Gustavo Cortiñas: A Jazz Drummer's Call to Action
From his Mexican roots to Chicago's jazz scene, Cortiñas explains how he builds "bold, urgent conversations" on his album 'The Crisis Knows No Borders,’ addressing climate change through the language of improvised music.
Today, the Spotlight shines on drummer and composer Gustavo Cortiñas.
Gustavo’s latest album, The Crisis Knows No Borders, tackles climate change head-on through music that’s both urgent and beautiful. Working with guitarist Dave Miller, saxophonist Jon Irabagon, and violinist Mark Feldman, he’s created compositions that explore how global warming sparks conflicts, drives migration, and connects us all, whether we like it or not.
The Chicago-based artist has built a career using jazz as a medium for social commentary, and this new project feels especially timely as we face a world where environmental challenges refuse to respect any boundaries.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Gustavo Cortiñas’s album The Crisis Knows No Borders)
Dig Deeper
• Visit Gustavo Cortiñas at gustavocortinasmusic.com and follow him on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube
• Purchase The Crisis Knows No Borders from Bandcamp or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice
• Gustavo Cortiñas discography and bio
Featured Musicians:
• Dave Miller, guitarist
• Jon Irabagon, tenor saxophonist
• Mark Feldman, violinist
Previous Albums:
• Desafío Candente (2021) - Exploration of Latin American colonialism and heritage
• Kind Regards (2022) - Meditation on immigration experience
• Live in Chicago (2024) - Recent live recording
• ESSE (2017) - Philosophical exploration of consciousness
• Snapshot (2013) - Debut album
Latin American Musical Influences:
• Chavela Vargas - Influential Mexican ranchera singer
• Mercedes Sosa - Argentine nueva canción vocalist
• Violeta Parra - Chilean folk singer and activist
• Café Tacuba - Mexican rock band blending folk traditions
• Xavier Quijas Yxayotl - Pre-Hispanic music specialist
New Orleans Musical Influences:
• Johnny Vidacovich - Cortiñas’s New Orleans mentor
• Ellis Marsalis - Influential New Orleans jazz educator
• Rebirth Brass Band - Iconic New Orleans brass band
• Astral Project - New Orleans jazz group
Chicago Jazz Scene:
• AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians)
• Roscoe Mitchell - AACM founder and avant-garde saxophonist
• Green Mill Cocktail Lounge - Historic Chicago jazz venue
• Carla Campopiano - Argentinian musician and collaborator (Chicago-based)
Musical References:
• Miles Davis - Nefertiti - Structural influence on “Oil and Water Don’t Mix”
• Hector Berlioz - Symphonie fantastique - Program music influence
• Claude Debussy - La Mer - Impressionist classical reference
• Oscar Peterson - We Get Requests - Recent listening choice
• Joshua Redman - Still Dreaming - featuring Ron Miles
Philosophical and Literary References:
• Eduardo Galeano - The Open Veins of Latin America - Inspiration for Desafío Candente
• Miguel de Unamuno - Philosopher influencing “The Man of Flesh and Bone”
• G.W.F. Hegel - Philosophical influence on compositional approach
Climate and Environmental Context:
• Climate change and migration - UN perspective on crisis themes
• Environmental justice movement - Social context for album’s message
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: Something I'm really curious about is the span of time from when you conceived the album and recorded it to the differences in our world now that it's out. To not beat around the bush, I'm assuming, given the timeline, you conceptualized and worked on this before the 2024 election.
Gustavo Cortiñas: Absolutely.
Lawrence: And now that we have a different regime with much different priorities, I'm curious how the project sits for you now. I think I'm asking you a feeling question more than an intellectual question.
Gustavo: The project was already low on hope to begin with. (laughter)
The last song is a meditation on the end of times. I have an ongoing feeling that convenience keeps getting in the way of even small sacrifices that all of us can do to save the world. I don't think that's a new thing—I don't think that's pre-2024. It's very small decisions that we make on a daily basis to make the world better, not only in terms of the environment, but like our society in general, our relations, both economic as well as personal and whatever. Those types of things kind of keep getting in the way.
