Story in the Air

Click the DOWNLOAD button above to download the album. Scroll down for more information.

Featuring:
Michael Fortunato, trumpet
Kunio Iwata, tenor saxophone
Shin Kawasaki, guitar
Mike Rathjen, keyboards
Evan Calbi, double bass
Angel Lebron, congas & cajon
Mike Dubin, drums & percussion
Chili Charles, steel pans & drums

Mixed and mastered by Glenn Suravech: Mosaic
Produced by Evan Calbi
© All rights reserved, 2009

Album Notes

Chili, This One is for You
by Evan Calbi

I met Chili Charles in 1996 when he was playing in a jazz trio at the Onyx Café, a beloved and long gone Los Angeles coffee house. Chili, pianist Mike “T” Telesmanick, and my longtime bass teacher Bill Markus played weekly sets of free improvisation that usually ended with T dismantling the piano to pluck the strings with his hands while Bill and Chili broke into prisms of counter rhythms.

On nights when the trio wasn’t playing, you could often find Chili in one of the neighborhood bars where the island brogue of his Trinidadian accent was recognizable over the noise. At the time, Chili lived in a condo on Los Feliz Boulevard. When he moved into an old house on Reservoir Street in Echo Park, he stopped going out. He didn’t need to leave the house because people came to him, stopping by at all hours to sit around the kitchen table.

Chili’s kitchen table monologues rambled all over the place and were frequently interrupted by his howl of a laugh. A story always crystallized eventually—about playing with Jimmy Witherspoon and Hugh Masekela, or working with Mike Oldfield on the Tubular Bells album, or living in a castle in England as one of the first artists signed to Richard Branson’s fledgling Virgin Records, or working with Van Dyke Parks and the Beach Boys, or about his son Oliver, a great drummer in his own right who was often on tour with Ben Harper.

Here’s an example: “Jimmy Witherspoon’s label give him a car with a trailer for a tour through the South, and the first t’ing that motherfucker do is drive to his house and swap the new tires of the rental for the bald ones on his Cadillac. The trumpet player complain the whole time about how the shit ain’t right and the tires ain’t safe until Witherspoon pull the car over in West Texas and leave his ass on the side of the road with his horn, his bag, and bus fare back to L.A. We picked up another horn player when we got to New Orleans.”

After slapping the kitchen table and laughing hysterically, Chili leaned in and said, “You got to be able to hang, you understand? Guys get cabin fever.” His ten-minute monologue became a lesson in how to live as a musician, and the hours spent around the kitchen table came into focus as another part of that life.

Chili had good stories to tell, but that wasn’t the reason that people sought his company. “There are so many people with good stories in L.A. I didn’t go there for the stories,” said Débora Antscherl, a friend who spent as much time in the kitchen as me. “What was amazing about Chili was how much he reached out at all times. How much he reached out to what was going on. He always saw talent in people.”

Chili inspired people, but I wouldn’t call him nurturing. He was full of moods and occasional tirades. When you caught him in a bad mood, he could be brutal. “I’m from Barcelona, and at times I couldn’t understand him,” Débora said. “It wasn’t just the accent. He jumped topics. It was a different mentality, like one big whirlwind.”

The living room of the house on Reservoir Street was a swarm of drums and recording equipment. I don’t remember how the Kufu project started, but I think I told Chili that I had put together a chart of one of his steel drum (or “steel pan” as it’s known in Trinidad) tunes, “Malagar.” With the help of Débora and another friend, composer Tim Riley, I started bringing arrangements to the house. I called two friends I had recently met in an R&B band we all worked in, guitarist Shin Kawasaki and conguero Angel Lebron. We met on Saturday afternoons and ran through the arrangements. And we hung out in the kitchen.

Shin is a guitarist from Japan. Chili gave him perhaps the best compliment I’ve heard one musician give another: “The cat’s got empathy.” Angel is a Nuyorican conguero from the Bronx with an irrepressible personality. He and Chili were laughing hysterically like long-lost brothers within about 15 minutes of meeting. After leaving Trinidad, Chili lived in New York for many years, and he and Angel shared a bond about the music scenes in the city and the way that island rhythms from Trinidad and Puerto Rico had infiltrated them. You can hear their playful dialogue in the Freddie Hubbard standard “Little Sunflower.” As Shin winds down his solo, Chili starts playing a latin clave rhythm pattern. “I heard that,” Angel says before joining Chili at the end of Shin’s solo. That’s me screaming afterwards.

By the time we started recording in the summer of 2003, Chili’s partner Daniela was pregnant, and they were planning to move to the Big Island. We finished an initial mix of the album the afternoon before they left. They seemed completely unprepared for their move to Hawaii, but they made their flight, had their son Jomo, built a house, and settled into island life. Chili would come back every few months, and I’d always know when because his blunt message would be waiting on my home answering machine: “This Chili.” I’d go by the house and find him in the kitchen. People would drop by as hours melted into each other.

“The cycle in the kitchen was just non-fucking-stop,” Débora said. “All day. All night. Chili didn’t separate anything. It was one experience. He didn’t separate his illness, either.” Towards the end of his life, a persistent cough was, in retrospect, the glaring warning that something was wrong.

When I heard that he’d died in Hawaii, I was floored. I’d never considered that he’d been sick with cancer for years. Neither had anyone else, for that matter. Both friends and family seemed totally caught off guard. Even after he left for the Big Island, I still thought of him as a permanent fixture of the Los Angeles landscape.

I’ve since gone to Trinidad to follow Panorama, the country’s annual steel band competition, and to research a book that is based in part on the last few years of Chili’s life. The excerpts of interviews and street sounds included in the album are from my first trip in 2007. Ruby is Chili’s mother. Her commanding presence was required to raise four boys on her own that had all outgrown her by the time they turned thirteen. Raymond, Chili’s youngest brother, is a professor at the University of West Indies at St. Augustine.

These excerpts help recreate what is was like making this album: we’d play and then hang in the kitchen, the vocabularies of music and language mixed up until they became one experience. Chili came up with the name Kufu and would often repeat it as a kind of mantra. “Kufu. Fuck you,” he’d say, and then howl in laughter. In all, we recorded three of Chili’s steel pan tunes—”Malagar,” “Drumology,” and “Dogon”—in addition to other arrangements: “Excursions” from A Tribe Called Quest’s Low End Theory, “On Stream” by Nils Peder Molvær, and “The Sunday Boys” from The Brian Blade Fellowship. The album remained unreleased until I began tinkering with the music last summer. I asked friends to add overdubs to the initial tracks, including trumpeter Mike Fortunato, saxophonist Kunio Iwata, keyboardist Mike Rathjen, and drummer and percussionist Mike Dubin. Their contributions transformed these recordings.

When Chili’s brother Raymond and I met in Port of Spain, he told me about playing the steel pan: “Every once in a while, I’ll take out my tenor pan and play a little music, and I always say, you know, ‘Chili, this one is for you.’” It’s a fitting title. Kufu wasn’t planned as a tribute to Chili, but that’s what it has become. Because this album is a celebration of his music, we’re releasing it for free to anyone who wants to hear it. The house on Reservoir Street was torn down recently and replaced with a knock-off of the original. It may be gone, but when I listen to this album I’m right there in that kitchen again.

– June, 2009

Photos by Daniela Schmid