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sinceileftyoublog · 2 months ago

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¿Qiensave? Interview: The Wu-Tang Clan of Cumbia

¿Qiensave?

BY JORDAN MAINZER

What happens when a group of teenagers are raised on traditional Mexican cumbia in the morning and discover punk rock, reggae, and hip-hop in the afternoon? Eventually, something resembling ¿Qiensave?, the Salinas, CA-based quintet that has been playing together for almost two decades. The band, consisting of four Cortez brothers--rhythm guitarist Carlos, guida player/keyboardist Mario, drummer Ricardo, and bassist William--and their friend, lead guitarist Alejandro Gomez, formed in 2009 but didn't release their debut album Mujer until 10 years later. It took them time to combine their influences and hone in on a sound. "We came back full-circle," Carlos told me over the phone earlier this week, "and it emulsified into what it is right now."

After Mujer, ¿Qiensave? dropped a few singles, some originals and some covers, and in 2022, the El After EP. Last year was the group's biggest so far, thanks to two collaborations that came out within days of each other yet couldn't have been more different. The first was Reanimación, a remix album created in tandem with nu-cumbia artist El Dusty. The second was Wake the Dead, a record made with Americana singer-songwriter Chuck Prophet that stemmed from jam sessions and became a larger symbol of Prophet's turn to uplifting music in his successful fight against cancer (and that we profiled last month). Later this year, ¿Qiensave? will properly follow up Mujer with an album titled Y Así La Cosas. Next week, however, they'll play throughout Austin, TX as an official part of SXSW, the band's first time performing in Texas, let alone at SXSW. And not only do they hope, like many at the legendary fest, to find a label to work with, but a producer to help them finish the record. "Our management, because we produce a lot of the projects ourselves and are self-funded, have to remind us to network and find distribution and a label, even if it's on the tail-end of putting it out," Carlos said. "For us, [what's important is] collaboration and new people to work with."

Though ¿Qiensave? have existed longer than have most bands playing at SXSW, their touring has been limited to California and Arizona, save for a handful of gigs in Mexico and Colombia. "We're really looking forward to being in Texas and exploring different parts of the country, connecting, and meeting new artists," Carlos said. "That's really important for ¿Qiensave?." Their writing and recording process is democratic, Carlos leading on coming up with a record's theme but everybody supplying songs. (Every member but William sings.) What the Prophet collection brought, and what ¿Qiensave? wish to include more in the future, are tales that reach beyond their immediate world. "The more we get to hear different stories, the more we can share that voice," Carlos said. "We take a lot [from] the stories of life. Every album we create turns into a book, every song a little chapter. If you really pay attention to it, you'll get the whole story." They don't rule out taking the reigns away from Prophet on their next album with him--meaning this time, he'll try to find a way to fit in on their cumbia songs. For now, ¿Qiensave? have their eyes on Texas, the latest stop in their melting pot of a journey.

If you're in Austin next week, you can catch ¿Qiensave? on March 12th at Hotel Vegas (at 1:00 AM on the 13th), March 13th at Lamberts at 10:00 PM, and March 14th and 15th at The Continental Club at 2:10 PM and 4:15 PM, respectively. (They're also playing the Joshua Tree Music Festival in May.) Below, read my conversation with Carlos, edited for length and clarity.

¿Qiensave?

Since I Left You: Are you preparing for the shows coming up next week?

Carlos Cortez: Yeah, we've been getting our setlist ready and preparing. [Mario and Alejandro] are coming back from tour in the UK with Chuck Prophet. It's the last leg of the UK tour. They'll be joining us this weekend, and then we're hitting it again for another couple hours of extensive rehearsal.

SILY: Are you going to play a similar set at each show or switch things up night by night?

CC: We're gonna play it by ear. We have three setlists that we created in preparation. When they hit us up for SXSW and asked us to be an official artist, they didn't give us the set times or details, so when we got the news, we prepared three different sets. We're gonna practice those three sets, and it will [all] get mixed in depending on how we feel.

SILY: Are you playing anything unreleased from your upcoming record?

CC: Yeah, we'll be playing one of the singles that's coming out. We like to test things out...we want to get the feel for how people will react to it.

SILY: Do you play any of the songs from Wake the Dead without Chuck, or do you have to have him there?

CC: We haven't explored that...there are a couple songs, though, we really enjoy and like that we'd like to incorporate in the mix.

