La Música

Don’t Call Her Lady Gagá

Rita Indiana is a phenomenon for many reasons–not the least of which is her skepticism about Facebook (see vid above). Her importance can’t be isolated in her performance aesthetic, nor in her brilliant lyrics or in the way she fuses different traditions of music and culture. In the end, it’s something very personal, and this interview that I did with her last week is one of my favorites.

 

Rita: If you’d rather speak in English, if it makes it easier…

 

EM: Well maybe but I have to establish my street cred. Let’s see. What was the process of bringing the album to fruition? You must have been working on it for years.

 

Rita: I never considered myself a musician; I did a lot of literature before I actually thought of making music and this record is one of my projects—the next one might be a book, it might be something else like a video art project or something, but it’s definitely a multimedia project that came—it has a lot of stuff that I had accumulated over time, reading or listening to music, or from life, programming beats in my house, talking with people. The album was made in a week, see, and just two or three months before arriving in Santo Domingo I put the band together but definitely there were many years of research, so to speak, and of improvisation that is in that record.

 

EM: And you were playing live before this?

 

Rita: Before we recorded I just played, I had been playing for less than a year because I mostly focused on literature, I had only been writing since I was 19 years old. In 2008 I started to make music like, well I’m going to make music, because before that it was just stuff I did for myself, for my friends, like programming a beat, I’d send it to you or it was music that I did for performance art pieces that I would perform in museums, it wasn’t with the idea to make popular music or anything in that style. Before making this record I had been playing live for about a year, more or less.

 

EM: What is the relationship between your prose writing and ideas for songs?

 

Rita: I think the seed for both is the same, like to tell a story or express something. I think that with literature I do much more sophisticated and elaborate work, in long form. Songs come out of me in a day—I’m walking, I take the buss and suddenly the melody and the lyrics come together. Zoom zoom like that. It’s not something like “I’m going to write a song now.” I don’t do any research or anything before writing a song and I’d say instead it comes out of me—bang—something really spontaneous is happening to me. With literature, in general it takes me some months, cooking it up in my head, cooking up the story, which is what I should write, which is what is happening to me. The thing with music comes more through a rhythmic thing. And the lyrics sometimes are things that don’t make much sense because people ask me, ‘what does this or that mean’ and what I’m doing is I’m playing with language to make music in the song. Sometimes it makes sense and other times it doesn’t necessarily have a meaning, they are like more abstract, the lyrics, than the literature I write.

 

EM: So it’s more like poetry…

 

Rita: It’s more like poetry, and novels are prose, although there’s a story that I tell in a song but it’s a language that’s a little less tied to the conventions of communication.

 

EM: Yes but it’s also clear that you’re an aficionado of different kinds of music which you probably thought well I want to mix this idea or feeling that comes out of this kind of music with another aesthetic.

 

Rita: There’s a mix but what I’m saying that with music, it’s much more spontaneous. I’m not like “now I’m going to mix dub with bachata, it just comes, because that music is inside of me, all that music that I’ve listened to, and all those things that I’ve experienced are there—that’s what’s beautiful for me to write songs that just come to me. I write a song and suddenly those elements are there, because they’re inside me like a blender, you know, of the Brazilian music I hear, Afro-Cuban music. There are times for example, “El Blu del Ping Pong,” when we play it, there’s gagá in there, a magic religious Dominican rhythm, there’s blues in there, there’s punk, you know there’s a whole bunch of things, but it’s not like I said, “Okay, now we’re going to play the guitar so it sounds like gagá, or we’re going to make the drums sound like…things come out because I am filled with all that music and my musicians also come from different backgrounds, and there you have it. They are spontaneous experiments, let’s call them that.

 

EM: What was Luis Días’s influence on you?

 

Rita: One thing I share with Luis—may he rest in peace—that he was a great teacher for me, I had the honor of meeting him personally and discuss things like music and literature because Luis is a super well-read guy and is super intelligent, that love for popular music. Luis was a rocker and hard-assed punk, an investigator of Dominican music, always a real do-it-yourself guy, but the guy know how to appreciate popular music and what he could take from that and he lived to write merengue for Sergio Vargas, Fernandito Villalona, he had a good ear for this phenomenon, for merengue, what was popular in the Dominican Republic above all in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. For me personally my head spins over what happened with merengue in the ‘70s and ‘80s because it was like a revolution where it transformed from being either campesino music or formal salon music in the ‘70s during the Balaguer regime, people like Johnny Ventura revolutionized the scene completely by putting together smaller bands. It’s a little like what punk did—they put together a band, and they weren’t such professional musicians, and began to play with the way they dressed and other styles. And that was in the sound and in the visuals, it’s super attractive and there’s a whole bunch of things that happened there too, the choreography. Three’s a guy I’m really into, I don’t know his name but I have identified him in many videos of different merengue bands, and he is present there because he is the one who arranges the dancing of the Kentons, and Anibal. That idea of the front of the orchestra, that the dance had to be the most creative, right? And that definitely, of the music and the aesthetic, marked a little what it was, what has been that part of my project. It’s what you can see a little in the work that Noelia did in “El Juidero,” which talks about that era, the end of the ‘70s.

