Fabian Almazan joins Preston Frazier for a Something Else! Sitdown that includes an in-depth song-by-song analysis of the Havana-born, Miami-raised pianist’s forthcoming album, This Land Abounds With Life. He also discusses how nature’s bounty inspires him, and the balance his independent record label is striking between environmentalism and a music listener’s desire for something tangible …
PRESTON FRAZIER: When we first chatted, you were very busy with work as a sideman in addition to being a solo artist and label head. You are now very much in demand as a session player. For 2019, you’ve toured with bassist Linda May Han Oh in Asia. How did you find time to record your upcoming album, This Land Abounds With Life?
FABIAN ALMAZAN: Through careful planning and keeping a clear artistic compass of gratitude and honesty, I find the energy to accomplish most of my goals.
PRESTON FRAZIER: The album was recorded essentially as a trio with Linda May Han Oh on bass and labelmate Henry Cole. This seems to be a departure from your prior project Alcanza. How did you develop the concept for This Land Abounds With Life?
FABIAN ALMAZAN: The ensemble heard on Alcanza is called Rhizome, and it was a dream of mine to really take a full-body dive into the world of string-quartet writing. By no means am I done composing for that ensemble, but it felt like I had accomplished my task of writing for strings, having produced three albums containing string quartet music: Personalities, Rhizome and Alcanza. Although the upcoming album does contain one track featuring the string quartet (“Bola De Nieve”), the majority of the record features the trio alone. I have had the opportunity to play with numerous brilliant musicians’ bands this last decade including Terence Blanchard, Linda May Han Oh, Mark Guiliana, John Hollenbeck, Avishai Cohen, Justin Brown and Dave Douglas, to name a few, and I learned immensely from every single one of them. Musically speaking, this album is, among other things, the result of all of these musical experiences I’ve had. From an artistic point of view, my aim was to find a way of marrying my return to Cuba after 23 years, my love for nature and the natural world, and to return to the trio and highlight the endless capacity for music-making present in Linda May Han Oh and Henry Cole. Because I am Cuban, I examine the issues that trouble society with the island as a canvas, but the title This Land Abounds With Life applies to all places on Earth. I celebrate life everywhere on Earth, and the sense of urgency I feel towards doing the right thing to ensure its health for future generations.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Please talk about the arranging and recording process.
FABIAN ALMAZAN: Esplanade Studios, located in New Orleans, felt like the right place to record this music for a variety of reasons. Aside from the studio having top gear and instruments, in my mind, New Orleans is the furthest Caribbean city, and I wanted to capture the atmosphere of my experience in returning to Havana after two decades. Because Linda, Henry and I were so busy in 2018 as leaders and side-people, it was challenging to get together to rehearse some of the new music I had composed, so some of the music was performed in its entirety at the recording session.
PRESTON FRAZIER: How did Oh and Cole contribute to the arranging?
FABIAN ALMAZAN: I am fortunate to have such great musicians by my side who were open to bring life to brand new music. Linda and Henry are always able to interpret the music I bring with the perfect balance of musicality and risk.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Can you share the concepts around some of the songs?
FABIAN ALMAZAN: We may well have been born into disparate parts of the globe where gods are different and the languages vary, but chances are we have all stopped what we were doing at some point to simply marvel at nature’s beauty: At its core, that is what this album is about. Having been born in the largest of the Caribbean islands, I have always been drawn to nature, and music is the means by which I can share my fascination and appreciation. In recent years, human beings have exploited natural resources and pushed life to the edge because of our conflicting ideologies and our political power struggles. I returned to Cuba after a 23-year absence and made a series of field recordings of endemic birds. I am joined by long-time musical partners Linda and Henry, as well as by Rhizome. We have all worked together for the last decade. As much as I wish to portray the beauty and fragility of life, I also feel a sense of urgency to address climate change with my music. Because of our portrayal as both the protagonist and antagonist in this story, it is a difficult conversation, but a necessary one nonetheless that we need to have as a people. This land abounds with life, and here we are, sharing in this collective experience that we call humanity. That, to me, is music.
