San Francisco/Bay Area Salsa & Latin Jazz: Interviews: William Cepeda

WILLIAM CEPEDA:
Boricua Visions
from the Heart

Ninth generation musician, composer and arranger, William Cepeda hails from Loiza, Puerto Rico. The Cepeda family is known internationally for the traditional bomba and plena music they play and have kept alive and vibrant. At home in New York for the past ten years, Cepeda is a jazz composer and trombone player who has had an illustrious touring history with many well-known jazz musicians. He has recently attracted a great deal of attention to his original compositions of jazz mixed with Puerto Rican bomba and plena, showcased in his CD ' Afro-Rican Jazz: My Roots and Beyond' and the production of 'Grupo Afro-Boricua' (both on Blue Jackel). It was a day of rain, on and off again in Puerto Rico, but we headed out to the beach anyway. Sitting in the car, facing the ocean and rain pouring down, I began the interview.

Q: When did music come into your life?
William Cepeda: As long as I've had consciousness or knowing. My whole culture is music. When I was little, I would be playing percussion. or dance with my family. I would play the drums and after that I would start to dance and copy what everyone else was doing.

Q: What was the next step in terms of your musical education?
WC: I played with people here and there in my home town [Loiza]. For Christmas, we play traditional Puerto Rican music, and sometimes we would go and play at parties. We had jams in the streets. Everyone would sit and play, dance and sing. That was my first training and the most important for me. After that, in school, 11 years, learning music basically. I learned on the elphonium, a little baritone horn, used in classical music. I wanted to play the trumpet but they said I couldn't because my lips were too big. Anyway, they gave me the elphonium and I changed to the trombone a year later.

I went to a music school in Carolina, Escuela Libre de Musica, and studied there with a private trombone teacher for three years. Then I went to the Berklee College of Music [Boston] and came back to Puerto Rico in 1983. I had left in 1979 or so. At Berklee, I studied jazz composition and arranging. Then I came back to Puerto Rico to finish my Bachelor's in music education. I taught for 5 years at the school I went to, Escuela Libre de Musica, in Carolina.

I have played with a lot of artists from here [Puerto Rico] like Bobby Valentin in New York. [I] Played with a jazz band and with Batacumbele also in the 80's. Then I toured with Dizzy Gillespie, well, until he died. That was 1988 or 89. Then I continued to teach and I also toured a lot. I got a scholarship towards my masters. So I quit my job here and went to NYC to finish my masters. I finished in 3 semesters and have been in New York ever since. My masters degree was in trombone performance. This was at Queens College. Their music department is called the Aaron Copland School of Music. It was a very good department. Slide Hampton, Donald Byrd, Roland Hanah, Jimmy Heat and all sorts of people were in the jazz department. I learned a lot there.

Q: Tell us about the two CDs you came out with , 'Afro-Rican Jazz' and Grupo Afro-Boricua'.
WC: 'Afro-Rican Jazz' is work that I've been doing for over 10 years. I had played with Dizzy Gillespie in Europe, with Miriam Makiba, also James Brown for awhile - I had a lot of experience playing African music with jazz. Touring with Dizzy, I saw how he saw music, the way he mixed things, the way he thought about the whole music scene. It gave me a lot of ideas and how to come up with my own music.

Before I started doing my thing, I would think, what's left? I wanted to do jazz but I didn't want to be marked as one thing or the other. But then I thought, better to be known as something rather than nothing. I felt I should take advantage of where I come from and my roots and what really belongs to me. I always have to tell my story, where I come from, instead of trying to be somebody else that is not me. So I came back to my music and I started to create melodies and composing. I started studying my people's music on a deeper level, my music and culture and where everything comes from. Sometimes when you go through this innocently, you don't really get the most that you could even though its right there for you. You don't really see the importance and how you could really get more knowledge. Then, you see that you need to go deeper, see things and take advantage of this the right way.

So I started to look around for more information and tried to see things in the real world but on another level. I started messing around with it , combining different rhythms. Basically, I came up with Afro-Rican jazz. I thought the name Afro-Rican jazz would be cool and I named my group that . The first time we played was in 1993. Our debut was at the [Heineken] Jazz Festival in Puerto Rico with my group from New York. I had my family singing, my grandfather, my aunt's dance company, 6 percussionists - a lot of drumming. From there, I kept developing my concepts, writing new songs, always learning more about where I come from and where the music comes from, how to develop it and get it to the next level. That's basically what I 'I've been doing ever since.