Capitalism or maybe democracy, if you will, is a little too idealistic to leave the decisions that will save the world to everyday people who are continuously being pressured by the system. Like people who have to decide whether to buy an environmentally sustainable good or buy the cheaper good when they're already struggling to pay rent and whatnot.
All these little decisions. And those are like the most dire things, but then there's the like, do I recycle? It's a little hard. Do I turn off the light while I'm doing—do I fix this dryer for $250 and have no guarantee, or do I go get a new one for $500 with a five-year warranty?
Everything's kind of stacked against the world already as it is, and it makes the decisions really hard on us and our neighbors or unlike us, regular people down here. And then if that wasn't already enough, now I guess the added thing is that not only is it like those small decisions, but now we have—there was a small but meaningful approach from the prior administration to do something about this. And now there's a complete 180, and it's just trying to make a buck and flip everything in the direction of money. So it feels maybe a little bit—it was already, like I said, it was already a little hopeless. But it's definitely a little more heartbreaking talking about these issues nowadays.
Lawrence: There's a lot to unpack there. Obviously, there are so many examples of what you just talked about. You listed some of them. I think about another one that comes up a lot when I talk with artists—streaming music, this miracle of spending $10 a month and having the universe of music available is such an incredible joy until you scratch the surface and talk to artists and other people who make their lives in the creative fields.
It's been very interesting for me over the last six to nine months in my conversations here, to hear how many artists who are, especially in the creative music field or independent artists who are saying, "I don't need the algorithm because it's not going to—I'm not making music designed to be a million seller, why even bother then? Why swim in that pool?" It's really interesting to hear how artists are coming around to some of those realities as well and just opting out.
I fully appreciate, in addition to the list of things you articulated and the empathy with which you framed the way people have to make the decisions, everybody has to make their own choices, but ultimately the incentives are what are broken. To hear you talk about some of the things on that list—I'm going to badly paraphrase, but I've heard the statement of something about like tax policy reflects our morals and ethics or reflects our priorities. It would be so easy to subsidize different things, subsidize fixing your dryer (laughter) if we decided that was important or stop subsidizing other things. It's part of this like scarcity mentality that we have in Western society that's just so not true. Like there's enough to solve so many problems. It's just the will that seems to be in short supply. It's not capital, it's not smarts. We have lots of that. Anyway, I'm ranting at you. (laughter)
Gustavo: Preach! We see this every day. We see it in the supermarket, people packing peeled oranges in a plastic container. Why is that? All these little systems that you said—they're not being subsidized, and then the problem is that also the other stuff is being subsidized. And that's like the thing—these sustainable practices that should be subsidized are kind of left on their own to see if the market willfully wants to pick them up. And then all these other things, be it through unsustainable agricultural practices or everything that we're witnessing with the petrochemical industry and all that stuff gets huge subsidies, or like transportation.
Anyway, all of that is like, help us out a little bit. And the sad—even sadder than what you say—'cause you say like they, it's—is our tax policy a reflection of our morals?
Lawrence: Yeah.
Gustavo: And like may—are we that depraved? Maybe we are, but like, I have more of an inkling that actually the governments tend to pick and choose when they reflect our morals. Doesn't matter which party it is. I mean, we talk about this on the topic of abortion, for example, how like a great majority, regardless of a party, a majority is okay with abortion, but we don't want to do that. Gun control. Healthcare. All these things where like the morality is actually way ahead of where our political structures let us go.
Lawrence: I think the great example of that from our somewhat recent history is the Civil Rights movement. It took so long to drag the Supreme Court and the executive and the legislative branch to where the public—the public led the Civil Rights movement. The public demanded the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. It wasn't some inspired leadership.
Gustavo: Yeah.
Lawrence: Or great act of courage.
Gustavo: Exactly. It's coming from below now. It's not top down like they like to say economics and all this other stuff where it's always from here.
