Audio By Carbonatix
Richard Blair put his trust in the beats and the rewards are self-evident in Sidestepper, his collaboration with Colombian musician/producer Iván Benavides, and their recent album 3 a.m. (In Beats We Trust).
But these aren’t just formulaic, bass line-driven downbeats thumping along at 130 beats per minute, club style. They incorporate syncopated claves and swaying salsa, cumbia, and charanga. They’re complicated time structures worked out, looped, and patched together with horns, percussion, and vocals to create a genre-bending collection of songs that combine drum and bass production with homegrown Latin American music and Jamaican dub and dancehall toasting. “Jamaica is unique in the Caribbean in what it’s given to the world in terms of sound and production,” says Blair during a phone interview from his home in Bogota. “And so I wanted to try and bring that attitude and that sound and production to Colombian music, and also to Cuban music.”
It’s an interesting if unlikely marriage — urban electronica, Latin rhythms, Jamaican raps — that makes sense considering the path Blair has traveled. Working as an engineer and producer at Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD studios in Bath, England, Blair was exposed to more than his share of world sounds as he worked on label releases like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s 1990 album Mustt Mustt, Remmy Ongala’s 1991 Afro-pop release Mambo, and Gabriel’s own 1992 effort Us. But it wasn’t until a round of recording sessions in 1992 that he finally found himself moved by the music.
“One of the artists there was this woman, Totó La Momposina, and [she was doing] the cumbia thing — big hand drums, call-and-response vocals and percussion, and nothing else,” says Blair. The unnamed track, which found her singing over Paulino “Batata” Salgado’s percussion, was eventually included on Totó La Momposina’s 1993 album La Candela Viva. It was the first of many times he was transformed by the power of cumbia. “It just took my head off,” he says. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It sounded very Jamaican, but not — something a bit deeper and wilder; something similar but unlike anything I’d ever heard. It was extraordinary.”
Being a typically hospitable Colombian, La Momposina invited the awestruck Blair down to her native country for a visit. So after finishing off his last bit of work at the studio, he headed to Bogota for a short holiday. He finally left three years later, but not before absorbing the culture and sounds that he had fallen in love with. It was the warmth of the people that kept him there, along with the loose, spontaneous lifestyle; the music; the beautiful countryside; and especially the partying (“These people are professionals,” he marvels). He absorbed salsa, merengue, and vallenato; worked his way into Colombia’s fledgling rock scene by mixing Aterciopelados’s Con El Corazon en la Mano; then started producing and mixing recordings for local bands like La Derecha and Estados Alterados.
While Blair is a respected producer in his native England, the Colombian-born Benavides is an all-around talent. In the late Nineties his groundbreaking group Bloque de Busqueda combined classic rock, Afro-pop, hip-hop, and salsa beats, energizing the rock en español scene. However it was his work as a songwriter for superstar Carlos Vives that led him in 1994 to Blair, who just happened to be producing Vives’s La Tierra del Olvido. They quickly became firm friends and musical partners, releasing two records as Sidestepper: 1999’s Logozo EP and a full-length album, 2000’s More Grip.
The duo began work on 3 a.m. (In Beats We Trust) by laying down some basic tracks. “I would look for flavors or rhythms or backing tracks, a beat, something that’s kind of just hip enough to get us grooving,” Blair says of the process. After that they added other elements like horns and percussion, then vocals from guests like Rubi Dan and Jucxi Dee. Benavides tossed in his own lead and backing vocals at will, trying out different styles until, as Blair explains, “one works and gets us jumping around the room. Then he’ll come back and flesh it out with lyrics.”
Throughout, the two strove to keep the process as intuitive as possible. “I really wanted to avoid the modern production thing of chopping everything into little bits and sampling it and turning it backwards and so,” says Blair, who opted to use a more organic approach of layering entire tracks over one another. “So even with the programming and backing tracks, they’re pretty much the way they were the first day we came across them.”
Since the album’s release this spring, Sidestepper has been playing gigs around Bogota to rapturous reviews in preparation for an August tour through North America. But how will Sidestepper sound in the shadow of Universal and Sony Latin here on Miami Beach? “It’ll be interesting because I feel like what we’re trying to do is a new angle,” says Blair. “And the Latin music business is so conservative, it’ll be interesting to see how they react.”