 

EM: So you also were influenced by boleros and maybe the Tropicalistas?

 

Rita: I was raised with my grandparents—my parents divorced and my mother went to live with my grandparents and I was raised with my grandfather and grandmother and my great-grandmother. And my mother was working and studying so I was with the old folks the whole day, listening to the music they listened to, which was basically boleros and when there were blackouts at night they would turn on a battery-powered radio, their whole bolero show the whole night long, and that’s like part of my imagination, inevitably in the back of my head all the time. That whole dark aspect of the bolero, super-dramatic, so theatrical. The theatrical thing that the bolero has enchants me and it also has a very literary character. Sometimes there are boleros that have introductions like an Edgar Allan Poe story, like a Gothic thing. On the other hand, I love Brazilian music; I came into contact with it when I was about 17 years old, through some older friends I had. They introduced me to Caetano Veloso, or Maria Bethania or Gal Costa, all those people and they enriched me a lot, because of that idea of the mixture of what it is to feel African in the Americas, feel the slave and the rhythms the slaves left us—the mix of that with rock and roll, which is also African—Latin American culture mixed with African-American culture. That marriage interests me a lot.

 

EM: What you said right now about Africans interests me a lot because it occurred to me that if here’s a pervasive theme in what’s going on in a lot of your songs is that you do get to the trance state of the traditional spiritual Afro-Caribbean music, like posesión. I hear it a little bit in the Ping Pong song.

 

Rita: On this project in particular, Los Misterios, on this record it’s super-present because it was something that I always wanted to do, integrate what I danced when I would go to rave parties in the late ‘90s and what I danced when I would go to for example out of curiosity to a gagá festival, in a cañaveral, in a batey where Haitians and Dominicans celebrated Holy Week. There was a trance state in both places—one a magical religious one and the other a party thing, there I was breaking my head with deep house, you know? So since I saw that those things in some way could speak to each other, and also converse with Dominican popular music and other rhythms, and that definitely, my heart—there’s a side of my heart that is very attached to the idea of dance, but dance as something sacred, that allows a human being to transcend. Not dance for dance’s sake, or dancing to flirt with women, or whatever, but dance as something sacred that can transport you to another dimension.

 

EM: Let us speak a little about your reality as a transnational artist. The obvious song is “La hora de volvé,” but then I hear a song like “Pásame a Buscá”, which is not explicitly about transnationalism but it shows such an intimate details of Puerto Rico. How does your transnationalism influence you as a person and an artist?

 

Rita: In the quotidian sense, I can say, or for Dominicans, in the act of leaving my country I have to go through a series of requirements to visit another country—I have to meet immigration requirements to get a visa or permission to travel or whatever. That right there puts you in a complicated context. Do I want to travel? I have to get this visa, I have to pay to get permission and maybe they won’t give it to me. Which is what any Dominican goes through, and in addition, under the pressure of a completely disarticulated economy and from where everyone wants to leave because of problems and to search for a better life. That’s something that is super-present in my live because in Santo Domingo everyone has a family member living abroad. Everyone has a family member living abroad who left from every social class, above all middle class and lower class, because they had family that left for the U.S., for Puerto Rico, for Spain, wherever, to work so they can send home something to someone who was left behind. It’s something very real, not something you have to pinpoint. It’s all over the place. It’s how we live, and it’s in my work, clearly it’s in my work. It’s like saying “well I’m Dominican, I’m of such and such age, and I also have to say I am a diasporic person, because my father went to the U.S., my aunt worked in a factory in New York her whole life. I’ve come to live in Puerto Rico looking for other opportunities. It’s our reality and it has to be obvious in what I do.

 

EM: You seem to be saying something that reflects a transnational reality for the 21st century,  a certain sensibility.

 

Rita: Definitely the question of nostalgia that some people live—some don’t because there are people who leave and they say “No way in hell I’m going back! Back there? No way!” And they go and stay 10 or 20 years and don’t go back because they had a traumatic experience in their home country and don’t want to return but the majority feel, above all, the Caribbean person, well the Latin American has a nostalgic experience of their homeland, that it’s like a dream even if they never return, even if they don’t want to return, they have this thing about recreating their home country in the First World, like the Dominicans do, Puerto Ricans do, Cubans do, everybody, the little islands inside the big city. And Europeans too, the ones who came in the 20th century, they want to recreate what’s theirs in the big city.

 

EM: Are you primarily based in Puerto Rico?

 

Rita:  Right now I’m in Puerto Rico.

 

EM: For how long?

 

Rita: I’m in Puerto Rico indefinitely, for the moment.

 

EM: Is there a difference between the Dominican in Puerto Rico and the Dominican in New York?

 

Rita: I think that in Puerto Rico there is more discrimination than in New York. It’s a smaller space, we are the only other because there are people from the islands but really the Big Other here is the Dominican. So there is much more discrimination and it’s harder I think. And there’s less opportunity than in New York. I would say that is the difference—we are a little more oppressed in Puerto Rico than in New York.

