Zemog El Gallo Bueno is the philosopher’s psychedelic
Latinotronic band. With multiple, branching roots and a lifetime of grappling
with identity, the driving force behind the group Abraham Gomez-Delgado-Delgado
has gathered musical kindred spirits back into a band for a raw, rhythmically
stunning, dancefloor-ready, thinking person’s album.
Nothing is as straightforward as you want to make it,
Gomez-Delgado insists. But it can be a hell of a beautiful ride, as mapped out
on YoYouMeTúTrilogy: Volume 3 (release November 9, 2018).
“It can feel awkward to use the term Latinx or Latin or
Latino, because you’re being grouped together with so many people. But you
can’t say no to it, or things get taken away from communities. I wanted to walk
close to the line of tradition and then do something that’s not necessarily
predicted. To say, hey, we are individuals and have intricate realities like
other humans,” Gomez-Delgado says. “We’re not all just like, ‘hey salsa, let’s
party!’ I’m not your entertainment, nor am I here to be a jerk and not
entertain you.” Gomez-Delgado and Zemog are here to get you to dance to your
own humanity, as they grapple musically with theirs.
Volume 3 presents a closing rally to a deep-going,
wide-ranging trio of albums. The previous, Volume 2, was sparked by
Gomez-Delgado’s struggle to rebuild his life while grappling with intense
experiences of alienation and migration, Volume 3 revels in the joys of healing
love and friendship and the three-chord song--a formula just as potent in Cuba
and Puerto Rico as in garage rock (“Sexy Carnitas,” “Pianola”)--and in life’s
moments, great (“Wedding Song,” “Delgados Feliz”) and small (“Quiero Correr,”
about a really good jog in the park).
Gomez-Delgado’s musings on “Balance Imbalance Dance” speak
to the spirit of the whole album: “Without balance there is no imbalance. You
need tension. You need to throw a wrench into things,” Gomez-Delgado reflects.
“It’s not an opposite; it’s in balance. You zoom out to wanting utopia, and as
hard as hard times can be, we need them to remind us of what is and what is
important.”
The texture and timbre of complex experience has always been
important to Gomez-Delgado. His work strives to embrace all the contradictions
and riches of his Puerto Rican-Peruvian heritage, his life as a young immigrant
in a sometimes less-than-friendly environment, and his yearnings as a
remarkably deft and sensitive musician. He longs to create the connection
between people, onstage and off, that’s often called afinque in salsa music:
that moment of meld when everyone sways as one.
After a successful string of albums with his band--and many
of his favorite bandmates continue to play with him--Gomez-Delgado found
himself in a period of deep introspection that made it challenging to play
music with others. Eventually, Gomez-Delgado found his way forward, moving all
his favorite salsa elements to a single instrument that could be played by a
single musician. “It coaxed me toward remembering how to play with others,”
Gomez-Delgado recalls.
That energy, once coupled with the excellent New York-based
musicians in Zemog, burst into new intensity at a regular gig at Brooklyn music
hub Barbès, where the band had a long-standing residency. Gomez-Delgado worked
to keep the intensity present on Volume 3, keeping the live vibe on tracks like
“Agua a Peso” and “Pianola.”
This new-found sense of vibrant community lets
Gomez-Delgado’s wonderfully vivid imagination run wild, vibrating with cha cha
cha, salsa, guaracha, punk, funk, and pure idiosyncrasy. “I wanted this album
to have a wide spectrum. That asks a lot of people. That’s not always fair or
right, but sometimes you are reacting to what life is,” notes Gomez-Delgado.
“I’m going to bring these things up in my music. I wanted to lay some heavy
stuff down and if you can get through that, then we’ll have fun and a good
conversation.”
The heavy stuff springs from the political, no surprise for
an artist like Gomez-Delgado in this day and age. “Americae,” with its Latin
lyrics and its fantastic, all-over-the-place polyrhythms, cuts to the heart of
the American dilemma of its cries for freedom and its basis in genocide and
slavery. “This original and ‘invisible’ sin keeps coming up. Until we deal with
it, it will keep coming back,” comments Gomez-Delgado.
Yet Zemog never lets gloom dominate the conversation.
“Motivate,” written with conga virtuoso Reinaldo DeJesus, urges movements and
motions, with coils of low brass, inspiring percussion, and a dreamy guitar
line that dares you to sit still. The lyrics ask us all to get the guts to up
on the dancefloor, literally and figuratively, to step up and wake up, in an
anthem that feels like Frank Zappa and Antibalas colliding with cumbia.
With a similar floating sense of rhythm but a more stately
sway, “YoYouMeTú” addresses identity dilemmas of a more intimate nature. The
crisis of connection that we all face--that promises greater happiness if we
learn to deal with it--can be resolved only by losing some of what we cling to
and having faith in this vulnerability. “The lyrics use the words ‘afinque’ and
‘afincado,’ used in salsa starting in the 60-70s. They basically describe when
the band is tight and becomes one, with the dancers in the room. You lose time,
fully present but not in a stressful, ego-filled way. The band is swinging.
That to me is the main thing of all of this,” explains Gomez-Delgado. “It’s
hard to accept because anything that’s new is contradicting what you knew
before. That tension takes an inner faith to move through.”
What happens on the dancefloor or in our tangled inner
worlds blurs for Zemog, but that is where the pleasures of committed
relationship (a moment celebrated with his wife Olia in “Wedding Song,” which
they crafted for their big day) and family (“Delgados” includes a recording of
Gomez-Delgado’s extended family singing together in Puerto Rico.) This is the
place Gomez-Delgado fought so hard to reach, what he lays out in polychrome,
shifting, quirky detail on the album. “I don’t care how cliche it is. It’s
really about us and how we affirm each other’s existence. It’s the most basic
thing, but I don’t care. The message still isn’t getting through, judging by
our current climate. So it’s vital to say it and play it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment