Kurt Rosenwinkel’s new album is a trip nearly 30 years into the past, to a time when he and his collaborators found lightning in a bottle in a renowned New York club.
Fully saturated in bebop language, Kurt had created a modern, signature style grounded in stunning compositions. His band was full of what we now know as some of the most accomplished jazz musicians of the era: Mark Turner on tenor sax, Ben Street on bass, and Jeff Ballard on drums.
How interesting, then, to find out that this body of work was fully formed years earlier, as evidenced by his latest release, The Next Step Band (Live at Smalls, 1996). Between 1994 and 2001, the group had a weekly residency at Smalls, the West Village club that was becoming a proving ground for New York City’s straight-ahead elite. By 1996, they had already developed a remarkable chemistry, inhabiting Kurt’s challenging compositions with empathy and authority. A recording was made of one of the shows on Alesis Digital Audio Tape, or ADAT, which Kurt carried around with him for almost three decades.
“We were four very strong personalities. Would we survive on the road again?”
Why release it now? “My wife had been suggesting for several years that I revisit this era,” Rosenwinkel says. “I was resistant. I couldn’t see the point in looking back. Also, we were four very strong personalities. Would we survive on the road again? I finally had some time in my schedule and listened, and I knew it was time to share this history.”
Kurt Rosenwinkel & The Next Step Band - "The Next Step"
Rosenwinkel says that the development of the music was “part and parcel” with the room at Smalls. “It was a great room for music with a lot of detail; bebop-based things with quick turns,” he says. “We had the fortune of having this steady gig every week, and I was writing music all the time. We would rehearse at my place in Brooklyn. Ben and Mark lived close by, and Jeff was just over the bridge on Varick Street. I had already spent a lot of time playing duos with Ben, and when Mark and I met we had an instant connection. So from the start, we bonded. We would experience a kind of telepathy on stage. I wrote a lot of those songs in one week when I was housesitting at Chris Cheek’s house in Brooklyn. We rehearsed during the week, and it was an intense period of study where I resolved to learn as much as I could about the mechanics of the instrument.”
There are many remarkable aspects to what Kurt is doing. His compositions, from the start, demonstrate a fully mature, individual voice grounded in his forebears: Strayhorn, Coltrane, Bud Powell, Bill Evans. Kurt’s harmonic approach is extremely sophisticated. The changes can be profuse, surprises alight, and yet the music never feels overstuffed or pointlessly intellectual. As a soloist, his linear lines are charged with risk-taking drama, and his ability to accompany himself with perfectly placed chord shapes is uncanny. He never seems to run out of ideas. As if this isn’t enough, he manages to include several pieces on the record where he uses alternate tunings. It’s hard enough to play compositions with this much harmonic density in standard tuning. Doing so by relearning where the notes are on the neck is mind-boggling. (The tuning is B♭–G–D♭–A♭–B♭–E♭.)
“From the start, we bonded. We would experience a kind of telepathy on stage.”
Why retune? “I was shedding incredibly long hours in those days,” says Rosenwinkel. “It got to the point where my intellectual focus was overwhelming. There was so much critical analysis of the fretboard going on that I felt I needed a beginner’s mind. The altered tuning came about because I wanted to sabotage my knowledge. I didn’t want to know anything when I touched the instrument. All the codification and classification were getting in the way of my enjoyment of the music. It was beautiful to not know what I was doing, and many of these songs came out of that. It really served its purpose, in terms of putting the intellect in its proper place. The deeper senses, the heart, need to lead your music. That being said, when I came back to the conventional tuning, I was really happy to feel as if I knew something again!”
The Next Step Band (Live at Smalls, 1996) is a snapshot of the rare musical and cultural symbiosis that made Smalls a hotspot for era-defining up-and-comers in the ’90s.
The community around the venue was part of the experience, too. “The scene at Smalls was such that you’d meet hundreds of people, coming in and out all the time, a whole spectrum of musicians including people my age, and an older generation that stretched all the way back to the ’50s, to Bud Powell and Charlie Parker. We’d hang out in the back room just talking all night. There was no bar—it was BYOB—so it was all about the music. There was all the rice and beans you could eat, which for some of us was our main sustenance during the week. People would live at Smalls. A couple times someone crawled out of the wall where they were sleeping in back of the stage, had a good stretch, and traipsed between us as we were playing! A lot of people had strong experiences with the music at that time, and I think you can hear that in the music.”