Lawrence: It's interesting. I live just outside of Seattle. I moved here from New York City several years ago. Seattle was kind of late to the game in developing light rail. There's like this regional light rail project that's like the never-ending project. The city's now pretty connected with it, but now they're starting to connect the outlying areas and there's all the talk you'd expect of like, it's a million dollars a foot or whatever it is.
There's all kinds of sniping about the light rail project. I think it's the most beautiful aesthetic thing that I've seen around here, other than the natural beauty. But like when I see the light rail at night and the curvature of the track and the train rises up and it's kind of quiet. It's not the roar of like the elevated subways in Chicago or New York. It's sort of beautiful, and every time I see it, I'm like, man. And it's like lit in a really beautiful way. It's got this aesthetic to it that I'm like, I love the light rail. I love taking it. I love looking at it. I love watching them extend it. I love looking at the construction site. I don't know—and it's apropos of nothing. It's a complete non sequitur, but the solutions aren't always inconvenient and aren't always ugly and aren't always a sacrifice.
Gustavo: They only are when you let infrastructure get run down. You don't connect it properly—like the L is a good example. Talk about a subway system that works as a web. Everything goes in, nothing goes around like this. So if you want to just take the train, you have to always connect through downtown, or you have to take the bus system, which in my experience can sometimes be a little untrustworthy. And then there's like the problem of how that infrastructure is run down. It's not quiet like the one you said. The cars are run down, the tracks need maintenance, need updating. We're not prioritizing that—we're repaving the street for the 10th time in 10 years.
Lawrence: Or expanding the damn highway. And it's like, I feel like I heard this 20, 30 years ago, and I'm no expert in this, but I feel like the theorists behind traffic study, game theory, mathematicians, they know that every time you add a lane, it just fills right up. Like you're not expanding capacity, you're expanding the motivation to drive. It's just like we know these things, we know them, but it looks like you're doing something when you make a highway—it looks like you're doing something.
Gustavo: And the bottleneck stays the same too. All is going to go out there and that one traffic light in downtown Chicago is going to stop everybody as it always does.
Lawrence: I feel like our conversation is going to meander between what I'll call the aesthetic as well as the topical or the social, or the political. I'm kind of curious about the specific musicians as well as the specific combination of instruments that you chose to address the themes on this album. Is there a connection?
Gustavo: Starting with the musicians, I would say that this project came from a little whimsical kind of idea. I had played with both Dave and Mark and had some hangs with them here in Chicago. I'd heard John many times and all of them are like people who I deeply admire, often on the bandstand.
I got this opportunity for a gig and I was just really just imagining what they—not even those instruments, but those people would sound like together. I was just like, man, I'm just going to give them a call and if they can make this gig, I've got about three months. I've got some ideas for this music already. I'm going to write a whole new set of music with these ideas and these concepts for these people that I've been trying to do before this gig. And the inspiration was very much there. So the stuff just kind of flew in that direction. I will say that a lot of it was me thinking from the perspective of who was on the project rather than what instruments were there.
I think those people play themselves more than they play their instruments. I think that's pretty special.
I definitely wanted the aesthetic to be quite flexible to go beyond any particular genre, and I wanted it to pack a punch. I wanted definitely some aggressiveness so that like the guitar maybe—that was king. But all of those guys, the incredible thing about these guys is that they have the spectrum to play the most delicate, beautiful thing you've ever heard. And also the ability to smack you right in the face and shock you with what they play. And I think that's kind of like what I wanted this project to be.
Lawrence: Tell me a little bit about the intellectual environment that you grew up in. Parents as educators and sort of thoughtful thinking people and how and if that informed sort of your approach to using music as social commentary.
Gustavo: It definitely is like foundational. It's not something that I thought of growing up, or even when I first started in music, it's just something—it's more of a, honestly, it's more of a hindsight situation. Like I find myself now doing the things that I am doing, having a dialogue with certain ideas, and then when I start tracking those ideas within me, within my steps, it leads to my family, it leads to conversations we had, to books they recommended, to things that I was hearing or seeing at home and around with them, with their friends, the environments that they exposed me to, the ideals that were forged around our house.
