In the 80’s and early 90’s I followed a lot of bands from club to club. None of these bands ever made it big. I saw Terror Train at Club Lingerie (which no longer exists) and at the Shamrock (the only Irish pub in East Hollywood, later converted to a strip club). I saw the Underthings at Al’s Bar. I saw the Uninvited at Toe’s Tavern. The Uninvited are still around, but they hardly play in L.A. anymore; I remember them more for their witty newsletters than for their music. Some of their Halloween newsletters could have won a Hugo Award.
But I never felt about any of them the same way I felt about Umbral.
Umbral used politically oriented themes and Latin and Caribbean rhythms. The group was constituted of Chuy the guitarist, Reyes the percussionist, Tino the keyboardist (very briefly), and the spiritual leader, a soft-spoken and musically talented Mexico-born gentleman named Cesar Torres. Cesar was married to Ericka, who played with a political Latin-folk group named Sabia. Cesar was a member of Sabia for a while, then started his own band. Umbral (meaning “threshhold” in Spanish) played faster, danceable music in both English and Spanish. The two bands would often play together, with Sabia first inspiring the audience and Umbral making them clear away the chairs. Audiences loved “Como Ves,” “Shut Your Mouth, Go Away,” and “Bluefields Express,” a song from the English-speaking Caribbean coast of Nicaragua that would often inspire a conga line.
I made a point of seeing Umbral whenever I heard they were playing. They played at At My Place (now defunct). They played at Club Lingerie. They played at a nameless club in a mini-mall on Atlantic Boulevard (the only time I ever danced with that pretty teacher I was working with at the time). After some of these shows, I would see booking agents approach them. They played wherever they could. They played at Occidental College. They played in the Residential Housing complex at Cal State L.A., which I still remember as the most joyous party I have ever attended. Afterwards, there was a jam session in a dorm room, with Chuy picking an arpeggio in G-C-D7 while some French guy played the notes to “Guantanamera” on a recorder.
This is really hard to write about when you know the ending to the story.
While Sabia released two tapes and toured nationwide, Umbral never released a recording. I think they may have made a demo tape. I would constantly plead with Cesar to make a recording so that we would always have Umbral’s music. “Come on, Cesar, put out a cassette,” I would beg him. Cesar was whimsically flattered by my devotion: “Look, it’s my fan! My ONLY fan!”
A little later, perhaps frustrated by their inability to break out of the local club scene, the group broke up. This was the time of the Lambada, and Reyes joined a Brazilian group. Cesar complained that he couldn’t afford to go see Reyes’ new band, but Reyes scoffed, “He can see us anytime he wants.”
I would often run into Cesar on the Cal State L.A. campus. We both felt sad about the 1990 Nicaraguan election, in which the people decided to end their revolution in favor of safety and peace. I tried to make light of it, joking, “Well, Cesar, maybe you can start doing concerts for Romanian orphans.” Cesar replied, “Ah, what the hell, at least Nelson Mandela is free.”
Later I heard that Cesar had died of lung cancer. This is a disease that seems to strike particularly hard at talented Latino men. (Roberto Naduris, the news director at KPFK, also succumbed to it.) I think there was a public funeral or memorial, but I didn’t go.
I don’t know what Reyes and Chuy are doing now.
In the late 90’s, a new group exploded on the scene, both locally and nationally. Ozomatli was the latest bombshell in a constantly developing tradition of politically tinged Latino rock, a tradition that includes Santana, Los Lobos, Mana, Tierra, and even (somewhat) Rage Against The Machine. I finally bought Ozomatli’s CD recently, and it was great. Well, not great. There was only one song I really enjoyed. The other songs, combining various genres of Latin music with rap, were (in my opinion) OK, but not great. But there was one song I kept listening to over and over, even skipping the rest of the CD to keep going back to that song. “Como ves, como ves, la historia no es como crees.” (“How do you see, how do you see, history’s not what you think it to be.”)
Finally I figured out why I liked that song so much. I checked the CD, and there it was. Written by Chuy Perez, copyright Umbral music. On the inside back cover of the CD, the band thanked Santana and Los Lobos, but they did not thank Chuy or Cesar or Reyes or Umbral.
A wave of emotion swept over me: not happiness that an Umbral song had finally been recorded, but grief for my old friend, that kindly, decent man, Cesar Torres, gone these many years.
I can’t say Cesar’s life was tragic. I didn’t even know him that intimately. He probably had a very good life, and was happy most of the time. But the tragedy is in the “what might have been.” And of course I miss my friend.
I’ve been crying as I’ve been writing this.
Whenever I hear that song again, on the radio or at a concert, I will say to myself what Ozomatli did not say: “Thank you Cesar. Thank you Chuy and Reyes. Thank you Umbral.”
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