 

EM: Yes but at the same time Dominicans are going to have a big influence on Puerto Rican culture in the coming years.

 

Rita: Definitely we have an influence on the economy, the culture and everything—in the city we have already had an influence in all those areas, because it’s a pretty big community. That is inevitable.

 

EM: Do you enjoy the culture and the feeling there? How much do you feel Puerto Rican by being there for a period of time?

 

Rita: I don’t feel Puerto Rican, but I do feel that I have roots here, many different kinds. My two novels have been published here, I have an almost 10-year relationship with this country. I have great friends, familial and personal relationships in this country that to me, despite all the violence and everything that’s happening, give me a lot of serenity. I feel that there is an energy that is a little more subtle than there is in Santo Domingo, which my Puerto Rican friends deny, but that’s my perception. Here I’m more relaxed. More relaxed in the city. For me it’s a city that has clean beaches, it’s a privilege. We haven’t had that in Santo Domingo for a long time.

 

EM: Who are you working with here?

 

Rita: Ahmed Irizarry is the musical director of the band. We knew each other beforehand, we were friends and now he has become the musical director of the band and he is a tremendous human being.

 

EM: I read in a Santo Domingo newspaper that you were working on something with Calle 13 and Tego Calderón and Yotuel of Orishas.

 

Rita: The thing with Tego and Yotuel has not become concretized yet. We are working on it. I’m co-directing a script for Calle 13 with the director Noelia Quintero, who is the director of the videos “La Hora de Volvé” and “El Juidero.”

 

EM: What is it like for you to be “out” in the celebrity world of Latin America? It must be a very unusual experience.

 

Rita: I have always assumed (being out) very naturally, and I haven’t made an issue out of it, you know, in hiding it or anything. I dealt with it as any other person would deal with their life and happiness. In Santo Domingo…I felt it would be more scandalous than it was. But people on the street reacted in a healthy way. More healthy than the media.

 

EM: Many artists stay hidden for many years and then suddenly there’s a revelation and it’s a big thing but you, since you began your career “out” and everyone knew it, I think you must be a big inspiration for a lot of people.

 

Rita: It was very nice to hear commentaries from older people, who you think are more conservative than anyone. 70-year-old ladies would suddenly say to me in the street, I like people like you because you are what you are, you are not afraid, or I like you, it’s great that you are the kind who tells the truth. These are great gifts from those you least expect to get them from.

 

EM: Do you feel like you have a unifying concept in the album Juidero?

 

Rita: El Juidero is just what it means like “the runaway is ready, ready to runaway.” It’s like a getway, I don’t think it’s very translatable to English. But it has a little bit to do with that sensation of someone who is moving. Of someone who is running away. And I think that someone who leaves their country, even if they’re away 20 or 30 years in another country, always has the feeling that they left running away from something and continues to be running away from something. That’s a little bit about “El Juidero.” You’re running away your entire life. Towards something that sometimes you don’t even know what it is.

 

EM: It’s a little like being the protagonist of an action movie.

 

Rita: It’s an action movie set in the Caribbean, totally.

 

EM: Have you played in New York yet? Did I miss it last year?

 

Rita: I haven’t played in NYC yet. Last year it was canceled because they hadn’t given me the visa yet. But now I’m going to play in Summerstage and I’m looking forward to it.

 

EM: What will it be like for you to finally play for the people here?

 

Rita: I’m very happy about playing in NY, I feel that many of those songs speak directly to the people that live in New York in one way or another.

 

EM: What are your feelings about the term Latin alternative or the genre signified by it?

 

Rita: I used to have a lot of problems with labels in general to classify music but after I began to make music I realized that heck, they’re necessary because this is an industry, you know, and what are you going to call it? Are you going to do like Prince, put up a logo to drive people crazy? You have to call it something. Sometimes they don’t do justice to the music you make or you feel uncomfortable because you think “oh this isn’t that music, I’m not that.” But I don’t have those problems with that kind of thing. You can call it what you will. I make music. And whomever wants to call it alternative, go ahead. If you want to call it merengue, call it merengue. If you want to call it whatever you want, even world music. I make music for whoever wants to see it.

 

EM: Are there any Latin alternative bands you like?

 

Rita: A band that totally influenced me and who I admire a lot, one album I’m going to say because it’s a specific album, is “Re” by Café Tacuba, which I think is a master work and I take my hat off to them. And well Manu Chao who they also push into the Latin alternative category. Those two I can mention.

 

EM: Where did you get the name Indiana?

 

Rita: There’s a little story behind that. It’s actually my middle name, my given middle name. My name is Rita Indiana Hernández Sánchez, and that name, it was my great-grandmother’s name, Rita Indiana del Castillo. And I’m the third Rita Indiana, so it’s more than given, it’s a family tradition. The fact is that the first Rita Indiana, her name was Rita, but she was mulatto and her husband called her Rita Indiana because she was dark. So when they had a grandchild, my great grandmother who was the grandchild of that woman was given the name Rita Indiana—that was the second Rita Indiana, and then my great-grandmother, when I was born, gave me her name, Rita Indiana.