SILY: You're a cumbia band that experiments with and expands your sound to different genres. How do you approach a crowd that doesn't know you at all at a huge festival like this?

CC: The beauty of ¿Qiensave? is that we're kind of like the Wu-Tang Clan. Each member has a different style that's really strong, which embeds itself into the cumbia we have. It's a variety of flavors of reggae and rock. It usually translates when we start playing. Some of the elements we've all been influenced by are pretty accessible. It helps set the tone. It makes people move.

SILY: What are the genres you're most influenced by?

CC: We all bring different elements. I do a lot of the artistic development, writing the songs' lyrics. I'm influenced a lot by poetry and writing. Mario brings a lot of his rock and alternative reggae background. Ricardo and William have strong reggae roots influences and strong Mexican regional background. Alejandro is...a singer-songwriter. All the elements combined make ¿Qiensave?'s sound. You can hear the elements when you listen to each member separately...we all explore traditional music and folk music in our own right, but we're not super traditionalists in any way. We're open to exploring and seeing what we can do with the genre.

SILY: Do the songs on your upcoming album explore any new sonic territory?

CC: Definitely, every time we collaborate. This collaboration with Chuck has influenced my next two albums. There's residue: Things I've learned, things I've absorbed...we like to keep some of the sounds that have been signature, and then we explore a little more and see how it goes. It's always hit or miss. We hope it hits, but it's music: Everybody feels differently about it.

SILY: Is the upcoming album written but not recorded?

CC: We have an interesting process. Everybody brings in different ideas. I'll usually have a theme or idea, and we'll all contribute different songs. Alejandro and Ricardo will throw some from their pocket. We'll pick and choose what lines up with the theme. We'll record demos and split the different tasks. We'll take the main ideas and present it to the producers, who take it to the next level. Right now, we have [some] final recordings and the rest of the album in demos. The demos are pretty strong, but we like to bring in an outside perspective.

¿Qiensave?

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sinceileftyoublog · 3 months ago

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Chuck Prophet Interview: Get Hot

Chuck Prophet & ¿Qiensave?

BY JORDAN MAINZER

Can music heal? It's something even I, a born skeptic, found myself thinking about the first time I read the backstory of Wake the Dead (Yep Roc), the collaborative album between Americana singer-songwriter Chuck Prophet and Salinas, California-based cumbia group ¿Qiensave? The prolific Prophet had been a fan of cumbia music for a few years, first encountering it via cumbia nights that would sometimes follow his sets at the Make-Out Room in San Francisco. Gleefully watching the dancers at the club led to collecting vinyl from Latin America. Prophet had a new obsession.

In 2022, doctors found a mass in Prophet's intestine, and he was diagnosed with stage four lymphoma. He underwent an operation so they could determine how far along the disease had progressed and how severe it was. He waited almost two weeks for the results, which thankfully revealed the disease was treatable with immunotherapy and chemotherapy. But just like during the initial stages of pandemic lockdown, Prophet had time to sit, think, and listen. Instead of wallowing in despair--even during that waiting period where he didn't know whether he'd make it out alive, let alone ever play music again--he turned to cumbia music to raise his spirits and keep active his brain and heart while other parts of his body needed to rest.

As he recovered, along with getting back into his favorite activities like surfing, Prophet started jamming with ¿Qiensave? What was at first perhaps a mere celebration of the fact that Prophet felt more like himself again, turned into ¿Qiensave? backing Prophet at live shows. At that point, Prophet wanted to test out some of the cumbia-inspired songs he had been writing with longtime writing partner Kurt Lipschutz (aka klipschutz). To see whether his and ¿Qiensave?'s live chemistry could further mesh with his backing band, The Mission Express, Prophet invited them all to cram in the studio and record. With almost double-digit numbers of people in one room, the group had no choice but to record live.

The result, of course, is Wake the Dead, a record that incredibly still sounds arranged for maximum dynamic energy. The opening and title track is an exercise in contrast: between crooning and deadpanned vocals from Prophet, between tangible elements like wiry guitars and accordion, and distortion. The acoustic breeze of "First Came the Thunder" is eventually subsumed by a more abstract, shimmery palate. "Same Old Crime" alternates between cumbia-reggae and soft folk in the chorus and verses. And "Sally Was a Cop", which Prophet co-wrote with Alejandro Escovedo and appeared on Escovedo's Big Station in 2012, gets a groovier, more celebratory sounding version here, despite carrying the same themes of drug cartel violence.