Both my parents were educators. Incredibly liberal people. Very compassionate, very dedicated. I remember giving a speech at—my dad died in 2011. He was like an intellectual of the highest degree. And in his apartment, you could not see a wall. It was all books. So after he passed away, me and my two brothers and my mom, we grabbed a few books that were meaningful to us and the rest of the books were enough that we donated them to the university where my dad used to teach and they started a library in his name at this university and we had to give a speech.
My mom said, "I can't do this for right now." She was there, but she's like, "Can you talk?" And I agreed to do the speech, but I had a conversation with her about what should be the content of it and what should we emphasize. And she told me something that she said that my dad used to emphasize a lot, which was this idea of—he was a law professor and it was this idea of exercising law as a science with a conscience, which in Spanish also rhymes by the way.
But this idea of practicing your science, your discipline, from a perspective of conscience. And I thought that was very poignant. It really resonated with me.
Lawrence: Wow.
Gustavo: And I feel like it's something that I try to implement as well in the way that I walk.
Lawrence: That very much resonates. Interesting aside, my dad also passed away in 2011. He was involved in the law, but in a different way. He was a policeman my whole life. He was retired when he passed away. But for his generation, he was one of the first policemen in his area, in his town, who was actually educated. 'Cause before him, before his generation, it was kind of a blue collar job to go into law enforcement. And now I think it's much more mixed in that you'll get people with criminal justice degrees or who went to college.
It's very interesting that notion of your discipline with a conscience or through the lens of conscience, and consciousness, that is very resonant in your work. Similarly, can you talk about the musical influences that you grew up around? My understanding—I have here in my notes that there was a diversity of music as well as thought in your world. Can you talk about that a bit?
Gustavo: Absolutely. Some of the first music that I remember is Mexican music—wide variety. The things that stick closer to home for me is folkloric music from Mexico and Latin America, especially the great singers who also carry a huge era of consciousness and social justice in them.
Chavela Vargas is one of my favorite all-time singers, Mercedes Sosa, Violeta Parra, all those great Latin American singers, super important. Rock en español was a huge thing. Also, anything from Café Tacuba, which is a great Mexican rock band that also uses Mexican folk with all these other contemporary styles, but also Jaguares and a band called Molotov and Soda Stereo, all these bands that also have these songs that speak about our history and our trajectory.
As a teenager, I got really into punk, and that's a whole other side of rebelliousness that really resonated. And I had a couple punk bands growing up in Mexico. We wrote our own music and lyrics and it's all from this very naive perspective of social consciousness. But we started then making music already in that perspective.
Also grew up listening to the Beatles. My mom hired my neighbor who was basically my age, four years older than me to teach me English, and he taught me English with the lyrics of the Beatles. And that's how I started getting into the Beatles a lot. And then it turned out that my mom loved them too. And then so it became a thing. So all of that music was very present.
My dad, he would upset all the neighbors. We lived in an apartment complex, he had a big stereo and he had all this classical music and he would be bouncing off like Beethoven and Wagner and all this stuff.
Lawrence: Oh, amazing.
Gustavo: The stereo would be here, and the bathroom would be like on the other side of the apartment. Not a huge apartment, but still. And he'd be showering and he would be playing Beethoven or Wagner and stuff like that while he was showering.
Lawrence: So the volume was up.
Gustavo: Well, it was driving for sure. So all of that stuff—my dad actually took me to see the Ring Cycle, Wagner's Ring Cycle. They did this thing in Mexico City where they came once a year and they brought one of the—I don't know what you call them—chapters, cycles, exactly. But anyway, so I was exposed to that.
So yeah, very varied array of music. Honestly, jazz was not really at home. Jazz is something that I picked up through my study of the drum set, connecting with different people. So jazz is more of an afterthought in my upbringing, you could say. It's not something that I knew of before I was 15 years old, for example.