 

EM: That’s a wonderful story.

 

 

Archived posts below:

 

Que Descansa en Paz

He was a friend of my dad’s. Came over the house a few times when I was a kid. A few years ago came all the way up the mountain to sing aguinaldos for my family. He had a generous spirit.

 

El Viento te Da Sorpresas

A chronicle (una crónica) on how to keep your Puerto Rican ass alive: First, think of Viento de Agua. When I think of Viento de Agua, I think of precisely that. A salty-coco burst of Yemayá mist catching you by surprise on the waterfront in the southern coastal town of Arroyo, or mixed with a warm splash of Medalla in the back room of El Balcón del Zumbador in Piñones. The same Viento de Agua that lifts your entire Brooklyn apartment, jammed with everyone who has ever attended Boricua Fest in Prospect Park, up into the air for several seconds so high that you could say the orishas got possessed by us.

Viento de Agua is the placita in all of us, the place where you get the necessary Fruta Madura and make your 3 a.m. dance a divine desahogo, a diasporic disparate that makes a melaza so sweet you no longer have to ask y dónde está tu abuela? She’s right here. And Tito Matos, flashing his pandereta like it was the center of the only cipher you need to know, won’t let you forget that. I can almost hear Victor Hernández Cruz saying “Areíto, anyone?”

VDA’s latest, Fruta Madura is a triumphant, experimental album that is traditional, avant-garde, and popular at the same time! It is a living bandera that channels José Campeche, Canario, Tite Curet Alonso, Maelo Rivera, Tito Kayak, and Juan Sánchez all at once. It’s everything you need to know, in this order: Plena, Plena, Bomba gracimá holandé, Plena, Plena, Bomba gracimá holandé, Plena, Bomba seis corrido-corvé, Plena, Plena, Bomba holandé sicá, and finally, Plena. It’s the fruit of life.

What was the recipe for Fruta? Take one part VDA street show, the “uplugged” version consisting of Tito and the crew, cats with names like Llonsi, Lagarto, Joko, Richard, Willie. They are the masters of the punteador and the seguidor, and the song of the migratory black workers that found their way to San Antón in Ponce at the real turn of the century (this last one was bullshit). They are the melody of rhythm and the rhythm of melody–their hands and their harmony tell the story of Puerto Rico.

Then you mix in part two, the compositional/arranging genius of Ricardo Pons, who gives Fruta Madura the feel of a symphony, a Berklee-ish air of majesty that can give you a serious hankering for the salad days of Batacumbele (Miguel Zenón and Jerry Medina in the house). It’s always been a mystery why Puerto Rican music is never considered world music unless it’s played in Hawaii, but this time no one can deny the global inevitability of the album’s reigning anthem, “Ciudadano del Mundo.” Finally, a song designed to end all future aquí-allá identity paradoxes!

Whenever circular migration comes up, I can hear Tito doing his best Sammy Tanco imitation–of course none of this would have been possible without Juango and Los Pleneros. They took the parranda from Santurce to the early morning light of El Sur del Bronx, or Los Sures, or somewhere South where the sun is always shining and there is no status, only a nation without borders, an island of millions that knows no North or South. When Tito (and Mariana) moved back to Puerto Rico after getting their PhD in Bregando Con Nueva York, the circle was complete.

There’s a line from track 2, “El Mareíto,” that you need to remember: “Dicen que muero, y no me muero na’/Es un mareíto que a veces me da.” The next time you think you can’t stand up anymore, the next time you’re served up that knockout punch, know that Tito and his band of functional plena-holics are not going to let you pass out.  There’s too much at stake to leave this party early.

Viento de Agua will rock the house at Hostos Center for the Arts and Culture, 450 Grand Concourse at 149th St, Bronx, Saturday, December 4, at 7:30 p.m.

Bomba y Pleasure

The above is from the latest publicity materials sent out by Calle 13, Puerto Rico’s leading agitprop art-hiphop combo, to publicize their new album, which drops in October. While lyricist/MC Residente, a/k/a René Pérez etc. has flirted in the past with “explosive” imagery (most notably this triplet from the massive hit “Atrévete: “señorita intelectual ya se que tiene el area abdominal/que va a explotar como fiesta patronal/que va a explotar como palestino”), this would seem the most literal attempt at “metáforo bomba.”

We’re well aware of the urban significance of “bomb” as in “da,” but there’s something especially ’70s about Residente’s approach. While you could say that the Mexican rock-hiphop hybrid Molotov, a crude antecedent to Calle 13, was on a similar track, René’s anti-establishment cocktail makes no apologies for its explosive flow: amenaza as fun, rhyme as weapon, dance as erotic/political eruption.

The upcoming Larry Harlow Salsa Suite performance at Lincoln Center out of Doors this week brought all this to mind through the memory of the almost forgotten Nestor Sánchez, who along with Frankie Rodríugez (no, not Dr. K., el Mets closer, but the congero-sonero so all the way live on Jerry González’s classic Ya Yo Me Curé) delivered Harlow’s “history of Afro-Latin music” operetta. A little research revealed that Sánchez began in the early ’70s with a local outfit fronted by Tony Pabón, and their first album, called Protesta, had this iconic cover design:

Yes, there were real bombs, and too many died and went to prison over them. But there always had to be an outlet for that bomb in our hearts. Bomba y pleasure.