'Grupo Afro-Boricua' came out by accident. I produced a CD for the Ayala family about four years ago. I produced and arranged, got three labels interested in signing them but they didn't want to sign. I got frustrated because they were great productions and there was nothing else like this CD around. So I waited for them and in the meantime, something came to mind: I'm gong to get the best percussionists and dancers and singers from the whole Island, from the South, Loiza, San Juan and put them together - put a group together that is not the Ayalas or Cepedas, not from any one town. Just a group that is from the whole island and covers Afro-Puerto Rican music. I came to Puerto Rico and called most of the people I knew, held auditions and picked the best singers to my ears and best dancers. Then we rehearsed for two weeks, went to the studio and recorded the CD. I called it 'Grupo Afro-Boricua'. Why hadn't there ever been a group called Grupo Afro-Boricua? I came up with that name . So the group does not belong to any one family or part of the island. Just a group of the best percussionists, singers and dancers from the Island. We play music from Loiza, from the south, San Juan. That is how it all came about.

(At this point, it is pouring rain outside, pounding loudly on the car. But William's voice carried through and we continued)

Q: Why do you think a recording like this was never done before?
WC: There has never been a recording of this quality. A few things have come out before but of poor quality. It depends on who produces it. Someone with the knowledge and the ears was needed. This CD could compete with any music from other parts of the world. I think the real stuff is there. There was nothing like this. Maybe people from Puerto Rico weren't paying attention or didn't think it was very important. There are great musicians here who could do great productions. I know a lot of people who do great salsa CDs, pop and jibaro . But after Cortijo died, Ismael Rivera, some of the people who put this music on another level, after them, no one else seemed to care about this music. Some care, like my family, but I don't know. Maybe they just don't have the vision to bring our music to another level.

Q: So you have taken that upon yourself to do that.
WC: I'm trying. I believe in the music and in bringing it to a level that is produced well, not out of tune. Puerto Rico has nice studios and facilities to make great productions, so why not!

Q: Do you see yourself returning to live here again to continue your work or can you do it from New York?
WC: I will have to do that anyway. Right now I have a lot of projects I would like to realize. I would like to produce a lot of people that do Puerto Rican music. I have a vision and I can see who is who and who has talent. Not just the talent, but people who should be recognized and have the opportunity. The main thing is producing them myself. I have concepts I would like to see done with Puerto Rican music that have never been done before. Many people have tried but from the business side. People have the potential to become something, to do something with this music. Like with commercial Puerto Rican music, I would get people that would bring things to the next level on the commercial side, people that play jibaro music, the real deal, and produce jibaro music with jazz, for example. I would like to produce more Latin Jazz and Puerto Rican music that is more conservative. I know who can do that because I don't have an interest in those things. I want to do more avant-garde, more creative, doing what I want and not caring what people think. I'm going to another level, my own path, unpredictable things. If you play a bomba groove and a nice melody, people will groove a lot and I know who is into that. I know who composes and writes like that and who would love to do something like that. I know those that have the potential to do something like that. I can give them the opportunity and produce them. A CD like that would probably work better than my own because it will be accessible to more people, like salsa-ish jazz. Like bomba jazz. Doesn't have to be complicated.

The problem I see is the gap: nothing exists in between my music and the roots [music]. There is supposed to be something in the middle. In other places, that does exists. You have contemporary stuff and you have people who do more jazz. I have a lot of things in my mind I would like to do. I would like to do these productions in the next year or so. I know it could work and we need more people playing our music, to be able to recognize that we exist and that we are here and we are moving forward. The more people that play this music and the more that advertise it, with different styles, I know that it will bring more attention to our people and more producers will come to Puerto Rico, like what has happened in Cuba. We need people to invest money in our music. Right now, I'm thinking about money, creating and developing our music. I know in the future that will happen. It has happened with my CDs. There is an Afro-Rican ensemble now and they have a CD called 'Bombazo 2'. The Afro-Boricua CD is called 'Bombazo'. I don't know where they got Bombazo. They have 'Afro-Rican Jam' and they didn't include one of my tracks. One of my tunes is called that and they didn't include it. So, when people see that my CDs are doing very well, labels and producers see what tracks are hits and unfortunately, that is the business. But for me it about the music more than anything else. I need to learn these things, so I'm not naïve.

Q: Tell me a little about the new recording you are about to start work on.
WC: On my new CD, there are new compositions and things that have never been done before with Puerto Rican music. For example, I added poetry. Black Puerto-Rican verse with jazz. I created a bomba in 6/4. No one has ever played a bomba in 6/4 that I know of. I created a new rhythm. I combined that with flamenco buleria rhythm from Spain, so I called that 'Bomba Flamenca'. Another song has Arabic melodies. I was listening to a CD of this singer from Spain that was mixing flamenco with Arabic music with an Arabic orchestra. I started listening to this - I love the melodies, the way the melodies are played, the lines of the music. So I started writing some of my own versions and then I created a song called 'Gauchiva' so I put some Arabic melodies together with bomba rhythms. So I'm doing all types of different things. I composed a bomba for my home town, Loiza, 'Bomba for Loiza', using the bomba rhythm from Loiza. I didn't use rhythms from Loiza on my last CD.

