LA LOM from left: Jake Faulkner, Nicholas Baker, and Zac Sokolow
These days, trace the cutting edge of modern guitar and youāll 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 GutiĆ©rrez, itās easy to hear how theyāve built upon the traditions they investigate. LA LOMās tropical-guitar explorations are right in line with this crew.
If youāve heard LA LOM, thereās a good chance it was because one of their vintage-inspired videosāwhich seem to portray a house band at an imaginary ā50s Havana or Bogota cafĆ© as seen through an old-Hollywood lensācaught your eye via social media. (And for guitarists, Zac Sokolowās 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 LOMās 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. Itās that gig that started the band in 2019, when drummer/percussionist Nicholas Baker enlisted Sokolow and bassist Jake Faulkner to join him. Sokolowāwho 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 āBlind Boyā Paxtonāexplains that their first task was to find a repertoire for their instrumentation that started with electric guitar, upright bass, and congas. āOne of the first things we played together were some of these old Mexican boleros,ā he recalls. āI realized that Nick had an interest in that stuffāhis grandmother used to listen to a lot of that kind of music.ā
The trioās all-original debut is steeped in the influences the band explored through their video covers.
Sokolowās 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 heād 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 soundsāMexican folk, cumbia, chicha, salsa, tango, and moreāblended with Bakersfield twang and soaked in surfy spring reverb.
The trio have moved beyond the Roosevelt Hotelāthis year LA LOM played the Newport Folk Festival, and theyāve opened for Vampire Weekend. And the bandās 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 LOMās vibey and danceable signature. On the album, Sokolowās dynamic guitar playing is at the forefront. The de facto lead voice for the trio, heās a master of twang who thrives on expressive melodies and riffs, and heās always grooving.āOne way that we differ a little bit from a lot of those ā60s Peruvian bandsāwe donāt really get as psychedelic in the traditional way.ā
Zac Sokolow's Gear
Sokolow plays just a couple guitars. His red, semi-hollow āRes-O-Glasā 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 ā65 reissue
- Vintage Magnatone
Effects
- Boss Analog Delay
- Fultone Full-Drive
Strings and Picks
- DāAddario or Gabriel Tenorio (.012ā.052)
- DāAndrea Proplex 1.5 mm
LA LOMās cover-song videos detail the rich blueprint of the bandās 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.
āWhen you play Selena, it always just goes over wellāeverybody loves Selena.ā
The Set ListāHow LA LOM Plays Favorites
āLa Danza De Los Mirlosā Los Mirlos
āLos Mirlos are a group from Peru. Theyāre from the Amazon. Theyāre one of the most well-known classic chicha bands that play that Peruvian jungle style of cumbia. Iāve tried to look into what the history of that song is. As far as I know, they wrote it. Iāve heard some older Colombian cumbias that have similar sections; I think itās kind of borrowing from some old cumbias, and a lot of people have covered it over the years. In Mexico itās known as āLa Cumbia de Los Pajaritos.ā
āItās always been one of my favoritesāespecially of the guitar-led cumbias. The way we play it is not too different from the original, and itās one of the first Peruvian chicha kind of tunes we were playing.ā
āJuana La CubanaāĀ Fito Olivares Y Su Grupo
āThatās a song from a musician from Northern Mexico, on the border of Texas, who sort of got popular playing in Houston. Itās very much in that particular style of Texas-sounding cumbia from the ā90s. Heās playing the melody on the saxophone. That song is so famous, and you hear it all the time on the radio.
āThere was one time that I was driving home from a gig really late at night and heard that, and realized thereās some little saxophone lick heās playing that kind of sounds like āPretty Woman,ā the Roy Orbison song. I had this idea that it would sound more like ā50s rock ānā roll played that way. We started just playing it [that way] at gigs, and it sounded really good instrumentally. Thatās how we decide to keep something in a repertoireāif it feels really good when we play it.ā
āLa Danza Del Petroleroā Los Wemblerās de Iquitos
āThat is from another group from Peru called Los Wemblerās de Iquitos. Theyāre from Iquitos, Peru. Itās kind of dedicated to the petroleum workers.
āI would say one way that we differ a little bit from a lot of those ā60s Peruvian bands is we donāt really get as psychedelic in the traditional way. We donāt use that much wah pedal. I usually keep my tone pretty clean. Iāll have reverb and a little bit of delay sometimes with vibrato, but we donāt 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.ā
āOne of the first things we played together were some of these old Mexican boleros.ā
āComo La FlorāĀ Selena
āThatās probably one of the first cumbias I ever heard. Thereās 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 wellāeverybody 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 donāt think Iād 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, thereās a bunch of his steel playing all over it. It came out sounding pretty different from other covers Iāve heard of that.ā
āEl Paso Del GiganteāĀ Grupo SoƱador
āGrupo SoƱador 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. Thereāll be these impromptu dances that happen sometimes on the street or in dance halls, and theyāre 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.
āA 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.
āI 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, itās some other instrument, whether itās a saxophone or a synth or accordion playing the melody.ā
āLos SabanalesāĀ Calixto Ochoa
āThat was written by Calixto Ochoa, from Colombia, who Iāve heard referred to as āEl Rey de Vallenatoāāthe king of Vallenato, which is a style of cumbia that came from mostly around the city called Valledupar in Colombia. And thatās 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. Heās just the coolest. Weāve learned a couple of different covers of his. I think the way we play this is more like rockabilly than cumbia.ā