I feel like I always was fascinated with percussion. We used to have one of these music classes where they give you a bunch of crappy instruments and we would do something. I can't even remember what we did with them, but I remember that I always—this is a funny story I like to tell, but I had this little medallion that I bought at the pyramids in Teotihuacan once as a kid, and it was like from the Pyramid of the Sun. And I just remember I would hold that medallion and be like, "Can I get the coconuts? Can I get the coconuts?" And there's like these coconuts that you would bang and stuff like that.
From then on I was fascinated with percussion and I remember being completely paranoid and very scared of picking up the recorder, which everybody has to pick up the recorder in Mexico. So that scared the crap out of me, but percussion never did. And at some point around the time that I was 10, a little earlier, my brother picked up the drums and so he was taking lessons, and I always wanted to do everything that my brother wanted to do. That was a little bit of an incentive. And one day he was late to his drum lesson and my dad was like, "Well"—and it was at home. It was an in-home lesson. The teacher came. So my dad was like, "Well, I'm not wasting this money. So today you're learning the drums." And that was my first drum lesson, just 'cause my brother was late and I never really stopped after that.
Lawrence: So you've told me a little bit about the intellectual background and the musical background. I'm curious about geography, how the places you have lived have influenced you. And I think, especially as a drummer, well as a jazz musician, but a drummer in particular, Mexico, New Orleans, Chicago, these are important places rhythmically and for the music. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how those places contributed to your development?
Gustavo: It's hard to talk about the places other than to tell you—like I could talk about New Orleans, how I just spoke about Mexico, like I was in Mexico, I was exposed to all these things. Some of it was through my family. Some of it was through my friends. And if I had to speak about New Orleans, I could give you the rundown of like, oh, well, jazz and all this. And that's like incredible with like brass band music, traditional jazz, but also modern jazz and people fusing New Orleans music with stuff like that. And that was it.
It's easier for me to talk about the people, and the people which cannot be separated from the place, especially the people that I'm talking about. The people who are a part of those living organisms of music that are those cities really, really shaped me. New Orleans, being exposed to—man, like New Orleans is a city of drummers. Johnny Vidacovich, who was my mentor when I was over there, just like—
Lawrence: Yeah.
Gustavo: —one of the most, if not the most melodic drummer I've ever heard. That was always incredibly important to me. Like I just absorbed that concept from him in my own way, and it's something that I always try to think of the drum as an extension of the harmony and the melody of the ensemble. And that's something that he really gave me.
Of course, like listening to guys like Herlin Riley, Shannon Powell, Troy Davis, Wayne Maureau, Jason Marsalis, I was in New Orleans when all these guys were over there and it was just like—I can't separate them from the music, listening to Ellis Marsalis, listening to Astral Project, Rebirth Brass Band. All this music, just being surrounded by that. And one of the really cool things about New Orleans that I've never experienced anywhere else is how—I'm going to make up a percentage—60% of the music is happening within a walk of itself. You go check out one person and you can check out everybody else. And more importantly, you go play a gig on the set break before the gig, after you set up or after the gig, before you go home, you have access to this community of music that is just—
Lawrence: And all that learning that happens off the bandstand.
Gustavo: And that's incredible. That was really, really beautiful to hear all this really varied music happening in all this place and to also feel this community that is built around that because it's not that—one of the greatest things about New Orleans is that it's hard to separate the music from the community. And it's one of the reasons why it produces so many great musicians and so much great music because it doesn't separate the music from the community. The best way to learn music and the best way to grow in music is through the community. Not trying to impress somebody, not trying to be taught something by somebody, but just by being there and absorbing in this kind of like organic, natural way, and then of course your lessons and whatnot, but there's no replacement for the community impact that music can have on people.
