tell me a little about this evolution? 

Vivancos: Well, since we began we’ve changed a lot. We do more fusions now, and we keep incorporating new techniques. We try to innovate choreographically, musically, and technologically. In the first show we weren’t doing aerial work but in Nacidos para Bailar we dance on the ceiling and play our instruments in the air, like tightrope acrobats. What’s important is that we try to grow constantly. We learn what we need to learn to do what pleases us. To create our shows, we do what we like to do. 

CulturalOyster: What can you tell me about Nacidos para Bailar?  And what comes after that?

Vivancos: Nacidos para Bailar was risky. We did things with lights and aerial suspension that we never did before, but we had no fear, and it turned out great.  It’s daring – really much more daring than our earlier shows – and it has more humor in it. Like there’s a silly part where four of us are playing the same cello at once. 

As for what’s next, we’re working on our new show, which we plan to premiere in 2020.  It takes three or four years from idea to realization, because the tours take time too. We’re always doing the last show while working on the next. 

[baby boy howling in background]

CulturalOyster: Don’t cry, niñito!  Elías, is there anything I didn’t ask about that you’d like to add?

Vivancos: Yes, absolutely. We now hold the Guinness record for the fastest taconeo in the world.

And we work with various agencies to give part of the take from all of our shows to agencies that work with children in need around the world. We’re involved with the Fundación Querer, in Madrid, which is dedicated to special education for children with neurological diseases, and this year we’ve also been supporting a foundation for orphans, and one that builds schools in Africa. We’re very proud of the charitable work we’re able do.