Kurt has also just released a massive book of his compositions—594 pages, 150 songs. Some nine years in the making, it’s a compendium of his life’s work. Not content just to print lead sheets, he has included printable PDFs of band arrangements, Sibelius files so readers can make their own arrangements, musings and reflections on each of the songs, and pictures from each time period. It’s a beautifully crafted presentation, suitable for a coffee table. I asked Kurt about the epic journey leading to this profuse, diverse, and deep collection of songs.
“The altered tuning came about because I wanted to sabotage my knowledge. I didn’t want to know anything when I touched the instrument.”“I began composing songs when I was nine years old; I’ve always considered myself a composer first,” he says. “I try to use every means at my disposal to help the writing process, going back and forth between piano, guitar, and the computer software. About one in 10 songs seems to come out relatively whole. In other cases, I can start with something, and find that it takes years to finish. ‘East Coast Love Affair’ was like that. I wrote the A section, and didn’t find the B section ’til three years later, when it came from another song I was working on. It’s like archaeology. You’re digging around in the soil for the valuable artifacts—dusting them off, putting the pieces together. I find my harmony by feelingwhat chord wants to come next, experimenting with light and dark. There have been periods in my life where I’ve written longer forms with a lot of complexity, and other times when I’ve gone for simplicity. As I’ve gotten older, it’s easier to get right down to it and get at the essence of the piece right away. I don’t really plan to write anything. I tend to wait for it to come to me.”
Kurt Rosenwinkel's Gear
Rosenwinkel says he doesn't have just one signature guitar sound, and he’s proud of that—he’s always chasing something he can never quite catch.
Photo by Aleks Končar
Guitars
- D’Angelico Master Builder New Yorker
- Westville Kurt Rosenwinkel Signature Vanguard
- Yamaha SG500
- Moffa Maryan
Amps
- Fractal Audio FM9
Effects
- Pro Co RAT
- EHX POG2
- Xotic EP Booster
- Line 6 Echo Pro
Strings & Picks
- Thomastik Infeld BB111 Jazz BeBop Strings
- Westville signature picks (tortoise, smooth, polished, celluloid 1.5 mm pick in traditional teardrop shape)
Was there a line connecting these different eras and focal points, from over three decades of putting pen to paper? “A prism comes to mind, something that reflects various aspects of your soul at different times. I’ve never been a person that needed to have a strong identity that is connected to any external thing, I tend to flow in and out of different identities. That’s what led me to do all kinds of different music, whether with [A Tribe Called Quest rapper/producer] Q-Tip, a whole textural thing, free improv, jazz tunes, and I’m even planning on making a rock record. I was totally into the so-called downtown thing in the ’90s, the Knitting Factory. Very few people in my circle at Smalls crossed over into that terrain. Whatever comes out of me, that’s the way it is. With Caipi [Rosenwinkel’s 2017 release featuring guitarist/singer Pedro Martins], for instance, I didn’t set out to make a Brazilian record. I just started to hear songs that had some of that vibe. It wasn’t a conscious process, it was all completely natural.”
“It’s like archaeology. You’re digging around in the soil for the valuable artifacts—dusting them off, putting the pieces together.”
Sifting through this book allows us to see the breadth of Kurt’s output. It starts with those early formative pieces on this new live record, tunes that are exuberant, harmonically elaborate, bebop-based, sometimes pensive. They dig into the past and fly into the future. We see a more quiet, meditative side from Deep Song. The Caipi record takes us into new rhythmic territory with pieces that have vocals. Star of Jupiter offers virtuosity that suggests the influence of Allan Holdsworth.
It’s interesting to see Rosenwinkel’s guitar sound morph as well. In the early and mid-’90s, he played an Epiphone Sheraton through a Polytone—not an atypical setup for the era. As time goes on, he continually experiments with any available technology, all in service of his liquid phrasing. At this point, he uses a Fractal Audio amp modeler for most effects, while still retaining the EHX POG, a box he was early to champion.
