photo: Luis Lopez
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“I’ve always had one foot in the Grateful Dead community and one foot in the Latin salsa/Latin jazz community,” Brenden Tacon remarks. “So when I listen to the Grateful Dead, I hear the Latin rhythms that I’ve studied inside of those songs.”
Tacon is a San Diego-based percussionist who grew up on the East Coast in a family of Deadheads.
“My first memory is hearing ‘Throwing Stones’ when I was five years old, in ‘87,” he recalls. “My father later took me to see Jerry Garcia in 1994 when I was 12. That was a pretty profound experience. Jerry passed away shortly thereafter, but my father, my uncles, my cousins, my brother, my sister and I have been going to every incarnation of the Grateful Dead ever since.”
Over the past two decades, he has also honed his skills on congas and bongó, embracing his Cuban and Dominican lineage, while traveling the world to explore different rhythms and techniques.
It took the period of downtime necessitated by COVID for Tacon to move forward and connect the sounds he had long heard in his head through the creation of The Latin Dead.
“I knew that it was going to be a huge, ambitious project,” he acknowledges. “I also was familiar with how to build a Latin jazz band and a salsa band because I had been tasked to do that a few times for various artists on little tours. It all starts with the arrangements. It doesn’t start with a bunch of guys in a garage jamming. The first thing you’ve got to do is have the arrangements. Preferably, you want those arrangements done by a notable arranger because, if you have that, then you can attract better musicians.”
Tacon soon enlisted his best friend—music producer Christopher Markisz (Dub Sonata)—to help him pull it all together. Almost immediately, they identified Oscar Hernández as the ideal person to help realize their objective.
Hernández is a four-time Grammy-winning member of the Spanish Harlem Orchestra. He founded the group over 20 years ago, and still serves as musical director and pianist. In addition, he worked with Rubén Blades for many years and also collaborated with Paul Simon, arranging and conducting the music for his Broadway musical The Capeman.
“When Brenden called me, my initial reaction was to say, ‘No,’” Hernández admits. “I was not a fan of the Grateful Dead. That music really didn’t cross my path.”
Tacon affirms, “When I spoke to Oscar, he questioned it right away. But then after a few minutes of talking to him, he started remembering things. He had actually played with Jerry Garcia one time.”
“We did a concert here in Los Angeles with Santana and Rubén Blades,” Hernández recalls, “and Jerry Garcia sat in with us. There’s something on YouTube that you can find from that concert. I’m the one who’s playing the piano and musical directing for Rubén. I knew that Jerry Garcia and Carlos Santana were both guitarists who were famous for doing what they were doing, but their music wasn’t part of my youth. Like I said, I wasn’t a fan—unlike Brenden, who, God bless his soul, was so passionate about the Grateful Dead that it was contagious. So before I gave him an answer, I listened to some stuff and started having conversations with him about the songs.”
In October 2021, while Hernández was still assessing the opportunity, Dead & Company performed at North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre in San Diego. Tacon invited him to the show and remembers, “That’s when he fully got it. I took him to Shakedown. He saw the community, the love, the uplifting spirit and then the music. He was already listening to some Grateful Dead songs, and he was saying things like, ‘Hey, this could be a bolero.’ We just hit the ground running after that.”
As Hernández began to work on some arrangements in anticipation of a studio session, the team also started to approach different musicians. Beyond a collection of Latin jazz and salsa all-stars, they also reached out to guitarist John Kadlecik, who had interpreted the music of the Grateful Dead with Dark Star Orchestra and later performed it with Phil Lesh and Bob Weir in Furthur.
“I liked the idea of an extreme mash-up of styles, and it’s done so deeply with arrangers who are Grammy winners in the Latin jazz world,” Kadlecik says. “It’s really cool that they were inspired to tackle it. Latin jazz is one of the jazz forms where people haven’t forgotten that it started as dance music, but it still involves some of the more complex musical ideas that are out there.”
He then points out the Grateful Dead’s original intentions, which were designed to elicit a physical response from the audience. “I’ve heard right out of Bobby’s mouth in a rehearsal situation— ‘We’re dance music!’ Before they were psychedelic, before they were fusion, before they were the inventors of math rock and before they were the architects of American rock[1]and-roll, they were just trying to be a good dance band with a heart.”
With all these considerations in mind, Hernández and a couple of his colleagues began working on arrangements that would bring the Latin elements of the Dead’s music to the fore. When Tacon heard “Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo,” he recognized that his longtime dream was well on its way to being realized.
“There’s a rhythm in there that’s a bit obscure, but it grooves so well,” Tacon explains. “It’s called oriza and it’s a Cuban rhythm on the conga. It was popular in the late-‘50s, early-‘60s. A lot of folks don’t know about it—it’s kind of underground—but there are a couple of albums that used this rhythm. They were hoping it would become the new dance craze, like the mambo craze, so there were some records released. It’s a perfect fit for ‘Mississippi Half Step.’”
