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 Click for music events Soundtrack to Summer For Alla, "Es Tiempo"
Jorge Ledezma first had his Alla epiphany while driving down North Avenue, near Ashland. That’s where the idea was born to create, along with his brother Angel Ledezma and singer Lupe Martinez, a psych-pop act, a bit loungey, dabbling in Brazilian Tropicalia, all in Spanish. The group had originally started playing together in synth-heavy instrumental band Defender, so there was little acclimation between musicians involved. Still, it took four years to complete the band’s debut, “Es Tiempo,” perhaps because Ledezma set his goals high when the band was born.
“We already started working on a new Defender album, we were toying with it, and I knew I wanted to make a culturally significant album,” he says. “Everyone wanted to do that. When we make a record, it has to be personal, from the heart, reflect where I’m from—what better than to do it in Spanish? Being Chicano, and trying to keep it in Chicago—I wanted to change the game. Our intent with the group, we’re hoping we can sort of…there’s no Latino playing field at the moment, we’re hoping we can shake things up, get the whole thing started.
“Es Tiempo” bounces between genres erratically, but that’s not to say the album is inconsistent or filled with errant ideas instead of fully formed songs—quite the opposite, actually, as the cohesiveness of the record, helped by Martinez’s intoxicating vocal contribution, proves its biggest strength. Too call it background music would be inaccurate and insulting—the subtleties are also a strength—but “Es Tiempo” is a summertime record if I’ve ever heard one, and if it’s in the background of everything you do all the time for the length of June, July and August, you’re bound to have a fine season. It swoops in and out in a breeze and demands repeat. The title track, slotted near the end of the record, stands out as the album’s best—a worldly beginning, spiritual vocals and crashing cymbals, gives way to a patient keyboard, which is an intro to a pop song filled with acoustic guitar, harmonica, all sorts of percussion and a stop-in-your-tracks “dum-de-dum” vocal sprawl. The result, near-perfect, flirts not only with the Tropicalia previously introduced on the record, but also mid-nineties alt-pop.
Ledezma produced the record at multiple locations, which included an extended stint in Sweden, and received the help from several guest musician friends, including Isotope 217’s Matt Lux and Red Red Meat’s Brian Deck, indie-rock hotshot engineer. “I booked very expensive studios and walked in with nothing written,” Ledezma says of the process. “I’ll have an idea for a song—I’m not trained in any way. I’ll have a concept for a song, walk into a studio and be like, ‘We have three days. Here’s $3,000, let’s get something done. It was fun though. We had a good group of people. It took a long time—we’re not gonna make a record like that again.”
The spontaneous nature of the songwriting comes through on “Es Tiempo,” as the songs themselves lack any generic processed feel—they’re fresh, alive, waiting to be devoured. “In terms of us being a ‘band’ when my brother and I started the record, we didn’t have a bass player or a keyboardist,” Ledezma says. “I’m not the most proficient musician, [so I was] taking cues from musicians and I would be like, ‘Shit, I need to find someone,’ or ‘Shit, I need that on the record.’ Some sessions, there would be ten or fifteen people hanging around, and it would be like, ‘Shit, alright, let’s have you go in the vocal booth and clap for a song.’ Brian Deck was around, and it was like we stopped doing whatever, cued up the song to have him play on it.”
Ledezma says the band’s biggest concern is translating the recorded material live. “We were nervous for that,” he says, “definitely nervous. We didn’t consider it at all while we were recording the album, we didn’t want to disrupt the creative process. Just the other day we were practicing [a song] we never played live, because we’re doing it for the record-release show, it was like, ‘Holy shit, I don’t even remember the chords.’ We just cued it up in the iPod, played it over and over again, played along and after a couple hours it was, ‘Shit, we got this.’ But I’m not a musician’s musician. I don’t play the same thing twice. I’m constantly shifting arrangements.”
He says his goals for the project haven’t changed. “You always have an expectation of what you think will happen, and hopefully we’ll reach my expectations as far as sales go and ascension into the music world,” he says. “One thing I’ve noticed, because the lyrics are in Spanish and I’m iffy about translating, I need to do as many interviews as I can to get the message out of what we’re doing. It’s not just a cute pop band that’s [saying] ‘Look at our record collection!’ We actually want to inspire other people, other Latinos. Get our voice heard.”
Alla plays June 13 at Schubas, 3159 North Southport, (773)525-2508, at 10:30pm. $10-$12.
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