It’s safe to say that the members of Latin funk/hip-hop outfit Ozomatli have not had a lot of luck when it comes to releasing albums. Their last record, “Embrace the Chaos,” came out on Sept. 11, 2001.
The release of their latest album, “Street Signs,” has been at least slightly overshadowed by the March arrest of two band members, singer/bassist Wil-Dog Abers and percussionist Jiro Yamaguchi, after a fracas during a concert at the South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas. The group had allegedly violated city noise ordinances when a samba line, a staple of Ozomatli shows, got out of hand.
“The club was oversold, so we took the crowd outside,” recalls Abers, who faced charges of failure to obey a police officer. “The cops told us we couldn’t do that, so we were trying to get back inside, but I guess it wasn’t fast enough and a cop threw me against the wall and put handcuffs on me.”
Abers says he was more worried about Yamaguchi, who faced the charge of assault of a public servant, than about his own arrest. “I always had a misdemeanor. But Jiro was a schoolteacher before this, and I don’t think he’d mind going back to it someday.”
Paradoxically, the charges (dismissed in the case of Yamaguchi; manager Amy Blackman Romero and Abers pleaded no contest, and their records will be cleared after 180 days without any further offenses) have offered Ozomatli the first real publicity of its career, though Abers is skeptical that it will ultimately do the band any good.
“I always think our albums are gonna do better than they do . . . ,” says Abers. “We’re creating something new. There’s no real scene that covers what we’re doing. We don’t fit any certain style.”
Like its predecessors, “Street Signs” is a riotous fusion of funk, rock, Latino and hip-hop. Sung in both Spanish and English, with accompaniment provided by the Prague Symphony Orchestra, gypsy violinists and Latin jazz icon Eddie Palmieri, “Street Signs” is the group’s most iconoclastic–and most aggressively political–record yet, an obvious bid to be Taken Seriously.
“They’ve definitely grown as musicians,” says Tom Pryor, managing editor of Global Rhythm magazine. “They were a great Latin alternative party band, almost like an east L.A. version of Fishbone. What’s impressive is that they’ve managed to cover a wide range of Latin styles as well, from tropical to Puerto Rican to salsa, Cuban and Mexican.”
Middle Eastern rhythms also turn up throughout “Street Signs,” a choice both musically and politically motivated.
“We really wanted to show this vision, that it’s possible to create a different world where people are respected and love each other,” says Abers, who notes that the group’s interest in Arab stylings is nothing new. “But we weren’t really versed in it [before]. After 9/11, it became known that we were going to go to war with someone in the Middle East. Our media has a tendency to dehumanize someone before we go to war with them, and this was our protest of that.”
Ozomatli (named after either an Aztec monkey god, the god of dance or both, depending on whom you ask) formed in Los Angeles in 1995. Abers, then an activist with the youth employment group the L.A. Conservation Corporation, won partial use of a community center after helping stage a sit-in. Ozomatli began as a loose formation of local musicians brought together to play benefits for the center.
The band, then as now a large, multicultural ensemble (various members are Japanese, Cuban, white and African-American), has managed to keep its lineup mostly intact for nine years, three full-length albums and several record labels, though they lost two key members, founding MC Chali 2na–otherwise known as Charlie Tuna–and turntablist Cut Chemist, to Jurassic 5.
“I don’t think it [the defections] affects us overall,” Abers says, somewhat unconvincingly.
Abers is already making vague plans for the group’s next album, though he knows that with an organization as unwieldy as Ozomatli, things tend to get complicated.
“You’re talking to a band with 10 people, and everyone has a different concept of what the album should be. Someone will throw out an idea, and it’s pretty obvious whether it works or not. People will get excited or they won’t.”
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Ozomatli
When: 9 p.m.
Thursday Where: House of Blues, 329 N. Dearborn St.
Price: $26.50; 312-923-2000