Rosenwinkel’s new compilation book, adorned on the cover with this photo, gathers decades of the guitarist’s compositions into one profound, exciting work.
Cover photo by Greg Miles
“I don’t have a signature sound,” says Rosenwinkel. “I have many signature sounds. When I recorded The Next Step, part of what I realized was that my ‘sound’ was what I was doing with my voice. I was unconsciously singing along to what I was playing. I had often hated the sound I got in recording studios in the ’90s. I realized that it was the blend of the guitar coming out of the amp and my voice that was what the audience was hearing. So we began recording my voice in the studio. A lot of people tried to copy that. The thing is that I’m always going for the same sound; it’s always been in my head, but I can’t ever reach it, so that’s why you get all these different iterations. I’ve heard people say that I should play with a more ‘pure’ guitar sound. But there is no pure guitar sound. Every pickup, every amplifier, every guitar is different. What I would like is if the guitar sounded the way it does before it’s plugged in. That would be my ideal, but you can’t get that. It has less attack, all these qualities that I’m trying to achieve. I don’t consider what I’m using as effects. They are all just tools for matching what I have in my mind to the instrument.”
“I’ve heard people say that I should play with a more ‘pure’ guitar sound. But there is no pure guitar sound.”
Rosenwinkel discusses his legato phrasing and his left-hand pull-offs and hammer-ons, flourishes that are unique amongst his contemporaries. “If every one of Charlie Parker’s lines had a transient to it, it would sound terrible,” says Rosenwinkel. “It would be too much rhythmic information. There’s emphasis and there’s continuity, and in that continuity you can hear all the content in the line. It’s the same with Lee Konitz. It’s fluid, very articulate, but liquid. The melodies are clear. I don’t want to be fighting with the ride cymbal in these transients. A lot of people who copy me get it wrong, because they don’t have the same very specific phrasing goals as me.”
With the Next Step Band, Rosenwinkel would sometimes play songs in unconventional tunings, complicating the already complex arrangements in a sort of challenge to himself.
Kurt is also an eloquent teacher. During the pandemic, he began to release a series of master classes with troves of information, and he’s a perennial and beloved instructor at the Alternative Guitar Summit Camp that I run in upstate New York every summer. This year, he shared illuminating details of his work with Heartcore, his record label. It’s become a place not only for his own releases, but a platform for deserving new artists who’ve profited from his attention. They’ve released over 20 records in nine years, and instituted a program where an employee of the label visits refugee camps in Europe and records children’s songs. Rosenwinkel then recruits master musician friends to create parts and arrangements to fill out the recording. All proceeds benefit the children.
Kurt expanded on these ventures while teaching at the guitar camp in late August. “I always wanted to start my own business,” he said. “I decided to build Heartcore as a vehicle for representing the light in music, how it illuminates the contours of our souls. In 2017, when we started, the landscape was pretty desolate. Old constructs were crumbling. So I gathered my resources, not only to release my own work, but to experience the joy of finding some cat tearing it up for whom I could provide a platform. We work really hard to spread this incredible music around the world, and I’m truly proud of what we’ve done.”
YouTube It
This grainy video captures part of a legendary Rosenwinkel set at his homebase, Smalls, in March 1997.
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Thurston Moore is back with some new ideas on his ninth solo release, saying that he feels like a perennial apprentice in the world of music.
“There’s something very elegant to it—the fact that the helmet sort of denotes a sense of military perfection, but that it has tuning forks on it as opposed to any sort of emblem of aggression,” he tells me, Zooming in from his flat in London. “If music is, as Albert Ayler would say, the healing force of the universe, then so is the tuning fork. I thought it was just a thing of beauty.”
It also dovetails with a theme that runs through Flow Critical Lucidity, an album that Moore describes as “an expression of hope.” But characteristic of the Sonic Youth guitar icon, there are additional layers at work here. One would be that Nares is, like Moore, an alumnus of the downtown Manhattan no-wave scene, having played guitar in an early iteration of James Chance and the Contortions. “It felt right to use one of Jamie’s pieces, because we kind of came up together through this musical micro-community in New York City,” Moore says.