This is why I have chosen to record the proposed works:
“BENJAMIN”
The oldest of all of the animals, Benjamin, the donkey from George Orwell’s Animal Farm, is the inspiration behind this piece of music. The melody’s repeating Major 7 intervalic skips emulate Benjamin’s panic when he realizes that Boxer is Boxer is being sent to a glue maker to be slaughtered.
“THE EVERGLADES”
I spent my teenage years in Miami, Florida, living within a 15-minute drive of the Everglades. With an ever-increasing suburban sprawl, today it takes about an hour to make the same drive. Invasive species, rising sea levels and nutrient pollution have played a major role in devastating the health of this ecological gem. The Everglades, or the “river of grass,” continues to be a holy place for me. This piece is intended to take the listener through the various temperaments of these wetlands. I wanted to portray the peaceful sunrises on a calm winter day, as well as the ravaging strength of a lighting storm in the heat of July.
“THE POETS”
With this piece I humbly pay homage to all of the Cuban men and women who paved the way for me. For hundreds of years, there has been a rich tradition of improvised, nature-themed music in the country side of Cuba called “musica campesina.” The musicians who sing in this style consider themselves poets first and foremost. In the tradition of “pie forzado” (forced foot), someone from the crowd will shout out a line, which the poet will then have to use on the spot as the final line of an improvised, 10-line poem called a “decima.” During my time in Las Terrazas in Eastern Cuba, the biologist who served as our field guide spotted an old man sitting on the side of the road and quickly told me to get out of the car so that we could speak to him. Unbeknownst to me, the old man turned out to be the poet El Macagüero de Pinar and he graciously spoke to us about the history of the musica campesina. The audio heard at the beginning of the track is the “pie forzado” that I provided el Macagüero with: “Me gusta el punto Cubano.” He quickly sprung into his improvised poem and I managed to capture the impromptu performance with my cell phone as tractors and farming equipment drove by. This was one of the most memorable experiences I had.
“ELLA”
Spanish for “her,” “Ella” was composed as a bilingual song with lyrics in English and Spanish. Few have been as historically disenfranchised as women. When writing the lyrics, I imagined the journey of a female bird flying thousands of miles in search for meaning.
“SONGS OF THE FORGOTTEN”
On Dec. 7, 2016, I stood outside the small apartment where I grew up in a neighborhood of Havana called Nuevo Vedado. Three days later, I was in the dense forests and jungles of the eastern edge of Cuba where I made field recordings of endemic bird songs. Millions of children and families throughout the world have been displaced from their birthplace, due to the political oppression of the people by the few who desperately cling onto power. Inevitably, when there are conflicting ideologies, the governments will feud and the bystanders will be forgotten – this is the song of the forgotten.
“THE NOMADS”
“The Nomads” taps into the vibrancy of Caribbean energy. I remember what it was like to grow up hungry in Havana during the special period, yet despite the extreme hardship, people always found a way of somehow celebrating life and enjoying the simple things like catching up with friends.
“JAULA: FOR NELSON MANDELA”
In 2013, I performed in Johannesburg, South Africa for the first time. I was only there for a couple of days, but I had enough free time to allow for a the trip to the apartheid museum with some of my bandmates. Words cannot describe how deeply moving the experience was. I came back to the New York and quickly began writing a lyrical song envisioning Nelson Mandela’s imprisonment during the apartheid as a caged, wild bird; the resulting song is entitled “Jaula” (Spanish for “cage”).