In fact, a difference in tone between the themes and instrumentation is a feature, not a bug of Wake the Dead. Escovedo's song is, of course, evergreen, but some of Prophet's tunes are prescient. The titular character of "Betty's Song" is a working-class child of immigrants who wants to study art but "watched her family ripped in half." Eventually, the narrator of the song declares their solidarity with Betty: "Where you're in trouble, honey, I'm in trouble, too." "In the Shadows (for Elon)" may hit too close to home today but nonetheless finds solace in the world regular folks occupy after the rich and powerful have left our dying planet for a more hospitable one. That is, if there are musicians around, there will still be music, like the thrilling interplay between Matt Winegar's farfisa and ¿Qiensave?'s clacking percussion. I can't help but think, too, that the title track's declarations of waking the dead to dance, and Prophet's considerations that, "We might end up on the moon / They might even name a planet after me," is a subtle suggestion that our boogieing take place on the dreams and graves of the oligarchs themselves, should they be defeated.

Days after Wake the Dead was released, I spoke with Prophet over the phone about the album. ("It seems to be connecting with people," he said at the time. "That's a good feeling.") On Friday, Prophet will play FitzGerald's with His Cumbia Shoes, a backing band featuring two members of ¿Qiensave? (keyboardist, güira player, vocalist Mario Cortez, guitarist and vocalist Alejandro Gomez), two members of The Mission Express (guitarist James DePrato, drummer Vicente Rodriguez), and Mexico City bassist Joaquin Zamudio Garcia, all of whom played on the album. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Wake the Dead album art

Since I Left You: Wake the Dead was born out of difficult circumstances for you. Are people generally aware of what you went through?

Chuck Prophet: It's become a big part of my story. It probably would have taken more effort to keep it under wraps. Once I was diagnosed, I had to start cancelling some shows. Initially, we called it a family crisis, and then, eventually, it was easier to let it all hang out.

SILY: This album, in a way, is the ultimate culmination of that upfront communication with the music listening public. The very title, and title track, sees you starting mortality in the face and dancing anyway.

CP: I suppose, yeah.

SILY: So you came across ¿Qiensave? and decided to follow them and eventually played with them. After how long did you decide to record with them?

CP: I don't decide to record, period, unless there's something I'm excited about. None of my records have been any different in that respect. I'm not really a big home recording person. I don't have a studio. This record isn't a lot different from my other records in that somewhere along the line, I had two or three songs I felt were taking me somewhere I hadn't been before. That has a lot to do with ¿Qiensave? That's when I started getting excited about it. I wrote most of these songs with Kurt Lipschutz, who I have written so many songs with over the years. I was following ¿Qiensave? around because I was such a fan, and I also went out to Modesto and saw a band called Valley Wolf. This is sort of an extension of how I was afforded time to listen during both the lockdown and my treatment. It had been a long time since I had been able to listen to records, and it was cumbia music that I kept returning to. It lifted my spirits.

SILY: There are songs on here that are certainly dark on paper, but the instrumentation and lyrics tell a deeper story. "Betty's Song" has lines that paint a brutal picture, but there's so much drama in the instrumentation to give it an eventually uplifting arc. Was that arc something you and the band conjured spontaneously?

CP: I guess it was really the song that wanted that, somehow. Every song has its needs. Kurt and I were writing a lot of these characters. I don't know what you would call Betty. She's maybe from a working class background, trying to transcend where she comes from. We imagined her heading towards an MFA in Fine Art. [laughs] Even the name Betty is kind of an old-fashioned, working class name.

SILY: Do you think this album captures the looseness you and the band had even in the initial sessions?

CP: By all means. In terms of the process and how this record was made, we were tracking as many as 8 people on the floor at the same time. You can't really give the attention to detail you would if you were overdubbing instruments one at a time. People were just playing. That suited it well, because in terms of records, I'm at a place in my life where the type of music I'm really hungry for is often live, and [the musicians' characters are] full of personality. In this post-Pro Tools era...there are a lot of really layered records like [those by] The War on Drugs, who I respect, but I'm not really hungry for that right now.

SILY: Even a band like that, though, when you see them live, you see their chops. Some of my favorite records of theirs are their live records.