Another layer, I suggest, might be that the many tuning forks are a self-referential poke at Moore himself, who has made something of a career out of deploying myriad out-there tunings in the service of some of the most innovative and influential music of the past 40 years. “So, they’re ‘alternative-tuning tuning forks,’” Moore reasons, then smiles. “Maybe I could have written C–G–D–G–C–D on it.” Which is, in fact, the actual primary tuning he employed for his guitar parts throughout Flow Critical Lucidity.
Why this tuning? “I like it,” Moore says, simply. “I find it to be a good one to write in, and I’ve gotten used to it. So it’s been a mainstay for the last six years or so, and on the last couple of albums. I actually feel like I need to put it to rest a bit, because that low string tends to create this kind of droning low C on almost every song now. Maybe I’m getting a little too comfortable.”
You wouldn’t know it from Flow Critical Lucidity. Moore’s ninth solo album overall, the collection is an enchanting, transportive, and deeply creative work: There’s cadenced spoken word over clanging, chiming soundscapes on “New in Town”; gorgeous guitar and piano commingling in “Sans Limites” (with Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier dueting on vocals); feral, percussion-heavy rhythms pulsing through “Rewilding”; a no-wave callback in the jagged four-note guitar stab of “Shadow”; hypnotic, liquid guitar lines punctuating “The Diver.” There are electronics courtesy of Negativland’s Jon Leidecker, lyrics penned largely by Moore’s wife and collaborator, Eva Prinz (working under the pseudonym Radieux Radio), and, on several tracks, extensive use of prepared instruments, such as guitars with objects placed under or on the strings to modulate their tone. It is an album that is varied and vibrant, imaginative and idiosyncratic. It is, Moore has said, one of his “favorite” records in his solo catalog.
On Flow Critical Lucidity, Moore recorded with guitarist James Sedwards, bassist Deb Googe, keyboardist Jon Leidecker, and percussionist Jem Doulton. The record was mixed by Margo Broom.
“If music is the healing force of the universe, then so is the tuning fork. I thought it was just a thing of beauty.”
Though somewhat sprawling in execution, Flow Critical Lucidity came together in a uniquely focused manner, with Moore and Prinz settled at an artist residency near Lake Geneva. “They allow people to stay there for six weeks to six months to sometimes a couple years,” Moore says. “So I asked if I could lock myself away there and write—and specifically to write a new record. I had a couple guitars, a couple small amps, and a little Zoom digital recorder. Eva would throw lyrics in front of me and I would construct pieces around them.”
When it came time to record, Moore assembled his current band—Leidecker, former My Bloody Valentine bassist Deb Googe, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist James Sedwards, and percussionist Jem Doulton—at Total Refreshment Centre (“a funky little studio”) in his adopted home city of London. A key architect at this stage was Margo Broom, who mixed the material. “She was really able to put it in a place that I don’t think anybody else could have so successfully,” Moore says. “For instance, while she was mixing, I was talking to her about how to treat my vocals a bit, because I never liked my vocals so much—I’m kind of key-challenged when I sing. But Margo was able to finesse that. She said to me, ‘I’ve been listening to your vocals since I was 16 years old, so I know what I’m doing here!’ I was impressed by that.”
Moore, now 66, often records with his tried-and-true alternate tuning, C–G–D–G–C–D.
Guitar-wise, Moore continues, “Margo was able to create a lot of space, which is something that I’ve never really felt has happened so successfully, even all through Sonic Youth, because of the desire to always have a lot of guitar layers happening in the songs. But she was able to find definition there, even where there was a lot of mass information going on.”
To be sure, there’s plenty of characteristic Moore guitar work on Flow Critical Lucidity, particularly in the extended instrumental sections of songs like “The Diver” and the gently chugging “Hypnogram.” But as far as the actual gear he used in the studio, Moore kept things streamlined—one guitar, one amp.