So I guess I spoke about Mexico before, and this is kind of how I feel about New Orleans. I'd be remiss to not talk about Mexico, how like I also had partners in crime who are studying music with me, and this is true also in New Orleans. Those people that you bump into, whether it's at school or in other musical scenarios, how they grow and they show you different bands and everything. And that becomes especially important I think for me when I came to Chicago too, because Chicago is a very diverse city. In some ways more, at least more—I don't want to say more diverse than New Orleans, but more cosmopolitan. People from all over the world are here. And since I've gotten here, I've been able to play with people—so I was exposed to this hard driving jazz tradition that has like the AACM and Roscoe Mitchell and those guys, and of course the blues and bebop and also this contemporary jazz thing that's happening, and that's really incredible. But also, like, I've played with people from just to name a couple, like my friend, Gros Ngolle Pokossi, who's from Cameroon. I got to basically, while I was playing with him, learn and study with him. My mentor, Yuri Hevia, who's from Chile, amazing drummer and my friend Roy McGrath from Puerto Rico. I was a part of an Argentinian band with my friend Carla Campopiano. We did a couple records influenced by Tango, but with drums.
So all these people that are doing music that resonates with their roots, and particularly my friend Yuri Hevia. He is someone who inspired me to look back at those roots to be like, okay, this jazz journey has been really beautiful, but where do you come from and how do you bring that into the table? And he's a huge example for that. He's one of my favorite drummers and great friend and just that idea of absorbing all the music that they are bringing from their places and all of that also being like, oh, they're bringing this stuff, what do I have to bring? And that inspired me to kind of also look back at my roots and even double down.
Lawrence: A lot of what you just referenced too is music that, just hearing you rattle off some of that list, I think incredible lineage or set of traditions that are around rhythm and melody. It's just such a—it's beautiful and I think it dovetails into the next thing I'm curious about, which is, if you don't mind me referring to it this way, when you're making message music or music that's meant to be commenting and integrating real world themes, I'm curious how you balance that with making music that stands alone on aesthetic and artistic terms. You're dealing with visceral and emotional subject matter, so I would assume that helps because it's not like it's analytical or sterile. I'm curious if you have to be mindful of maybe not being overly intellectual or sacrificing the art for the message, or is there anything in there that merits a discussion?
Gustavo: I would say that I just kind of use the inspiration and I haven't found these intellectual ideas or these emotions as something that limits my writing, but rather as something that expands it. It makes me—it's like sitting down and it doesn't matter what idea you have, I can have a melodic idea already that doesn't have a connotation, and I'm like, well, I'm going to grab that idea and I'm going to use it for this composition, for example. But then the idea is like a person grabbing the idea and being like, what kind of world am I trying to build around this? What kind of juice am I going to get out of the idea? How do I want to transform this idea and tell a story with it? That's where this programmatic thematic type of approach to composition to me, really proves itself to be very fruitful. It's where it forces you to think maybe not outside the box, maybe in a different box, which is to me more important.
I always talk about how—to get a little Hegelian about it—pure undetermined freedom means nothing until you limit it and give it up. That's when it realizes its potential by limiting itself. And same with the music, so like being able to go inside a box and being like, okay, what kind of world am I trying to build? If I'm trying to express these ideas? And that becomes a huge aid to me in making my music and my compositions take very different directions. If I was just sitting in front of the piano trying to make pure music, maybe it's because I'm not as great of a composer as other people in that way. Some people maybe can just flow a million contrasting ideas just out of thin air for pure aesthetics. But I'm really helped by trying to tell a different story in my music.
Lawrence: I hear the philosophy minor speaking? (laughter)
Gustavo: Perhaps.
Lawrence: I spoke just yesterday—I spoke with an artist, and I don't know if you know Kim Perlak, she's a guitar player. She's the chair of the guitar program at Berklee. Her most recent record is very much inspired by—I don't want to speak for her, but it's pretty explicit in the conversation and how she presents the album—some natural surroundings around where she composed and recorded. And she talked to me pretty explicitly about how she translated the influence of the natural world into the compositions, even through the use of extended techniques. Like one of the things she said to me that's really stuck with me over the last 24 hours is how she was thinking about, she was looking at a lake and watching the mist rise off it. And she was trying to figure out what that would sound like and how she was exploring on the fretboard and through the use of extended techniques, how to get to that sound.
