Los Angeles! I’ll be performing at the Getty Center on March 16-17 as part of a beautiful musical project called Sonorous Present, composed and performed by my dear friend, musician/scholar Alex E. Chávez with musical direction by Grammy-award winning producer/musician Quetzal Flores. The event is FREE. Yes FREE. You have to sign up to reserve your tickets HERE.

From the Getty Museum:

“Sounds of LA 2024 launches with an exclusive performance of immersive, poetic music from Alex E. Chávez’s forthcoming album SONOROUS PRESENT. What began as an experimental, collaborative, and improvised performance in Chicago—inspired by the music and poetics of Chávez’s award-winning book Sounds of Crossing—has been subsequently reimagined as a studio album in collaboration with Grammy Award-winning producer Quetzal Flores. SONOROUS PRESENT offers a never-before-heard blend of Mexican and Latin American folk elements with progressive jazz, poetry, dance, field recordings, and ethnographic songwriting that crosses the sunburst surrealism of America's musical and cultural borderlands.”

The main band will be composed of Alex Chávez (pictured below), and members of the group Quetzal. I’ll be doing my horn thing, flying down from the Bay with a few armloads of saxophones and flutes and percussion and getting in where I fit in. The music is so beautiful. It is an honor to be a part of this, and to be part of the maiden voyage of bringing this to the stage and public. Hope to see you there.

I first met Alex in Southeast Austin in 2003 when I was on a roadtrip from Brooklyn to Michoacan. My friend Adrian Quesada, on one of our many runs around the city, took me to his apartment one day to meet him. Little did I know then that I would be relocating two years later to Austin, and that we’d cross paths many times, whether it was a University of Texas grad student circles that he and my wife ran in, double bills with my Ocote Soul Sounds and his Maneja Beto, or guest appearances on album’s by his group Mitote. The friendship lasted after we both left Austin. He continued on to Chicago to teach and start another great musical project, Dos Santos, which I’ve had the pleasure of making cameo appearances. And now this.