ARTICLE BY JAMIE SKOWRON
PHOTO BY VERONICA MUNOZ
SEPT. 14 | LOS ANGELES—Tonight the audience at West Hollywood’s Troubadour collectively welcomed the extremely intelligent Teri Gender Bender and the prolific Omar Rodriguez-Lopez. Mexico’s Les Bucherettes opened with a set full of crowd favorites, including “I’m Queen” and “Henry Don’t Got Love.” Produced by Omar Rodriguez-Lopez on Rodriguez-Lopez Productions and under Sargent House management, the band’s first full-length is scheduled for release early next year. Tonight’s show follows Teri Gender Bender and company’s Los Angeles debut at Spaceland this summer, during which Vato Negro—comprised of Juan Alderete, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, and Dee Parks—was the opener. (Read The Scenestar interviews with Les Butcherettes and Vato Negro.)
This sold-out show festered for 30 minutes between sets until Lars Stalfors (OR-LG sound manipulator) approached the stage to create the first layer of the musical onion that emanates from a Rodriguez-Lopez performance. The distant manifestation of Cedric Bixler-Zavala (vocals for The Mars Volta) and Ximena Sarinana (vocals for El Trio de Omar Rodriguez) promised another remarkable night in cutting-edge popular music. The stage had a very unusual and symbolic contour with an arrangement of instruments that spotlighted the somewhat newly recruited soldier, drummer Deantoni Parks. As a guru of musical subdivisions, his musical presence lifted the night’s energy into godly territories. His versatility within Omar’s songs is a microcosm of his greater involvement in the occupational music world. Deantoni is an extremely well versed musician and has been a staff member at the Stanford Jazz Workshop, Berklee College of Music, and The Drummer’s Collective NYC since 1998.
Dee was positioned as the stage’s frontman, with Omar humbly behind him and the other members positioned close by. The outfit performed a set full of, in Omar’s words, “music that I threw in front of them three days ago.” Along with this innovative material, Omar presented some sprinkled seasoning from Solar Gambling, during which Ximena appeared on stage to prove why Omar has taken such an interest in her soulful voice. After almost two hours of impeccable music and multitude of gratitude, Omar ended the night with a speech about the negative and positive people whom he has encountered and how “he needs them both to be where he is today.” He then proceeded to dedicate a song to his “friend of over two decades” (Cedric Bixler-Zavala) as a mock-love song and scurried into a Phil Spector-like “wall of sound” to finish off this unforgettable night.
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