Desde la bahía - escena musical desde San Francisco - TT: From the Bay - TA: music scene in the San francisco area

Latin Beat Magazine, June, 2001 by Jesse "Chuy" Varela

NUEVO GROOVE: As a freelance Latino pop critic for several papers in the San Francisco Bay Area, my assignments take me to a variety of exciting musical scenes.

Recently, Chicano-Latino alternative sounds are manifesting themselves with refreshing fusion. I say it again. The 1990s brought an invigorating change to the California Chicano-Latino music scene with a generation of young musicians who grew up on the sounds of funk, Latin rock and hip-hop. The sons and daughters of the hippies are coming of age and articulating a youthful political consciousness fueled by anti-corporate greed and the Zapatista struggle in Chiapas, Mexico. Bands such as Ozomatli, Quetzal, B-Side Players, Los Otros, Aztlan Underground, Lysa Flores, Ollin, Five Degrees of Soul, Blues Experiment, Perla Batalla and others are creating grooves that draw from Poncho Sánchez, El Chicano, Los Lobos, George Clinton and Grandmaster Flash as influences.

Inspired college twenty-somethings pack places like La Peña in Berkeley or Fuel 44 in San José to do a collective trance dance. This is a new millennium boogaloo sprouting out of the necessity to speak musical truths, why not with a good beat?

HECHO EN CALIFAS! Whoever declared Friday the 13th a bad luck day should have been at La Peña Cultural Center in mid-April. The place sold out with a roomful of twenty-somethings grooving to a superb night of spoken-word and music mainly from East Los Angeles.

Bands such as Grito Serpentino, Ollin, Slowrider and Quetzal shared the stage, definitely a "buena onda" with genuine youthful talent.

When I arrived, Ollin was on stage playing a traditional son jarocho acoustic piece from Veracruz, Mexico. Midway, they picked up their Fender Stratocasters and transformed the tune into a blaring electrified jam with a pounding 6/8 beat. In the vein of The Blazers and Los Lobos, the tight quartet led by singer-guitarist Scott Rodarte had the crowd spinning, but when he declared, "I feel a ranchera coming on," they drove the place into a frenzy with a punk-polka rendition of Doug Sahm's Soy Chicano.

In between bands, Bay Area spoken-word artists entertained the crowd. Oakland's Jimmy Salcedo-Malo delivered rapid-fire odes that praised the Zapatistas and Ché Guevara, as the college crowd whooped and hollered his verses. Organized by raza renaissance man Paul Flores as part of his ongoing series Hecho En Califas, the spoken word added vibration to the show and is an example of the spirit of a new movement that is working toward a new era of social change and Chicano-Latino consciousness.

Slowrider was amazing, with a sound that fused everything from old-school Latin rock and funk to barrio hip-hop laced with cumbia and reggae flavors. With a new album Más Allá produced by Ozomatli's Wil-Dog Abers on the collectively owned De Volada Records, they rocked the house with a two-horn front line that included sax/flute wiz Vince Maghrouni (who also drums for Mike Watt) and the charismatic rapper Olmeca. Led by keyboardist David Gómez, Slowrider played instrumentals such as Fumigado that twisted and turned through a variety of beats and slamming solos.

But it was Quetzal that most of the audience came to see. A buzz carried through the crowd that its petite lead singer, conga drummer Marta González, was not feeling well. Forget about it. When they hit the stage she and the group gave the sardine-squeezed crowd an excellent 90-minute performance that traversed songs from their self-titled debut album as well as transculturized Mexican and Cuban classics. With violinist Yunior Terry (part of the prestigious Cuban musical family) now part of the group, the cohesiveness and musicality is at its prime in this group. González is blessed with a crystal clear angelic voice.

El Cascabel, born out of Mexico's black jarocho heritage, became a long jam that had the place in a collective dance. As images began to flash on the screen behind them of Zapatistas and Sub-comandante Marcos, the crowd roared with "Viva Zapata." When they went into an anthem honoring the only woman general in the Southern Mexico struggle -Somos Ramona- the place was a sweatbox of joy. With a quiet smile, guitarist/bandleader Quetzal Flores knew they had reached the depths of this audience's Chicano-Latino soul.

ORIXA. The California Music Awards took place on Saturday, April 28, at the Kaiser Convention Center in Oakland. Once known as the BAMMIE Awards (the name change came after the magazine that once sponsored the awards show folded), the organization decided to start priming the party with a free outdoor jam the Saturday before the event at Jack London Square. Co-presented with LIVE105, it was a novel idea that showcased Dork.com, Brickhead, Down Temper and the Eastbay's own Spanish-language rockers Orixa, who were nominated for Best Latin Album along with John Santos, Pete Escovedo, Los Tigres Del Norte and Julieta Venegas.

Just back from their first East Coast tour that took them to New York City, Washington DC, Atlanta and Miami, Orixa was headlining and in top form. Lead singer Rowan Jiménez was like a gold top metallic battery jumping on and off the stage, running in and out of the crowd with boundless energy. Situated in front of the Barnes & Nobles bookstore, the bass frequencies boomed as funk and ska beats had heads bopping.