profile
After winning a Grammy Award in 2011 and backing the Tony Award winning broadway show “Fela!” with their respective bands Grupo Fantasma and Antibalas Afrobeat Orchestra, Adrian Quesada and Martin Perna return to their sun-soaked Latin-psychedelia project Ocote Soul Sounds with their fourth studio album, Taurus.
Like its bullish namesake, their latest album smashes through sonic barriers with a heavy and dynamic mix of pan-Latin flavor, conscious political attitude, afrobeat and hip-hop rhythms. Taurus was produced by Eric Hilton of Thievery Corporation at the Washington DC based ESL Music Studios and features vocal collaborations with fellow ESL Music regulars Natalia Clavier, Sitali, Verny Varela and Chico Mann.
With soaring vocal anthems like “Primavera,” bass-bin rattling groovers like “En El Temblor,” red-hot Latin jams like “Contigo Jamas,” and even pensive Italian folk excursions like “Nessuno”, Taurus is Ocote Soul Sounds’ most expansive and complete album to date! “Taurus” will be released by ESL MUSIC on May 31, 2011.
Click here to view the video for the track “Pathways” by Ocote Soul Sounds, from their new album “Taurus.”
Ocote will also release a single titled “Pirata EP” on 7″ vinyl on May 17th, 2011.
Praise for the acclaimed debut album, El Nino Y El Soul:
“Ocote & Quesada’s organic creations are a joy to the ears” –Mosoul
“Sounding like a sun kissed Brazilian soundtrack from the ’70s, this tasty afro beat collaboration between two of the genre’s biggest players has funk horns aplenty and chilled vibes throughout. For fans of Fela Kuti, Gang Starr and everyone in between.” –Dazed and Confused
“the feel of a long lost South American or African soundtrack, depending on which cut you are listening to. Highly Recommended.” –Straight No Chaser
“Dramatic soundscapes with some real old skool flavours to them.” –Blah Blah
“Sounds like an early DJ Shadow working with Giles Peterson’s deep, Latin record stacks…it might just become the soundtrack to your gritty, sun-hazed, sweltering summer.” –One Week To Live
“A whirlpool of psychedelic Afro-beat that’s tethered by a Latin sound, it does not disappoint.” –Wax Poetics
“Trade in your E for peyote and chill out to some of the nicest flute, vibes and MPC 2000 combinations in many a moon.” —XLR8R
“A grand adventure in sound…enough to make even James Brown jump back and kiss himself” — The Austin Chronicle
“Like the Beatnuts spiritually busking: good shit” — UPDATE
“This isn’t the purple-faced sax player funk 45 you’re sick of, it’s the mojito sippin, Don Juan Stuff” — TurntableLab.com
“Staged yet free flowing, rare and delicate, tripped out and hazy.” — The Fader
“Modern jazz-funk that takes it’s time, overtones of afro, latin, deep funk and hip-hop.” — Latinvibe.co.uk
“They have managed to spin the essence of their respective bands into something rare and different. A Jewel.” — TheAge.com
“El Nino Y El Sol is an album that deserves a wider audience.” — All About Jazz
“Search this one down – a vital accompaniment to your sun-bound journeys, whether imaginary or real.” — Know The Ledge
“Rarely has laidback funk felt so vibrant, so alive, with an exquisite organic feel-good vibe that brings a smile to the lips of the listener..exceptional and essential.” — PopMatters
Martin Perna Interview (from ACL 2007)
Bio
The Catalysts of Coconut Rock: Ocote Soul Sounds
Creative Mutations and Funky Beats
Just a sliver of the ocote wood starts a blaze. A few pieces of this pine was all Martín Perna needed to get his cooking fires started in a small fishing village in Michoacán, Mexico. It was there that Perna—known for founding Antibalas, the NYC collective that sparked an Afrobeat revival—found a new direction.
For several years, I’d spend time in this little fishing village,” Perna recounts, “living, writing, and doing a lot of green building. People would hear I was a musician and ask me to play some music. It was kind of difficult. What do I say: I play baritone sax, which I left in NYC, with this fifteen-piece band. If I play you some of my music, it’s not going to make sense,” Perna recalls. “I started thinking about what it means to be a musician and having a wide enough repertoire that I didn’t need fifteen people to play. So I picked up the guitar and started writing music in a new way, with more intimacy and immediacy.”
Yet it wasn’t until a mishap on a biodiesel cross-country trek that Perna found the perfect vehicle for this new sound, and the perfect musical partner in Adrian Quesada, of the Austin-based super-group Grupo Fantasma. The result was Ocote Soul Sounds. The grit and funk of the gridlocked NYC streets intersect seamlessly with the voices and rhythms of dusty Latin American lanes on their latest album Coconut Rock (ESL Music; release: June 23, 2009).
Perna and Quesada had lived in eerily similar parallel universes. Though Quesada grew up in the Texas border-town of Laredo, and Perna came up in Philadelphia (later New York), both musicians straddled borders literally and artistically. Both had grown up on hip hop and the jazz and funk it was built on; both taught themselves to play multiple instruments; both had founded game-changing, booty-shaking big bands; and both were deeply moved by a powerful spirit of social and political activism, the spirit of ocote.
Ocote, the Nauhatl word for pine, is key to starting fires, the fires used for cooking and heating across Mexico and beyond. A tiny handful, and even damp pieces of wood ignite, Perna says. “And I like that metaphor. I have always seen my role in whatever I do as a catalyst. We’re not the big log burning that everybody sees. We are the one that gets it started,” whether it’s the current Afrobeat craze fueled by Antibalas, Quesada’s initiative in Austin to help improve the lives of the city’s musicians, or Perna’s founding of NYC’s first biodiesel factory.
Years ago, Perna converted his station wagon to run on restaurant grease and journeyed from Brooklyn to Mexico, making a brief stop in Austin to meet Quesada, a friend of a friend. The two began playing around with some song ideas, and things really clicked. But after a few tracks, Perna had to hit the road.
The return trip gave an unexpected boost to the collaboration. “Martín’s car broke down and started having all sorts of problems. He had to drive from the Mexican border at 20 miles per hour, , and then got a tow all the way from San Antonio. So he got stuck here and stayed with me until he could fix the car, which took a while because no mechanic would touch it back then. And we finished the first album,” Quesada smiles.
The musical partnership continued, because, as Quesada explains, “It fit like a glove: I’m the rhythm section, and Martín’s the horn section.” Both have dozens of song ideas and sketches floating around—from melancholy cumbias to funkified Latin descargas—just waiting for the right rhythmic tweak or melodic twist. “That’s how a lot of our songs work: We’ll have these parts that are good but unfinished, and then the other person adds the elements to make the song whole,” Perna notes.
