NYE in Los Angeles with Antibalas

Catch me headlining this free party in downtown LA with Antibalas. Hosted by Novena Carmel of KCRW and lots of good bands and DJs.

Suns of Mothers (Live) 12-29-2024

The second installment of the trio I’m part of with Tommy Guerrero and Nino Moschella. Performing live at Little Hill Lounge, El Cerrito California 12-29-2024. (Free)

We spent two days in the studio last week to record some ideas and shape together some songs. It has been quite liberating to play in a small ensemble with so much space for texture, silence, and rhythm. We just started playing together a few months ago but we have spent decades drinking from a lot of the same musical fountains and when we get together, things just flow.

NYC Performances 11/15-16 with Antibalas at Brooklyn Bowl

Back to Brooklyn this week for two shows at the Brooklyn Bowl with Antibalas. It is always strange going back to this neighborhood. I started the band there 26 years ago, over a generation ago, and the landscape has changed so much such that certain blocks are completely unrecognizable and looking at a street sign on the corner is only more disorienting.

We will be performing music from a forthcoming new album on Daptone Records, and some songs from way back in our catalog.

TICKETS HERE>> https://www.brooklynbowl.com/brooklyn/events/detail/antibalas-k7vgfb3eni7iy

Sonorous Present at Getty Center LA 3/16-17

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.

Thirteen New Songs with Antibalas

Last November we did ten days of writing workshop in New York, played the songs over the past year live at stages across the world, and gathered at Studio G in Brooklyn to record as many of them as were ready.

These recordings will compose the next two Antibalas albums. Expect to hear the first in a few months, around mid-2023.

New song: Ocote Soul Sounds "Blues for Ukraine"

How to fully express the deep grief in watching the slow motion buildup of aggression, the growing carnage, the racism that seems to emerge even within crises that should unite? Sometimes peace feels like further away than ever. Yet we persist.

New album: Martez "Shadow Work"

The second in a series of works initiated in the beginning of the pandemic to sonify the overwhelming feeling of loss. Let the grief wash over you.

New Music: Martez - Lamentos

A new album very unlike any of my others- minimalist instrumental sonification of various moods, feelings and moments of the first eighteen months of the pandemic reality. Recorded in Oakland, CA.