Breaking News, 7/6: Maldita Vencindad at LAMC this week

One of the great politically conscious Mexican rock bands returns to New York showcasing their excellent new album, “Circular Colectivo.” Check out my preview feature in the Star-Ledger.

The Man Who Wasn’t There

There’s a glow where Silvio Rodríguez is supposed to be, ostensibly caused by the pseudo-psychedelic light show the night of his second show at Carnegie Hall. But maybe it was because in our world, he couldn’t really be there at all. Of course, the form of his presentation is familiar, yet its content is, to the mind trained to hear the language of the media-consumerist-complex, a mystery.

Silvio’s presence was completely different from his press conference the week before; he was in his performer mode, almost no speechmaking other than dedicating the show to the eighty-something Pete Seeger, present in the second row, and a shout-out to the Cuban 5. The group accompanying him, including his wife, the classically trained flutist Niurka González, were an idealization of the Cuban conservatory system–precise, yet emotional; exquisite harmony, impeccable rhythm.

Silvio’s world is an inexplicable realm of earnest self-exploration–sometimes concrete, others ephemeral, translated into layered poetry and sung to musical accompaniment that uniquely captures the folk traditions of Anglo and Latin America, as well as jazz, Afro-Cuban, and classical chamber music. There are moments when the message is explicit, as in “Carta a Violeta Parra,” about the recently deceased founder of nueva canción, and “Cita con Los Ángeles,” in which Silvio walks through the streets of New York and runs into ghosts of the end of modernist idealism. And there are riddles like “Sueño Con Serpientes,” and the childlike “Unicornio.”

Then there are songs that seem to say even more than the already intense pronouncements in the lyrics, like “La Maza.” Si no creyera en lo mas duro/si no creyera en el deseo/si no creyera en lo que creo/si no creyera en algo puro. If I didn’t believe in these things, what would the world be? These words shout about the core of identity, an identity of resistance. And when the crowd clapped, sang, teared up, they shared that heart that we know as resistance. The flame not yet extinguished.

These moments happened again, and again. In “El Necio,” which offers life after the death of ideals, and “Cita,” which celebrates survival after assassination, inspired, seemingly by the birth of his daughter in the wake of 9-11. The burst of applause for the last couplet, “Seamos un tilín mejores/y muchos menos egoistas” was a kind of jolt–it was as if we were hearing a message unimaginable in the commodity-ego world we live in.

I sat transfixed, regretting having underestimated Silvio in the past–his daring leaps into higher registers were not at all signs of fragility but strength. He was in command of every song without being at all overbearing or needing to be spotlighted. He was at once a leader and  member of his own wondrous workshop of song, and these were songs that spoke to another world. Was it all in Silvio’s head, or does it really exist in Cuba’s revolution? “What a strange way we have of remembering,” he muses in “Mariposas,” decorating his lyrics with rippling chords like a Tim Buckley who managed to survive, making you wonder, what was it that crushed so many people and allowed this butterfly to stay aloft? That was the climax to Act II.

In the end, there was “Te Doy una Canción,” another of his daybreak revelations that make it impossible to separate politics from love, while pondering contradiction: the same two hands can heal and kill. The show’s last utterance was the inevitable “Pequeña Serenata Diurna,” which asks you to believe that even in a world like this, with its covert and overt repression, it’s possible to awaken in a free country as a free person. In the closing chorus, he sneaks in that oddly deep sentiment about asking those who died for ideals to forgive him his cathartic happiness. We missed the piano solo by Emiliano Salvador that appears on the original. But as we filed out of this show, one of the few in recent memory I wished would never end, we were haunted by the joy that can burst from one’s soul despite a heart immersed in uncertainty.

Which is I think what captures Silvio’s moment better than any other of his endless bag of metaphors. He was the man who wasn’t there, save for someone’s waking dream of being free.

 

Aventura Unplugged

UPDATE 1-26: Went to see Aventura at MSG last Thursday, was quite a scene. It was ultimately a DR cultural nationalist event, kind of necessary for Zeitgeist grasp of  Dominican-York essence. Lots of ladies in skintight outfits, but the boys knew all the lyrics as well. Romeo was in this intensely ironic “I will teach you how to treat the ladies” mode. The band played on a revolving circular stage and there were a couple of moments that were jam-like. But they pretty much stuck to the script. Strictly for pop believers.