And I'm curious if there's an analog for you. If you could talk a little bit about like, some of the song titles are obviously very explicit. They're little statements in and of themselves. How do you sonically get to those themes? Is it a similar process? Could you talk about that process a little bit?
Gustavo: It depends on the song. Every song starts in a different way. Every piece. For example, I have this song, this piece called "Oil and Water Don't Mix," one of my favorite pieces on the record. And for that one, I was like, okay, what illustrates that to me? And I was like, I'm going to write a counterpoint for the violin and the saxophone because counterpoint is this whole point of contrary motion and never crossing each other's lines, et cetera, et cetera. So it kind of illustrates this idea of not mixing.
So having these two currents that are kind of moving together at the same time, they're kind of blending 'cause they are playing together, but they're not. They follow a certain rule and they cannot go beyond that. And at the same time, the drums, for example, in that piece, I have a main texture and I build from that texture. And the main texture is these shakers, these seeds that are used by Aztec dancers in Mexico. And a lot of times they use them in their ankles or as bracelets. I had the pleasure of collaborating with a man by the name Xavier Quijas Yxayotl. He participated on two tracks of my record Desafío Candente, and he was kind of an eminence of Aztec, and Mayan pre-Hispanic music in Mexico. He built all the instruments for Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. He played for the Dalai Lama, played for the United Nations, but he was just like a guy who made all the instruments based on stuff that he learned from the anthropology museum. And also he played them and has a long list of records that he made with this influence.
And anyway, he collaborated on those two tracks. And after that he invited me to record with him, that same weekend in LA when we were recording and we were working, he was using these seeds and he explained to me, he's like, "Oh man, this is how I do the sound of water." These seeds, to bring it back to your original question, and he is like, "Yeah, droplets. Look, if you use it like this, it sounds like a creek far away. If you start moving, it can sound like rain. If you start really shaking it, it can have this thing." And it's like, and what we would do is pack it with reverb and then it creates this whole thing.
So grabbing those types of concepts on that track, for example, be like, okay, I'm going to develop this landscape of water. I'm going to come from that thing. I'm going to build these other textures throughout the drums while I continue, this texture's going on, and I'm going to develop a storm out of it. So that kind of thing. And then Dave, I just let him go wild. I was like, we're going to treat this kind of like "Nefertiti," that song is kind of approached a little bit like "Nefertiti" from Miles Davis, where the melody on that track, the melody just repeats over and over and they never go into the solos. It ends up being a rhythm section feature with the melody carrying the pulse throughout the song. So I was like, I want to use that kind of vibe so that we have this watery flow, this storm that's growing while we have these agents that cannot mix underneath.
Lawrence: As our time together starts to wind down, just a couple other things. On a project like this, obviously you're wearing multiple hats or performing multiple roles. Performer, composer, band leader, producer, arranger, all these things. Some of those roles require you to be maybe first among equals—especially in the band leader role, but a collaborator and a partner. How do you navigate all that? What's the dynamic that you're looking for?
Gustavo: For the most part, I like to have a conversational group environment where everybody gets to bring themselves. I mean, if you're going to call people like Dave, Mark, and John, you call those people because you want their voices in the project. It would be a missed opportunity to have their creativity there and not take advantage of that. Not take their input, not let them lose, not let them do their thing. I definitely like to emphasize that as much as possible and that, I think that's where the strength of the group really shines.