“‘Looks Like Rain’ is a classic bolero arrangement,” he continues. “Then you’ve got ‘Golden Road,’ which we did in a cha cha cha format. Some of these formats are really standard in the Latin scene, as far as their genre, rhythms and tempos. Then you’ve got ‘Help on the Way.’ We use the rumba rhythm in that—it’s another Cuban rhythm—but it’s a bit more on the Latin jazz side.”
Hernández shares his perspective on arranging “Shakedown Street.” “I take the melody first of all, and then the concept of the song, and I try to get the feel of what they were trying to do,” he says. “When I put on my Latin producer hat, I’m visualizing it slightly differently, but I don’t want things to deviate to the point where a listener is unable to understand the connection between the original and what we did. So we added Latin percussion along with horns, which takes it to a different place altogether in a structured, arranged way.”
“On ‘Touch of Grey,’ we used the base of what they did, even with the intro riff, but added something which fits perfectly at that tempo in terms of conga tumbao, which is the basis of Afro-Cuban music or salsa,” Hernández explains, illustrating his point by playing the opening bars on a keyboard. “Once you know that fits perfectly with what they did, then it’s a piece of cake. I was able to use most of what they did and then I added my own nuances above and beyond the original.”
After completing the arrangements and gathering the musicians, The Latin Dead entered Los Angeles’ United Recording Studios on March 10-12, 2022. Ten musicians participated in the sessions, including Kadlecik on guitar and vocals, Hernández on piano and Tacon on bongó, congas and bell. The roster also included singer Andy Vargas (Santana), bassist René Camacho (Tito Puente, War), trombonist Francisco Torres (Poncho Sanchez, David Bowie), percussionist Charlie Chávez (Afrotruko, Charles McPherson), saxophonist/flute player Katisse Buckingham (Dr. Dre, Herbie Hancock), drummer Andy Sanesi (Frankie Valli, Arturo Sandoval) and Spanish Harlem Orchestra alum Pete Nater on trumpet.
Looking back on the sessions that yielded the 11 tracks that appear on Eyes of the World, Tacon describes the experience as a “whirlwind.”
Kadlecik adds, “It was interesting to get schooled, in a good way—literally educated— on some of the ways that Latin jazz horn players phrase certain things versus how Americans playing Latin jazz phrase those same things. It’s almost like what, in reggae, is called the ‘one drop’—the idea of nobody playing on the one, or only one instrument playing on the one and everybody else leaving it open. This is an overgeneralization, but Americans tend to jump ahead of the phrase and Latin horn players tend to come in after. That was interesting to see and it’s just an example of one little thing I grasped from listening to everyone. I found that if I let that inform me a little bit, I’d get smiles from those guys.”
By all accounts, smiles abounded when The Latin Dead finally made their live debut with three sold-out California shows in February.
“The reaction was beyond my wildest dreams,” Tacon reveals. “Everybody was loving it from the second we hit. I had so many people come up to me with such kind words.”
“We had a blast as a group and the audience had a blast,” Hernández echoes. “It was so much fun for me and something so beautiful. Obviously, our versions are different from the Grateful Dead, but we stayed true to those songs harmonically and melodically so that the audience could totally relate. People were singing along. I think they were totally gassed about hearing these versions of their favorite songs and it was nothing but super positive.”
Kadlecik offers his thoughts on his fellow musicians as they experienced the Grateful Dead audience for the first time. “I’ve seen it with several jazz guys coming into the Phil Lesh & Friends scene,” he says. “They have the rehearsal, and they’re thinking about what they’re going to do. Then, as soon as they take a solo for a room full of dancers, the energy that they instantly get back is so different from a typical jazz audience. When these jazz guys get in front of a live audience playing Grateful Dead music, it’s like seeing a kid eat a chocolate bar for the first time.”
The guitarist laughs, then observes, “I could feel it evolving very rapidly. By the third night, we were really starting to become a unit.”
Hernández notes, “It’s bona fide in every way. I stand by it wholeheartedly. We totally killed it in terms of how the band sounded live, and it’s a really interesting take on that music and concept. It’s a blessing for me to get involved on this level and to be able to put my love into something that didn’t exist before. I hope to keep expanding on it.”
As he looks to the future, Tacon maintains, “There are so many more places to go. A lot of this record is based on Puerto Rican and Cuban rhythms and foundations, but I’d like to see us stretch into Colombian-rooted music like cumbia and other areas. At first, I just wanted to do the project justice and show people that this is not a novelty, that it has legs to grow, since the stylistic depth of Latin music and the Grateful Dead are both so massive. We can keep taking this in so many different directions where it’s going to groove and it’s going to feel familiar, but it’s also going to be really surprising.”