Aventura is having an unbelievable run atop the Billboard Latin album charts. They’ve been outselling everyone else for months. You’re probably curious about why. Maybe the following Q& A I did with them in a Midtown Manhattan studio last week (literally minutes before the Haiti earthquake hit) will make the picture a little clearer:

EM: The production values are high on this album. Tell me a little bit about the production process.
Anthony: This is the album that has taken us longest to produce. We usually take a long time because we wanna make sure that we give people something as close to perfection as it could be possible but it’s always like 7-8 months max but in this production we took a year and a half. We took such a long time that—we had three or four years I recall where I’d be giving people like a studio album, because we were doing live productions and doing 4 or 5 songs. But this is the production that people were waiting for, we gave them like 18 songs, and we felt very confident with our work, because we were hoping—because at the end of the day people have the last word, if they like it or not. We were just like, I hope they like it. We tried new stuff, fusion, Lenny was basically you know like, combining a lot of different sounds in this production, and we gave people a lot of what they originally accepted of the group, so it was a good combination. It was a little bit of every production but plus. And when we noticed that it was a big success, it came out like, according to Billboard, the most Latin selling album in the last few years that was like really huge for us, we got really excited.
EM: What kind of things did you do with the production where you had in mind a wider audience than the bachata thing?
Lenny: We’re not really thinking about the wider audience, we’re just thinking about what we haven’t done yet. And we come with ideas like, “Anthony, let’s do a trumpet in the song, let’s see how we could put a trumpet in, let’s put a mandolin guitar in a song, let’s see how we could do with that.” When we invited Miri Ben-Ari. Let’s put a violin in a track but just like one person, like really killing and mix it with our stuff. And I think that’s what makes Aventura different. We do it nicely and the most professional that we can. We just don’t do it like crazy, like yeah let’s record, that was cool and leave. WE make sure we do a nice song with it too, nice arrangement, nice lyrics, that’s basically what we do. Every time we do an album we try to do something that we haven’t done yet. We don’t want to repeat the same sound because people always expect that Aventura are the leaders of this always coming up with new stuff in bachata, like ‘what they got now?
EM: Guitar is an unusual instrument for Latin music.
Lenny: We use acoustic guitars, nylon-string guitars, we use 12-string guitars.
EM: Any styles that you lke?
Lenny: We have flamenco, trio, electronic rock.
EM: Any players you admire?
Anthony: I’ve been listening to—I’m not a guitarist like Lenny but I play simple stuff, but I appreciate like great guitarists. I’ve been into this guy Andy McKee. He’s just amazing and I would like to collaborate with him in the future.
EM: What was it like to play for Obama?
Henry: it was one of the biggest experiences for us. Today they just gave us the picture, and now is when I get goosebumps and start reminiscing about how great that day was for us and our career. President Obama is the most humble person and he transmits that same feeling to whoever is around and all the artists and everybody. It was great.
EM: I read that he knew a little bit of bachata…
Henry: Anthony asked him if he knew a little about bachata. He said “why you guys all acting like I don’t know about bachata? I listen to you guys.” And I was very surprised, but then afterwards when I saw him explaining to his daughters every different artist that was performing, I realized that the guy knows about all different kinds of music and he does his research and he’s a great father.
EM: Did he say he has you on his I-pod?
Anthony: We didn’t ask him that.
EM: Is this the most special landmark series of shows for you?
Anthony: From my part, it’s always fulfilling and a great feeling, like the guys say we always get goose bumps and I think we always got that, especially when we’re about to go on stage. But me personally, I just always get like this rush to always outdo ourselves. Meaning that I like to make sure that we do bigger things. As we give people more productions I want to do better songs. If you ask me what was you’re best production I would have to say we haven’t done it yet. But I think that being a perfectionist can help you and it can hurt you because then like I’m like scared because what happens when we’re only able to do maybe one Garden or not a Garden because I feel like we’ve just been growing and growing, and I think that my goal is just to get people everybody in the world, not just Latinos. I want to get everyone to know Aventura, even if you don’t like us, I want you to know us. I want this group to become a mainstream phenomenon like with Americans and who knows, with everybody. Like Shakira, like Ricky Martin and I think that we’re on the right track. But I’m never 100% satisfied. I’m like, satisfied with the fans. I’m satisfied with the movement. But then with this whole series of concerts is over, I’m back, we’re back. Okay, what are we going to do now?
EM: Are you going to have any special guests, you know like Wyclef?
Anthony: We have surprises but what we try to do is we try to basically say you’re going to see Aventura, don’t expect anyone to come out. If someone comes out then enjoy it, but we don’t promote any artists. In ’07 we brought out a lot of artists and no one knew, and this year maybe no one shows up, but if they do, that’s an extra for the people but we’re not planning on bringing anyone out this time around.
EM: You have transcended your traditional audience like Ricky Martin and Shakira has. Do you think bachata has appeal to other Latino ethnic groups and then combining that with urban sounds is responsible for your success?