Every once in a while we are executing my compositions and the compositions have sometimes an arc that needs to be like expressed. For example, on "The Basic Economic Farsity," I remember we had to do an extra take because I really wanted a certain arc to build throughout the thing, and we were playing this improvised solo in a particular way and I was like, I'm okay with anything happening in the solo. I'm just asking that we need to—we need to end here 'cause we're going to lead to the end of the melody in this really big thing. And it's not happening. And I had to be like, no, no, it's not happening and we need to do it like it'll happen. So things like that, where like—and that's like a balance. There are—especially with program music, I guess, if you're trying to create a picture, you want to bring the peace and you want to get all these visions and all these creativity from all your partners into creating that picture. But if the picture's not happening, then you have to step in a little bit and direct a little bit. And honestly, all these guys are really great and really humble. And they're open to creating the picture.
Lawrence: That's beautiful. I have to ask, you've mentioned now a couple times you've used the term program music. When I think about that tradition, I think I have too small of a definition of it. My understanding, and I'm not a musicologist or I'm not an academic in this regard, but my understanding is that it's music that interprets or is inspired by specific texts. Is that incorrect or is your music inspired by any specific texts here?
Gustavo: Not this one particularly. I do have—my previous record, Desafío Candente, is inspired by Eduardo Galeano's The Open Veins of Latin America. My understanding of program music is that sometimes the music can come with a text, like a little program as text that explains it. Kind of like the liner notes on the record are—the liner notes would be that program. And it's not actually that the liner notes inspire the music, but rather that they're an accompanied program that allows it. There are some instances like Desafío Candente like Vivaldi's "Spring," for example, where for most—first movement actually, there's like a very clear text that goes with it and you can hear the references in his melodies, orchestration that depict that text.
But there's also like Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique. For example. Which had no actual preexisting text, but he was just kind of obsessed with Harriet Smithson, this actress, do you know the story of that one? He wrote this amazing piece of music. Symphonie fantastique, it's called. You can go on YouTube and look up a video and there's like—they're actually telling you, 'cause he wrote a program in which actually he tells you, this is what I call the Idée fixe, the fixed idea that I have of my ideal loved person and stuff like that. It was like a really dysfunctional, obsessive relationship. And he wrote a whole symphony about it and there's like some clear themes that are there and he wrote a little program for it. So it can—it's a wide variety. It can also be like Debussy's La Mer, it's more fluid.
Lawrence: We get to decide. Thank you. Before I let you go, I wonder—so when we end our call and you go about your day, what's some of the next music you're most likely to be listening to?
Gustavo: Okay. Do you mind if I go on my Spotify and go to the stuff that I've been listening to lately? Or do you want it off the head?
Lawrence: Like you said, we get to make the rules, man.
Gustavo: Let's see. I've been revisiting some of my punk days recently. So I've been reviewing all of that. I've got a couple records up here that were—I've been doing this thing that if I bump into one of my friends, I ask them some of the stuff that they've been listening to.
Lawrence: Better than any algorithm.
Gustavo: Oh yeah. I don't algorithm at all. I just have records right here. So I have a couple—I bumped into a friend of mine who does a lot of fusion type stuff, but sometimes leaning into more of a rock thing. But he's a very inspired traditional musician from Mexico, and so he recommended this grupo habanero and so that's at the top of the list. But the last thing that I listened to was We Get Requests by Oscar Peterson.
I've been listening a lot to—I listen a lot to Brian Blade, one of my favorite drummers.
Lawrence: Oh, mine too. You talk about melodic drumming, Jesus Christ.
Gustavo: Melodic, intuitive, interactive, dynamic, the whole thing. And recently I hadn't listened to this record when it came out, it just kind of slipped my radar. But a friend of mine played for me Still Dreaming. It's Joshua Redman's record with Ron Miles. And that's been blowing my ears quite a bit. A wide range. Some Mexican traditional music, a little bit of punk, definitely a little bit of Brian Blade, Joshua Redman stuff.
Lawrence: That's beautiful. Thank you for that. That'll give me some stuff to go revisit. I try not to listen to the same things over and over again.
Gustavo: I do the opposite, by the way. (laughter)
Lawrence: I try to—well, I definitely go down rabbit holes for sure. Thank you for making time.
Gustavo: Thank you, Lawrence. Appreciate you. It was a lot of fun talking. Thanks for doing some background on me as well.