CP: Sure. Yeah, I've seen them live. They're great.

SILY: You initially co-wrote "Sally Was A Cop" with Alejandro Escovedo for release on his Big Station record. Was including a different version on Wake the Dead your opportunity to put your own spin on it?

CP: Yeah. Alejandro and I had written an album called Real Animal, and that was really an explosive year for us. We wrote so many songs and spent a lot of time together in San Francisco and Austin writing. I don't recall when "Sally Was A Cop" was written, but it did come out on his Big Station record.

[My version] just asserted itself. I like the content of it, and if I was to be totally honest, it gave me an opportunity to stretch out on guitar a little bit.

SILY: When Alejandro plays the song live, it's much more deliberate, and there's a lot of echo on his vocals. It's almost mournful sounding. The version on this record is groovy and blistering and dynamic.

CP: I'm looking forward to playing it live.

SILY: What goes into adapting these songs to the live stage? Is it pretty natural, or do you have to spend a lot of time picking certain elements to carry over?

CP: Some of the parts and figures you can't imagine the song without, end up asserting themselves. From there, we learn the song the way it was recorded, and from there, we might unlearn it a little bit on the bandstand night after night.

SILY: Is the unlearning key to the process of keeping a loose feeling to the performance?

CP: Well, yeah, it's not a recital! We're playing and listening to each other musically. Hopefully it's a little bit conversational. I saw ELO play recently, and I don't think that was the approach they had. It was more of a recital, almost a symphony. I enjoyed it immensely, but [that's not us.] We have a lot of improvisation.

SILY: Both the pandemic and your recovery forced you to lay low but provided you the opportunity to take in records. Obviously, you fell in love with cumbia. Is setting aside time to listen to music something you've found yourself doing more since then?

CP: Absolutely. That's how I'm able to marinade so much of this music. I haven't really been afforded that time. I feel like I've just been on the treadmill, writing songs for a record or trying to wrestle a record to the ground, trying to get the songs to behave. Then, it's a matter of going on tour, or recovering from being on tour, which is often the case. In some ways, the lockdown and everything was kind of a strange blessing. I don't know what would have come along.

SILY: Are you still diving deep into cumbia?

CP: Yeah, I was just at the Discodelic on 24th street a few days ago and bought a stack of records.

SILY: Are there any other genres or worlds of music with which you were previously less familiar that you're also diving into?

CP: During the pandemic, I had a radio show called Trip in the Country. I had a show every week. Not only did I do a lot listening, thinking, and playing guitar, but I also did a lot of watching, because there are some phenomenal things you can find on YouTube. You can see a group of musicians in 1972 in Peru playing electric guitar, scraping a bucket, playing in the dirt, and running an extension chord to their patio. KEXP in Seattle has done some remote sessions where they went down to Mexico City and recorded some friends of mine, Sonido Gallo Negro as well as the Mexican Institute of Sound. There's a lot of inspiration out there all over the place.

SILY: As much as some people talk about the negative economic aspects of music being predominantly online, there is now virtual crate-digging, going down a wormhole of something you're interested in.

CP: That's a little bit of what attracts us to music. There's a curiousness when we're tapping into something. That's what it means to be a music fan.

SILY: Are you continuously writing?

CP: Not really. There are times when I might pick up a guitar and follow my fingers somewhere and maybe fall into something, and I'll make a note of it on my phone or the cassette player. Most times I don't.

SILY: Do you foresee recording more music with ¿Qiensave?

CP: Sure! There's a certain momentum you get when you play some gigs together and get hot. When you get hot, things just start happening. That can happen in the studio, too. [You can] have a few days where you're doing a lot of problem solving and whatever it takes, kicking the can down the road, but you can get hot where you have a few days where things are explosive.

SILY: Do you feel like when things are hot, it feels like the songs are their own living, breathing, entities?

CP: I know they are living, breathing entities because when you play them live, they evolve. Maybe there's another version you play on stage at FitzGerald's a year later that's different than the one in the studio. It's hard to call anything definitive, unless you're The Beatles. I don't think "Taxman" can be improved. But with Bob Dylan, and a lot of the music I like, there's always [another] version out there. He's always reinventing what he does. I don't think anybody said he's the greatest singer or guitar player--I happen to think he is--but he's the most bootlegged artist in the history of recorded music [for a reason].

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