Mikey: In the beginning it was an uphill battle because we came with a fresh new sound off the bat. When we started with our first single, we did a remix all in English and that was never heard in bachata, so the bachata culture weren’t really diggin’, really feeling that. It was like what the heckl is that? But the New York crowd were diggin’ it. Cause we from here, so the other kids that were from here like us, they started diggin’ it so as we got more and more popular, they set up something us for us to go to DR and take our music over there. Over there the youth was already waiting for us, the youth had our backs. The traditional bachatas from back then were older guys, like bar music, very sad. We came like with a boy-band image, but these boys could actually play the guitar.
Antony: It was tough for us. It was kind of annoying for us because we had a situation where people or girls were saying these guys were sex symbols. These guys are like boy bands—they were comparing us to In Sync, Backstreet Boys, who are very talented but we weren’t trying to portray that image. This was like, that just came with the package; we are musicians, we are producers, we are writers. Everything you hear, everything that has function in Aventura we made it up, from music to lyrics, everything. Honestly it was tough because at the same time I had a vision and we were very clear on something: It’s not what you’re doing, it’s the representation. Reggaetón for example, which was, it went from one night to the other for being like a mainstream hit. But it’s not just the music that has to be good, you have to have the machine behind you, the representation. And we were clear that what we were trying to do was not just do good music but represent it. We had a lot of people think we were stuck up because we didn’t want to play in small restaurants. But it wasn’t that, it was just that we wanted to take it to another level because if you stay playing in these small restaurants today you wouldn’t be able to be doing gardens like MSGs. We wouldn’t be able to be doing anything with just those small restaurants. So we were clear in that sense.
Henry: You know that it is also being proven that there is a place for bachata, not only with those Latinos who aren’t Dominican but people who don’t even speak Spanish. And it’s been proven in Europe where sometimes they don’t even know English or Spanish and they really, our song became number one. If it became number one out there, what’s stopping it from becoming number one here with the English-speaking people.
Anthony: We have to become fans of what we do. Then comes the essence which is the real fans, the ones who really decide what will become a hit and what doesn’t. I think that we already reached our goal, which was showing people that we could experiment in other genres and function. We don’t want to be able to sit here and just say yeah, we collaborated with this artist, but was it a hit? I think…
Lenny: I’m gonna cut you off, but it started with Don Omar.
Anthony: We’ve been able to experiment with other genres and function because I think the secret recipe is go to the real chef. We’re not trying to cook reggaetón because that’s not what we do. We’re not trying to cook salsa. We do it but we get the real producers, the guys who live that music. Just like if you want to do a well-produced bachata, come to us.
Henry: Bottom line…
EM: One of your albums is called “We Broke All the Rules.” What rules did you not break when it comes to the tradition of bachata?
Mikey: Basically the rhythm. You can’t break that rule, there’s no way around that. WE have to play the bachata rhythm the way it is, which is a 1-2-3-4 step.
Anthony: I think we’ve broken that, too. [Laughter]
Mikey: No, that’s when it comes to breaks after every measure, after every 16 bars, you do little breaks that are new that we invented that people copy from us which is good because we’re revolutionizing the rhythm. But we still have the same instruments, the bongos, the guira, and the second guitar, rhythm guitar, that’s basically…
Anthony: We don’t change that. I think the basic here is keep that bongo and that guira going, always experiment but let people enjoy the dancing, let people be able to dance…
Mikey: Let them understand the rhythm.
Anthony: But we always do stuff that, when we said “We Broke the Rules,” that was an album where like we took a lot of risks, musically speaking. We didn’t only just break the rules of bachata, we also broke the visual concept because if you see Aventura, before Aventura bachata was an older guy, middle-aged guy with a guitar dressed in a shiny suit…
Henry: Even if it was a younger person, they looked old.
Anthony: And to be honest with you, we played that role for a while. Before we were Aventura we were called Los Teeengers de la Bachata. And we were dressed in ways that we weren’t dressed. It’s like we had a uniform. Like this is the uniform that we had to put on because this is what we’re doing. And then we realized, you know what, we ought to be ourselves, we ought to dress the way we dressed. And I think that people, mainly the youth, accepted us quicker, they understood oh these guys speak like us, they dress like us. And that was so important.
EM: Are you using a little more English in your songs as time goes on?
Anthony: We’ve kind of stepped it up a bit, but I remember four or five years ago, on our first or second album, if you’re like a true Aventura fan, you would know that we’ve had this hiphop influence and you could see that mainly in Mikey, cause Mikey, we was adding hiphop songs in an Aventura production. Mikey had in “We Broke the Rules” a hiphop song, in Love and Hate, and we talking about six or seven years ago.
EM: Why did you call this album “The Last” and how hard has it been to deal with all the rumors about your break up?