“It was all Fender,” he says. “I used an early, pre-CBS Jazzmaster, a ’62, I think, and a Hot Rod DeVille.” Moore is, of course, a longtime Jazzmaster aficionado—in the early days of Sonic Youth, he says, “We started acquiring Jazzmasters before they became so collectible. You could go to the guitar stores in midtown New York and find one for a few hundred dollars. We had been using Harmonys and Kents and Hagstroms—whatever we could get our hands on—and the Jazzmasters and Jaguars were a step up. I gravitated more towards the Jazzmaster because the neck was slightly longer than a Jaguar’s, and for my height it worked nicely. I also liked other aspects of it, like being able to investigate behind the bridge more readily than with just about any other guitar.”
“I had a couple guitars, a couple small amps, and a little Zoom digital recorder. Eva would throw lyrics in front of me and I would construct pieces around them.”
Moore has many Jazzmasters, including one that he says is “one of the first ’58 production models,” and that Sedwards has been using extensively. But the Jazzmaster that Moore is playing now “has been my go-to for the last couple of albums. And a lot of that was defined by the one I played previously getting stolen. And then one previous to that getting stolen, too. So the record is all this guitar, and it’s all, I believe, in that same [C–G–D–G–C–D] tuning.”
Thurston Moore's Gear
Moore became famous as co-guitarist and one of three vocalists in Sonic Youth, seen here performing in 1991.
Photo by Ken Settle
Guitars
- Circa 1962 Fender Jazzmaster, tuned to C–G–D–G–C–D
- Circa 1958 Fender Jazzmaster (used by James Sedwards)
Amps
- Fender Hot Rod DeVille 410 III
Effects
- Pro Co Turbo RAT
- Dunlop Jimi Hendrix Octave Fuzz
- Xotic EP Booster
- Electro-Harmonix Metal Muff
- Electro-Harmonix Cathedral Stereo Reverb
- TC Electronic Hall of Fame
Strings & Picks
- D’Addario NYXL (.012–.054)
- Dunlop .60 mm
Except for one song, that is. “‘New in Town’—I couldn’t even tell you what the tuning is,” Moore admits. “That song will not be played live, because it just can’t be.” The reason why, he explains, is that he performed it on prepared guitar, altering the Jazzmaster’s sound by placing objects under or between the strings and retuning the instrument in real time.
“The idea of using guitars that are extended with different implements is something that obviously I’ve been working with since the early ’80s,” he says. “But ‘New in Town’ was probably the most expansive effort of it in terms of creating a song where the preparation of the guitar was in a place of improvisation while we were recording. On that song, I’m actually moving the strings around with the tuning pegs to a point where I’m not really notating what I’m doing, and I’m furthering that by putting different implements between the strings—not just under the strings and in front of the fretboard, but actually sort of woven within the strings. Like, maybe sort of midway on the neck and then over the pickup area, and then playing in the middle between the two.”
“I never liked my vocals so much—I’m kind of key-challenged when I sing. But Margo [Broom] was able to finesse that.”
Some of the types of objects he used were “a small, cylindrical antenna; a drumstick,” Moore continues. “And then I’m picking between those two, or on either side of them, and finding a rhythm or a motif. And I’m doing this while James is playing piano and Jon is processing it and moving it around through his electronics. We recorded that, and then I took it and I cut it up and edited it to create the composition. So the actual performance—I don’t think I’d be able to reenact it again.”
For Moore, the structuring of the track was as much a creatively fulfilling endeavor as the actual performance of it. “I find that, for me, a lot of the experimentation that has rigor is in that part of it, rather than in the expanded technique on the guitar,” he says. “I feel like that’s something anybody can do, and that a lot of people do do. I mean, when I was younger and I brought the drumstick out, and I was swiping it across the strings, and it’s going through a distortion box, it sounded really cool, but it also looked really cool. I knew that there was something very performative about it. But the composition has to have value beyond the oddity of what you’re doing.”
“That song will not be played live, because it just can’t be.”
He laughs. “You know, I’ve seen comments on social media, like, ‘Playing guitar with drumsticks is stupid!’ Which I thought was a really great comment. Somebody was just not down with the program on that one. I was like, ‘Right on!’”
Which brings up a question: Does Moore immerse himself at all in the online guitar world? Is he, like the rest of us, endlessly scrolling through 30-second clips of bedroom guitarists performing jaw-dropping feats of 6-string technical facility?
The answer is, sort of.
