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"Lares Vegas" from El Gallo Bueno
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Culture-clashing Zemog melds metal and jazz with its Latin Roots

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Boston Sunday Globe, Culture-clashing Zemog melds metal and jazz with its Latin Roots >>

   It's not likely anyone will ever call Abraham Gomez-Delgado a music traditionalist. Likewise, there's little chance Gomez-Delgado's band, Zemog, El Gallo Bueno, will ever find its music categorized as wholly American. And, really, there's nothing unreasonable about either of those expectations.
   Zemog's adventurous, experimental music has a tendency to stray frequently and widely from its Latin roots. Gomez-Delgado's compositions import elements from an array of genres ranging from free jazz to heavy metal to produce a sound that quite simply will never please strict Latin traditionalists.    
   In its instrumentation, its rhythmic constructs, and the predominant language of its lyrics (Spanish), however, Zemog's music is very much a product of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and South America. And accordingly, it is typically, and not incorrectly, labeled world music.
   Still, Zemog, El Gallo Bueno, which performs Thursday at Johnny D's, unquestionably participates in musical tradition, and its music could only have taken shape in the United States. As a composer, Cambridge resident Gomez-Delgado is very much in contact with the evolutionary traditions of all music. Gomez-Delgado was born in Puerto Rico but was raised largely in the United States. His outlook on life, which is reflected in his songwriting, was shaped significantly by the good and bad aspects of growing up in America.
    As a child in the Central Massachusetts town of Lunenburg, Gomez-Delgado heard different music wherever he went. "My father is Peruvian and he was a musician, and he played a lot of Peruvian folk music on the violin," Gomez-Delgado says. "At home we listened to salsa and a lot of Latin music. My father listened to Bach. My brother listened to Kraftwerk. At school we listened to heavy metal and hip-hop."
   Gomez-Delgado's composing is influenced by the sounds he heard growing up, plus the free jazz he discovered later on. "I'm trying to take all the musics I listen to and make them all into one," he says.
   Affecting his point of view, he says, is a self-confidence bred of a refusal to let himself be defined by the harsher realities of growing up Puerto Rican in America.
   "We came here and straight out, the first day, it was spic, spic, spic, spic, spic," he recalls. "I learned right away that this world is messed up and that there are people who don't like you for ridiculous reasons."
    Processing that information, Gomez-Delgado says, led him to attain insight and strength. "I learned to look inside myself and ask the questions of where have I been and where am I going. That's what's important." The answer to the second question, he says, has to be that he's moving forward. Personally and in his music, Gomez-Delgado says, "The tradition I'm trying to follow is the tradition of change."
   Musically, the desire to progress has led Gomez-Delgado from his previous band, Jayuya, to Zemog, an outfit he formed by bringing together what he believes are some of the best players in Boston's Latin music and avant-garde jazz scenes, including members of Balaton, Brass Roots, and the Fully Celebrated Orchestra.
   On its self-titled debut CD and in live performance, the band gives flesh to songs in which Gomez-Delgado attempts to capture his experiences honestly and organically.
   "I think a lot of world music that tries to combine different styles fails because it's very fake. It's like we're all one happy world," he says. "I'm not trying to do that. I'm trying to tell the truth. It can be dissonant. Cultures can clash at times."
   The sounds of cultures meeting and sometimes clashing can become complicated, even jarring, at times, as in such Zemog songs as "Rumba Pa' Las Ninas," in which Cuban dance rhythms do battle with Ornette Coleman-style free jazz, and "Lares Vegas," which evokes Willem Breuker, Tito Puente, and Metallica by turns. But the combination of traditional forms (bomba, plena), Latin music constructs of the last century (salsa, Afro-Cuban jazz), and the progressive leanings of outfits like the Willem Breuker Kollektief and the Sun Ra Arkestra, ultimately produce a music as interesting as it is honest.
   There's also a Breuker/Sun Ra-esque sense of humor about the band, which plays out musically and in the form of an oddball rooster fixation. El Gallo Bueno translates as "The Good Rooster" (Zemog is Gomez spelled backward). Clucking sounds pop up here and there on the band's CD. And Gomez-Delgado's publicity photo depicts him wearing a giant rooster head. That sense of humor, Gomez-Delgado says, is helpful when gauging audience reaction to the band's performances.
   "When people come to see us live, the first 15 minutes is just staring at us trying to figure out what we're trying to do," he says. "People expect certain things. They expect you not to be this or not to be that."
   Generally speaking, he says, people do not expect experimentalism in Latin music. Once they hear it, though, those who decide it's something they can accept learn how to listen to Zemog quickly, taking the band's music as what it is, a product of a tradition of blending and adaptation that has long been a part of both Latin and American music.
   "The music seems pretty complicated but it isn't," Gomez-Delgado says. "It's an expression. It's a development. But that's the nature of music, change." 03/16/03
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