Anthony: We all got immune to these comments like “they’re breaking up, they broke up,” you know. I think that they broke the group up at least twice a year. And they would literally ask us while we were performing, did you guys break up? Are you breaking up? And we’re like, dude, we’re playing right now, right here, this is us, you know? I think we just got used to it and I said, “you know what, let’s just take advantage of this.” It just became like a routine, a rumor that just circulated, and it would leave and just like come back around. The title “The Last” didn’t necessarily have anything to do with that. It was more like a farewell, like a good-bye, this is the last bachata album. But not bachata, meaning we’re going to stop dong bachata. Now we go back to the previous question. We want to expand, we want to grow as artists. We have the potential to do more than just bachata. And we want to like pretty much show people that we were able to continue to do what we function with in other genres, like Mikey said, we did a song with Don Omar, it was a hit. We did a song with Akon and Wisin & Yandel, it was a hit. I did a song with Wisin & Yandel, “Noche de Sexo,” it was a hit. So I think that we kind of want to experiment and this was the last 100% bachata album. What you’re going to get from the group in the future, Aventura albums are going to be more like a 60-40%, like 60% bachata, which is what people want to hear, and on the other 40%, who knows, urban music, it could be ballads, it could be whatever’s happening at the moment. I think we have the ability to do that. Because people accepted us for that.
EM: Is that what you’re planning for your next recording?
Anthony: Absolutely, and we actually started in this album because we don’t just have “All Up to You,” we have a song with Wyclef, and Ludicris. And like Mikey said, we tested the waters and we’re not just doing songs that people are like, okay, they’re doing other stuff. No these are like songs that actually are hits, people made them hits, so we’re not just taking risks, we’re doing what people accepted and also appreciate from the group, like when we go onstage and perform “Noche de Sexo,” which was a song that wasn’t even an Aventura song, it was a song that Wisin and Yandel featured me. We all took that as a success for us. That’s important to be able to show people that we’re more than just a traditional bachata group.
EM: Are you in the process of recording a new album right now?
Anthony: No, what we do is we let our heads clear up and are concentrating with this production because we’re taking advantage of what’s happening, because we were like rocking for 3 years with our previous production and this one is even bigger so I think we’re going to be rocking for a while with this production. What I mean by rocking for a while is that I think we’re going to give people maybe two more singles, and concentrate on markets like Mexico, Europe, Chile, just give people like, dale lo mejor de nosotros.
EM: Are you still having to tour a lot despite how well the record is doing?
Anthony: The industry, when it comes to record sales is not doing as great as before, we’re obviously selling a lot of records because we got the most-selling Latin album in the last four years but if we’re selling like half a million units, which is a lot, that really represents 2 million but it’s just not like that right now because of all the pirating and everything.
Lenny: We’re also investing a lot of money that we have to recoup for the label.
Anthony: So to answer your question, no we’re not just sitting back like “yeah, we selling albums.” Plus we get a rush out of being onstage. We enjoy doing that more than just sitting there and collecting royalty checks.
Henry: We enjoy both. Being onstage, it’s like the interaction with the people, that’s priceless for us.
EM: Any connections to NJ?
Henry: I actually lived in Paterson for two years. I was looking for houses recently in Jersey.
Lenny: Coming up we used to play a lot of clubs out there. We had a lot of fun, and those clubs when we was like killin out there. It was actually hotter out there than New York, so we used to stay out there a lot.
Max: Jersey has a lot of nice houses out there but I couldn’t buy one of them cause that bridge drives me crazy. GWB messed up everything.
EM: Success hasn’t spoiled you guys.
Anthony: In what sense?
Henry: It has actually made it harder.
Max: It actually makes you wiser…
Anthony: I eat lobster every day, but…nahhh.
Max: …and wanting to work even harder.
EM: Are you focused mainly on the playing in your show or the special effects?
Anthony: People ain’t stupid. You don’t do nothing bringing a $2-$3 million production and not give people a good show based on what they really like which is your music. Not to take anything away from artists that invest in their concerts, but Aventura invests money in our concerts, but we are the essence of the show, what you came to see is us perform and we’re going to give you more than just perform. We’re going to interact with you. We just do jokes, we make you laugh, we make you cry with love songs, and I think that’s where the group has shown more strength. This is what I hear and what I read, people are basically always saying this group live is just something else, and we always try to outdo what we did. We have to do a better show than what we did in ’07. Next time that you interview us, we’ll say we gotta do a better show than the ones we’re doing now.
Henry: Visually it has changed, obviously.
Anthony: People have grown with us. They see that this has been a team effort.
EM: What are your goals about become more mainstream?
Anthony: We were going to do George Lopez’s show and we didn’t get a chance because our schedule wasn’t functioning with theirs, but I think we’ve seen Juanes and Shakira doing Jay Leno.
EM: You don’t plan on doing an all-English song?
Anthony: I don’t think I would ever do, maybe an English song, but not an English production. I would just like to include my English material in an album and just give ‘em 50-50. But I don’t think I would just concentrate only English.
Lenny: It’s like the other fans would feel left out, you know? When you bring something out and by the time you come next time around, there might be someone else. You gotta always keep ‘em there, the same fans, keep ‘em satisfied.
EM: What about the future?
Anthony: I would like the world to know Aventura. I don’t necessarily need everyone to like us, but it would be nice to be able to know that everyone in this world even if they don’t understand or become a fan, they could say, yeah I know who they are, then it means…I feel that our music goes beyond just a culture. WE went to Europe and we had Italian fans, a lot of people that are not familiar with what we do, loving what we do. So basically that was a sign that we could take this to the mainstream. What we want to do is just basically let them hear it. They decide if they want to accept it, if they like it or not but we want to make sure that everyone is like, “yeah I know what Aventura does.”
Henry: We want to conquer Africa. That sounds crazy but we never thought we’d be in Africa.