Q: Can you expand a bit on that. What is different about the bomba from Loiza compared to another area?
WC: The difference is in the groove of the rhythm. Bomba is always in 4/4. Plena is in 4/4. There are different variations from different parts of the island [Puerto Rico]. The bomba form the South is different than it is Loiza. The drums are played differently and the lyrics will be different. Drumming technique is different and the qua is played with 2 sticks like the bomba is played. In the South, they have a big bomba drum, a long one, and the person is playing on top of the bomba drum. Here, in this area [Loiza], the person is playing with a chair and the bomba drum is on his legs. In the South, they stand on top of the bomba drums and then you see someone in the back, because the drum is very long, playing the stick on top of the same drum. There are many variations. There are just two rhythms in Loiza and I include those rhythms in a song. I'm hiring an African bass player from Cameron. So there will be different influences, the poetry, Arabic melodies and rhythms I did not use on my last CD, such as 'Holandez'. You have to be a very good dancer to dance that rhythm. It has a bomba that is 2 bars long. Usually the bomba is one bar long. I'm going to use Jeff Tain-Watt, a guy I used to play with. We'll incorporate the holandez with straight-ahead jazz. I composed this plena that is the next plena, for the new millennium. It has a groove but I did a very contemporary composition, free and with poly tones, so it is a plena on the next level, for the millennium. I'm also composing things to give more to the music. I don't want to do the same thing over and over. I tried to influence my music with music from other cultures like Arabic, India, Africa. That is really where our roots come from. We live in different places but we come from the same source.

Q: Are you working or touring with other artists?
WC: I'm doing a little touring with other groups. As a matter of fact, people have been calling but I've been busy with my band. I'm trying to do less and less. I need to work so the more work I get with my own music the less I'll work with others.

Q: Do you have a busy tour schedule coming up with your band?
WC: Not so busy right now. Gigs here and there. My CD came out 7 or 8 months ago. Since then, people have started to call more and recognize my work for gigs here and there. I don't really have anyone to promote me and really show my product to people in the world. But people are very interested and I think in the new year I'll be working at least double of what I did this year. I'm very proud that people are recognizing my work and supporting me as much as they can. Whenever I go play, I always burn the stage up. The audience response is always great. I feel happy, I think I;m doing the right thing in combining the traditional with jazz. A lot of people identify with my music, not just Puerto Ricans. African-Americans, Americans, even people from India. I was playing in Settle last week and this lady from India wanted to buy a CD. She said she had never heard such sincerity, soul, taste. I just played in Ohio and was at a drummers convention. This guy was so happy and supportive about my music I thought he was Puerto Rican. 'No, I'm from Mexico but I love your music'. Someone else gave the 2 CDs they had just bought to another person. People are excited when they come to my concerts and hear my music. They feel I touched them with my music. Its good.

Q: That's what it is about, isn't it, reaching people with your music, no matter where they are from.
WC: Yes, definitely. For Ohio, I had brought 2 boxes of CDs and I thought I would bring them all home. I was amazed at how they all sold. Why? I guess people like what I'm doing and get all exited and go by the CD.

Q: Often people want to bring home part of what they have just heard on stage.
WC: I still get amazed when it happens. I don't expect anything. I just play music from my heart. Then I get reactions, that they want my autograph or a CD. OK, thank you, I say. I don't pretend to be something I'm not. I just get surprised at how supportive people are. I'm at home, struggling, trying to make all those things work. As it happens, I've started to work more. So when I go and play a couple of gigs and people react as they do, I think, why don't I play more? It always shows the light - I see that something is coming. That is what I get when people like the music. So I am doing something right. I just have to have faith and keep on working hard. While I'm creating, I don't really think about getting air time on the radio, even though that part is important as far as publicity goes. When I write, I don't think commercial, I just play and write what I feel. I think that is the most important thing because in the end, when I'm 70 years old, I will know that I did what I wanted. I might not have made a lot of money but I would rather feel I did what is in my heart than having done commercial work and not produce what I wanted. I would rather realize the visions in my heart.

We ended here. I thanked William for his time and the insights. The rain had paused and it was time to check out the beach for a bit. If you haven't heard 'Afro-Rican Jazz' or 'Grupo Afro-Boricua', make sure and pick up a copy. You won't be disappointed.
In the meantime, listen to a sound byte from William Cepeda's 'Afro-Rican Jazz: My Roots and Beyond'. You can also contact him by email.
Check the EVENTS CALENDAR for William Cepeda and Afro-Rican Jazz West Coast appearances next year.