After producing several albums with Sonic Youth, Moore began releasing solo works in 1995 with Psychic Hearts. This photo was taken in 2010.
Photo by Mike White
“I’m in that algorithm, so I will get these interesting tutorials from, like, hyper-tapping kinds of players,” he says. “And I will sometimes watch them, because I’m actually very enamored with high-technique guitar players. Even though I don’t really consider myself a high-technique guitar player—I find myself to be a very personalized-technique guitar player. And I’m okay with that.
“But I do like it,” he continues. “Whether it’s Hendrix or some guy sitting on his bed and shredding. Or someone in front of their laptop decoding a Zeppelin thing, like, ‘This is how you play “Misty Mountain Hop” correctly.’ To me that’s really interesting to see, because I love Jimmy Page. I’m never going to play like Jimmy Page, but to have someone decode it and then share that with the world, it’s like, ‘Thank you.’ If I had more time on my hands, I would tune a guitar to traditional tuning and sit down and learn it.”
“I knew that there was something very performative about it. But the composition has to have value beyond the oddity of what you’re doing.”
Most people, of course, don’t usually have to first tune their guitar to standard before they play. But then, Moore is not most people. “I don’t think I have a single guitar in that tuning,” he admits. “And it’s funny, because [Dinosaur Jr. singer and guitarist] J Mascis used to come over, and he’d tune all my guitars to traditional tuning. And it was like, ‘Stop doing that!’ you know? Would drive me crazy.”
At the end of the day, Moore’s intention is to remain creatively open. Even while he is in the throes of the album cycle around Flow Critical Lucidity—“I’m still coming to terms with what we did on this record,” he says—he’s already looking forward to what might be next. “I have it in mind, but I couldn’t say what it is. Sometimes I think I want to make a brutal, harsh, noise-wall record. Or maybe something that’s a super, super-dark metal record. Because I love that kind of stuff.”
There’s still a lot of ground, and music, to explore. “It’s all live and learn,” Moore says. “Even at 66 years old, I still feel like I’m in some place of apprenticeship with a lot of this. I don’t really feel settled. But I do feel more confident, that’s for sure.”
YouTube It
Thurston Moore, with Jazzmaster and Hot Rod DeVille, performs the Flow Critical Lucidity track “Hypnogram” live in Munich in 2023 in this fan-captured DIY video.
![Jerry Cantrell Rig Rundown [2024]](https://www.premierguitar.com/media-library/youtube.jpg?id=53714787&width=1245&height=700&quality=85&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0)
Jerry Cantrell’s forthcoming solo record, I Want Blood, is a return to beastly form for the legendary grunge guitarist. Featuring spots from Metallica bassist Robert Trujillo and Faith No More drummer Mike Bordin—two old friends who played on Cantrell’s 2002 solo release, Degradation Trip—along with Duff McKagan and more, it’s a glorious, riff-filled reunion.
Ahead of the record’s release, PG’s Perry Bean caught up with Cantrell for an updated rundown of his current touring rig. Watch the whole Rig Rundown to catch all the details, and hear some special stories about how late Alice in Chains vocalist Layne Staley encouraged Cantrell’s singing.
Brought to you by D’Addario.The Ones You Know
The G&L Rampage has been one of Cantrell’s top choices for decades, and he brings his vintage, well-used, and colorfully decorated iterations on the road along with his newer signature models. G&L announced earlier this year that they were reviving the Rampage—thanks largely to Cantrell’s impact.
Feel the Champagne
This Gibson Flying V finished in champagne sparkle is another of Cantrell’s go-to stage axes.
Amp in the Box
Cantrell tours with this rack amplifier setup, which features a Fryette Two/Ninety/Two Stereo Power Amp, a Fryette LX II Stereo Power Amp, and a Bogner Fish All Tube Preamp.
