One of my favorite things about being in a band is the community—sharing music, books, friends, and food with your bandmates—as you march through an endless stream of van or plane rides, studios, sound checks, and hotels. The waiting can be interminable, and people find many different ways to deal with it. Sometimes, with the wrong company, the time can feel like a black hole, and it takes a good deal of conscious effort to stay sane and healthy. Luckily, I have spent most of my career surrounded by people that I could relate to—and we’ve built our friendships along the way—strengthening the music in concert with our personal bonds.
When I look back over the different bands I’ve been a part of, I often think to a record or two that defined our time together as a band. I remember the early days of my first band, where we spent a lot of time with Daniel Lanois’ first record, Acadie. It was a clarion call for us to stretch out musically, and it married a really deep soul with amazing production. Each person in the band could find something different in his music. For me, it was Daniel’s ability to play simple and folky music that seemed to reference a shadowy, second sound beyond the notes he was playing. I was hearing this a lot in those days with all of the post-punk and goth-style industrial music going on, but Daniel voiced it with an added poignancy and class that made it seem deeper and more dangerous. It really helped us open up doors as a band while we experimented with sounds in the never-ending quest to actually say something. Later, as we started improvising more on structure, we spent a good deal of time with Eddie Harris' music, along with Fire/Fury Records Story and the Swingtime set (both compilations of old soul/blues), that our label Capricorn had released.
My first band broke up in ’96, and I put together a band with JJ Johnson and George Reiff (as well as Bukka Allen, who played in the first band). Our first couple of tours were loose, while we tried to get our sound together. We were quickly in the studio making my third record, And All the Colors, and I remember Radiohead’s OK Computer and the Root’s debut as our bedrock records around that point. OK Computer really changed the sound of rock music during the time we were trying to get our voice. The Roots were doing the same thing with hip-hop. Both were in constant rotation in the studio and in the van. There were many conversations about the minutia of the songs, the ideas, and more. As we pushed through the concepts of those songs, we started falling in with some of the sounds of the ’90s British psych music—especially Spritualized and Stereolab. Our then guitar tech, Chris Dye, would drape the stage in white sheets, and set up his mishmash of Super 8 cameras, with avant-garde film loops whirring while we immersed the songs in waves of echo and feedback. Our new drummer, Chris Searles, would be a blur of motion and polyrhythm as we pulled the oft-unwitting crowd along with us. It was sometimes pretentious, but always fun.
Chris Dye came to me with a mission. He said, “We need to cut the fat.” Things were so bombastic and over the top every night, and he was proselytizing like Ian MacKaye on a coffee binge. I bit. We decided to go out with me playing acoustic guitar, sleeping on couches, and really trying to do something new. This was a germination time for my next record, Luminaria, and was a brand-new vista. Chris was a big Brian Eno fan, and really liked the concept of music as “wallpaper.” This was a pretty foreign concept to me at the time, as music was all about passion, blood, and intention. I remember many long drives through the western deserts with Eno’s Apollo and Here Come the Warm Jets playing through the endless hours of deserts and highway. As we toured, Chris started playing as well, first the Omnichord, and then “anti-guitar” guitar. I was learning the acoustic guitar as an instrument, as well as learning about silence and quiet, both in my voice and in my songs. As if on cue, Neutral Milk Hotel released In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Eno was like a palate cleanser (egads!) and everything seemed different afterwards. It felt like a retrenching of sorts, revisiting a lot of places I had been, but with new eyes.
We often found ourselves in San Francisco, and I had become friends with many of the bands in the Noise Pop scene there. To me, a lot of the music had ties to stuff that I was listening to at the time, but wasn’t being heard elsewhere in the States. Beulah was the first band I heard, as they were part of the Elephant 6 circus, but it was Oranger that I really fell in love with. They were an offshoot of the phenomenal power-pop band Overwhelming Colorfast that I was already quite a fan of, but they were more psychy, and it fit perfectly with where my head was at the time. Matt, the bass player, and I started writing songs together, eventually writing and recording my last record, El Sonido Nuevo together. Matt had become one of my best friends, and we basically were handing off records and books, as we wrote the songs. He has a deep knowledge of pysch and underground rock, and we spun through countless records, veering from ’60s Turkish psych to Emitt Rhodes, and from Arthur Lyman to Arthur Lee and Love. As we recorded the record, a chord shift from one place would sneak in, a lyrical slant from another, until we had a record sitting in our hands.
When I listen to my records over the years, the songs bring back all kinds of memories—however, the music I was listening to at the time is now seen as a conduit from one space to another. I really like the journeys and the shifts, and feel that in being open to them, I have become a better musician.
Ian Moore is an Austin, Texas-based guitarist who has had his hands in a bit of everything related to guitar, from an acclaimed solo career to building and modifying his own gear to being a sideman for pop star Jason Mraz. ianmoore.com
B.B. King’s performance at the Zaire 74 festival--which took place September 22-24 at the Stade du 20 Mai in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo)--was a powerful moment in music history, bringing the soul of the blues to the stage, uniting a global audience. B.B. King’s performance alongside James Brown and more set the tone for one of the most iconic sporting events of all time, the “Rumble in the Jungle,” a groundbreaking heavyweight championship fight between boxing legends Muhammed Ali and George Foreman, which ended up taking place on October 30, 1974.
“B.B. King’s performance at the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ was not just a concert--it was a defining cultural moment,” says Vassal Benford, CEO and Chairman of the B.B. King Music Company. “We are honored to collaborate with Gibson to create a guitar that captures both the artistry and spirit of B.B. King’s legendary performance. This instrument is more than a tribute-it’s a continuation of his enduring legacy, ensuring that future generations of musicians can connect with the heart and soul of the blues. The ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ guitar is a knockout, and Gibson’s craftsmanship is unmatched. This is a great surprise for the BIRTHDAY month of the Iconic Mr. King. Thank you, Gibson from the ALL of the King Family!”
Handmade by the master craftspeople of the Gibson Custom Shop in Nashville, Tennessee, the B.B. King “Rumble in the Jungle” 1974 ES-355 is an instant collector’s item, and only 100 guitars will be made.
The B.B. King “Rumble in the Jungle” ES-355 from Gibson Custom is a limited edition guitar that accurately replicates B.B.’s Walnut 1974 ES-355 he used for the concert. Like all ES-355 models, the B.B. King “Rumble in the Jungle” 1974 ES-355 features premium appointments befitting every top-of-the-line Gibson ES™ model, including mother-of-pearl fretboard inlays, Murphy Lab aged gold hardware, a Custom split diamond headstock inlay, T-Type Custombucker pickups, a mono Varitone switch, and a Maestro Vibrola tailpiece. It also comes bundled with a host of case candy that ties back to that historic festival performance, as well as the legendary Rumble in the Jungle fight itself. The B.B. King 1974 ES-355 “Rumble in the Jungle” arrives in a stunning Murphy Lab Light Aged Walnut finish, and a B.B. King “Zaire” hardshell case is also included.
For more information, please visit gibson.com. Price: $9,999.00 USD.
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.”