“BOLA DE NIEVE”
Although this can be heard in our debut trio album Personalities, I decided to revisit this song by Cuban-rocker Carlos Varela to document it with the sonority of a string quartet. I clearly have a hard time abandoning the timbre all together, because three out of our previous four albums have the sound of the string quartet. The panorama of Cuban music spans from rumba and son to symphonic classical and rock music. Cuba is rich in biodiversity as well as musical expression and I whole heartedly believe that this diversity is the key to ensuring a thriving, living, cultural environment. This is a song written by a Cuban rocker about “Bola de Nieve” (born Ignacio Jacinto Villa Fernández), one of Cuba’s most beloved entertainers from the 20th century: a black, closeted gay singer-pianist and songwriter who died in Mexico City in 1971.
“FOLKLORISM”
When applied to music, folklorism occurs when any given kind of folk music functions as a creative stimulus and is in turn used as a wellspring of ideas that reinvigorate a musical language. In “Folklorism,” the source I am tapping into is that of the faux-bozal Afrocubanismo movement of the 1920s and ’30s in Cuba. Key figures like poet Nicolas Guillén and the Grenet brothers made artistic contributions that became fundamental in the cultural fabric that defines Cubans. Songs like “Lamento Esclavo,” “Ay, Mamá Inés” and “Drume Negrita” made unabashed lyrical and musical references to Afro-Cuban culture, often alluding to orishas, santeria, and slavery. At a time when even the mighty tumbadora drum (now synonymous with Cuba) was banned in public, this was a movement that valued black working-class street culture from an aesthetic position as truly Cuban.
“UNCLE TIO”
With this composition I reflect on the passing of time and how familial roles shift, as we enthusiastically welcome new little ones while simultaneously mourn the final departure of older ones. It is dedicated to our five endlessly effervescent nieces and to my tío Pépin who passed away two months after I visited him in Havana.
“PET STEPS SITTERS THEME SONG:
Having arrived in the U.S. with no money, my parents were all too experienced at keeping multiple part-time jobs at any given time to make ends meet for my sister and I. After a decade and a half of breaking their backs, they had finally settled on well-paying jobs and life was at last becoming more comfortable – then the 2007 financial crisis hit and both lost their jobs on the same day. My parents are two of the most resilient people I know. They decided to start their own company in Miami, and were up and running within a month of losing their jobs. The name of the company is Pet Steps Sitters, and business is still going strong to this day. This is the oldest original composition of mine on the album, and it is wholly inspired by my two wonderful parents.
PRESTON FRAZIER: How did you incorporate electronics into This Land Abounds With Life?
FABIAN ALMAZAN: All of the electronics heard in this album are actually the acoustic piano being manipulated by pedals. The piano was recorded using pick-ups making contact with the soundboard. There were no synthesizers used in the making of this album.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Are you planning on touring as a trio for 2019?
FABIAN ALMAZAN: Yes, we are touring the West Coast, Midwest and northeast U.S. this summer and fall. We will also be performing in Europe in October/November. You can check on www.fabianalmazan.com and www.biophiliarecords.com to be up to date on our touring.
PRESTON FRAZIER: When we last spoke, you had just launched Biophilia Records. How has the label progressed over the last two years or so?
FABIAN ALMAZAN: Aside from the artists creating incredibly imaginative music, it has brought me great joy to see fans embracing our label’s core principles – which are to live a life in harmony with nature and address climate change. We are reaching new listeners every day and growing considerably with every new release.
PRESTON FRAZIER: Please remind our readers about Biopholio.
FABIAN ALMAZAN: Because Biophilia Records is centered around a philosophy of environmental awareness and climate change literacy, we release this and every album as a Biopholio, a two-sided 20-panel medium inspired by origami, the traditional Japanese art of paper folding. Each of them is made entirely out of FSC-certified paper, hand folded and printed using plant-based inks. There is no CD in the Biopholio. Instead, there is a unique code inside that allows the listener to digitally download the music in the preferred high-quality audio format. This caters to the environmentally conscious listener who may feel that a digital download is just not enough. Now, they have the added bonus of receiving a tangible piece of original album artwork to cherish for years to come.
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