Rack 'Em Up
Save for his signature MXR Jerry Cantrell Firefly Talk Box and his Dunlop Jerry Cantrell Firefly Cry Baby Wah which stay at his feet, Cantrell keeps his pedals in a rack configuration, including a handful of MXR Smart Gates, MXR Timmy, Strymon Ola, MXR Six Band EQ, MXR Ten Band EQ, Barber Electronics Direct Drive, Boss DD-500, MXR EVH Flanger, Boss CE-5, MXR Poly Blue Octave, Ibanez TS808HW, MXR Reverb, Line 6 MM4 Modulation Modeler, and MXR Talk Box. A Custom Audio Electronics RS-T MIDI Foot Controller, manned by Cantrell’s tech, handles the behind-the-scenes switching.
LA LOM from left: Jake Faulkner, Nicholas Baker, and Zac Sokolow
These days, trace the cutting edge of modern guitar and you’ll quickly find a different kind of musical ancestor to these early clashes of traditional styles and electric instruments. Listening to artists like Mdou Moctar, Meridian Brothers, and Hermanos Gutiérrez, it’s easy to hear how they’ve built upon the traditions they investigate. LA LOM’s tropical-guitar explorations are right in line with this crew.
If you’ve heard LA LOM, there’s a good chance it was because one of their vintage-inspired videos—which seem to portray a house band at an imaginary ’50s Havana or Bogota café as seen through an old-Hollywood lens—caught your eye via social media. (And for guitarists, Zac Sokolow’s bright red National Val-Pro, which he plays often, lights up on camera.) Once you tuned in, these guys probably stuck around your feed for a while.
LA LOM’s videos were mostly shot at the Roosevelt Hotel in Los Angeles and feature cover songs culled from the several-nights-a-week gig that they played there during the first few years of their existence. It’s that gig that started the band in 2019, when drummer/percussionist Nicholas Baker enlisted Sokolow and bassist Jake Faulkner to join him. Sokolow—who is also a banjo player and has worked in the L.A. folk scene as a member of the Americans and alongside Frank Fairfield and Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton—explains that their first task was to find a repertoire for their instrumentation that started with electric guitar, upright bass, and congas. “One of the first things we played together were some of these old Mexican boleros,” he recalls. “I realized that Nick had an interest in that stuff—his grandmother used to listen to a lot of that kind of music.”
The trio’s all-original debut is steeped in the influences the band explored through their video covers.
Sokolow’s own early love of the requinto intros to boleros by classic NYC-based group Trio Los Panchos, as well as music from Buenos Aires that he’d picked up from his grandfather, informed their sets as well. Soon, LA LOM had embraced a repertoire that encompassed a wide variety of classic Latin sounds—Mexican folk, cumbia, chicha, salsa, tango, and more—blended with Bakersfield twang and soaked in surfy spring reverb.
The trio have moved beyond the Roosevelt Hotel—this year LA LOM played the Newport Folk Festival, and they’ve opened for Vampire Weekend. And the band’s newly released debut, The Los Angeles League of Musicians, is an all-original set of tunes that takes the deeply felt sounds of the material they covered in their early sets to the next logical musical destination, where they live together within the same sonic stew, cementing LA LOM’s vibey and danceable signature. On the album, Sokolow’s dynamic guitar playing is at the forefront. The de facto lead voice for the trio, he’s a master of twang who thrives on expressive melodies and riffs, and he’s always grooving.“One way that we differ a little bit from a lot of those ’60s Peruvian bands—we don’t really get as psychedelic in the traditional way.”
Zac Sokolow's Gear
Sokolow plays just a couple guitars. His red, semi-hollow “Res-O-Glas” National Val-Pro is the most eye-catching of them all.
Guitars
- National Val-Pro (red and white)
- Kay Style Leader
Amps
- Fender Deluxe or Twin ’65 reissue
- Vintage Magnatone
Effects
- Boss Analog Delay
- Fultone Full-Drive
Strings and Picks
- D’Addario or Gabriel Tenorio (.012–.052)
- D’Andrea Proplex 1.5 mm
LA LOM’s cover-song videos detail the rich blueprint of the band’s sound, and they also serve as an excellent primer for tropical guitar styles. We assembled a setlist of those covers, as if LA LOM were playing our own private function and we were curating the tunes, and asked Zac to share his thoughts on each.
“When you play Selena, it always just goes over well—everybody loves Selena.”
The Set List—How LA LOM Plays Favorites
“La Danza De Los Mirlos” Los Mirlos
“Los Mirlos are a group from Peru. They’re from the Amazon. They’re one of the most well-known classic chicha bands that play that Peruvian jungle style of cumbia. I’ve tried to look into what the history of that song is. As far as I know, they wrote it. I’ve heard some older Colombian cumbias that have similar sections; I think it’s kind of borrowing from some old cumbias, and a lot of people have covered it over the years. In Mexico it’s known as ‘La Cumbia de Los Pajaritos.’
“It’s always been one of my favorites—especially of the guitar-led cumbias. The way we play it is not too different from the original, and it’s one of the first Peruvian chicha kind of tunes we were playing.”
“Juana La Cubana” Fito Olivares Y Su Grupo
“That’s a song from a musician from Northern Mexico, on the border of Texas, who sort of got popular playing in Houston. It’s very much in that particular style of Texas-sounding cumbia from the ’90s. He’s playing the melody on the saxophone. That song is so famous, and you hear it all the time on the radio.
“There was one time that I was driving home from a gig really late at night and heard that, and realized there’s some little saxophone lick he’s playing that kind of sounds like “Pretty Woman,” the Roy Orbison song. I had this idea that it would sound more like ’50s rock ‘n’ roll played that way. We started just playing it [that way] at gigs, and it sounded really good instrumentally. That’s how we decide to keep something in a repertoire—if it feels really good when we play it.”
“La Danza Del Petrolero” Los Wembler’s de Iquitos
“That is from another group from Peru called Los Wembler’s de Iquitos. They’re from Iquitos, Peru. It’s kind of dedicated to the petroleum workers.
“I would say one way that we differ a little bit from a lot of those ’60s Peruvian bands is we don’t really get as psychedelic in the traditional way. We don’t use that much wah pedal. I usually keep my tone pretty clean. I’ll have reverb and a little bit of delay sometimes with vibrato, but we don’t go for any really crazy sounds. Usually, we keep it almost more in a country or rockabilly kind of world, which has just sort of always been my tone.”
“One of the first things we played together were some of these old Mexican boleros.”
“Como La Flor” Selena
“That’s probably one of the first cumbias I ever heard. There’s something very emotional about that melody. It's kind of sad, and really beautiful and catchy. When we play that out, people just go crazy. When you play Selena, it always goes over well—everybody loves Selena. And we made a video of that with our friend Cody Farwell playing lap steel. He was trying to find a way to fit steel into it, and I don’t think I’d ever really heard the steel being played on a cumbia before. He was always kind of finding cool ways to fit it in and make the tone fit with ours. On our record, there’s a bunch of his steel playing all over it. It came out sounding pretty different from other covers I’ve heard of that.”
“El Paso Del Gigante” Grupo Soñador
“Grupo Soñador are from Puebla, Mexico, and they were a real classic band playing this kind of style. They call it cumbia sonidera. I feel like that style and that name is more almost about the culture surrounding the music than just the music itself. There’ll be these impromptu dances that happen sometimes on the street or in dance halls, and they’re usually run by DJs who will play all these records and sometimes slow them down or add crazy sound effects or talk into the microphone and give shoutouts to people with crazy echo and stuff on their voices.
“A lot of the records that came from that scene have a lot of synthesizers. Usually, the melody is played by the accordion or the synthesizer with crazy effects. It just has such a cool sound.
“I try to kind of imitate that sound on my guitar as much as I can. Something I often do with LA LOM is to try to get the feeling of another instrument, because in so much of the music we play or the covers we do, it’s some other instrument, whether it’s a saxophone or a synth or accordion playing the melody.”
“Los Sabanales” Calixto Ochoa
“That was written by Calixto Ochoa, from Colombia, who I’ve heard referred to as “El Rey de Vallenato”—the king of Vallenato, which is a style of cumbia that came from mostly around the city called Valledupar in Colombia. And that’s the classic accordion-led cumbia. The much older cumbia was just called the gaiteros, with the guy who played flute and drums. And then the Vallenato style emerged, which is that accordion-led stuff, and Calixto Ochoa. He’s just the coolest. We’ve learned a couple of different covers of his. I think the way we play this is more like rockabilly than cumbia.”