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“I had no idea I was gonna be a musician,” says Ayala. “God put music on my plate.”
(Photo: Nick Carter)Afro-Puerto Rican Jazz (PMC/Miel) is not just the title of bassist/composer Alex “Apolo” Ayala’s follow-up release to his acclaimed debut album, Bámbula (Truth Revolution). It’s the entire genre it encompasses.
“I named it Afro-Puerto Rican Jazz because a lot of people haven’t heard Afro-Puerto Rican jazz like this before,” explained Ayala when reached at his apartment in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Aided and abetted by his vibrant Bámbula Project ensemble — Andrew Gould on saxophones, Fernando Garcia on drums and Victor Pablo Garcia on percussion — he skillfully blends Puerto Rican music and folklore with bebop, avant garde and contemporary jazz.
It’s also a deeply personal album that pays tribute to his hometown of San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he was raised in the projects by his single mother, and recounts a recent devastating family struggle in the three-movement “Agonia.”
“I decided to put everything my family was going through into my music because music is about life, about feelings and emotions,” he explained. “I was always inspired by Charles Mingus and Wayne Shorter and other composers that used music as a tool for expressing their own emotion and feelings. Yes, there’s a lot of melodic and harmonic content, but also it has a message. It is storytelling. And that is something I strive to do.”
Ayala had a thriving career in Puerto Rico before he moved to New York more than a decade ago, drawn like so many others to the “jazz capital of the world,” where his big band recently played a sold-out show at Lincoln Center and he’s a mainstay of the Latin jazz scene. But his heart remains in Puerto Rico, as his latest album attests.
During this conversation, Ayala discussed everything from the alchemical process of transmuting his family struggles into music, to the hilarious story about how he became a musician almost by chance, to his serendipitous connection with saxophonist Miguel Zenón that led to Afro-Puerto Rican Jazz being released on Zenón’s independent Miel Music label.
The following has been edited for length and clarity.
Cree McCree: How did you get the nickname “Apolo”?
Alexis “Apolo” Ayala: When I was in middle school, I used to box a little, and one of the senior students saw me and called out, “Hey, Apollo!” As in Apollo Creed from Rocky. The next day, even the teachers were calling me Apollo. [laughs]
McCree: DownBeat gave a great review to your first album, Bámbula, with a quote from you: “Bámbula means the memory of a forgotten place.”
Ayala: It is the act of remembering a forgotten place that existed in the past and reconnecting with the ancestors. That album was very personal, because a lot of the compositions were about my family, my mother and my grandmother.
McCree: Your new album is also deeply personal. The three-part “Agonia” suite is about struggles your family was going through.
Ayala: It was a long, hard process, and I decided to put it in music. I cannot just write music for the sake of writing music. Music is my way of expressing life.
The first movement, “Reckoning,” is when we found out what happened and had to face the music. It was an ever-evolving situation. The second movement, “Hopelessness,” is in the middle of the process, and we didn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel. There’s no percussion moving us forward, only the saxophone playing. The third movement, “Uncertainty,” is when we saw a little bit of light. A candle, not a whole window. There’s no resolution. And that’s exactly what I wanted to portray.
McCree: And did turning it into music help you rise above all that?
Ayala: Yes. Yes. Yes. Music is a powerful tool for life.
McCree: When you were growing up in San Juan, how did you first get into music?
Ayala: I had no idea I was gonna be a musician. God put music on my plate. My mother wanted me to attend middle and high school, so she enrolled me in different schools with different specialties. One of the schools specialized in music, and when I took the admission test I failed that test. But the principal of the school knew my situation with a single mother, three kids, so she said we’re gonna take him anyway.
That was two weeks after the semester had started, and you have to select an instrument to learn. And because this is Puerto Rico, everybody wants to play percussion, everybody wants to play drums, everybody wants to play piano or trumpet. So all the instruments were taken. The only two available were the double bass and the tuba. They explained what a tuba was: It’s a wind instrument, and it’s big. And I said I don’t really like that. What is the other instrument? They said the double bass, it’s a string instrument, like a giant violin, so I chose that.
Next day, when I went to introduce myself to my bass teacher, I saw the double bass on the floor and was like, oh, my God. [laughs] It’s gigantic! And in the beginning, when you start playing, you get calluses on your fingers and they hurt. But once I started practicing, I fell in love with the instrument.
McCree: As a bass player, you’re very subtle and don’t step into the spotlight that often. But when you do, like the long solo you take on “Cuembé,” it’s glorious. I wanted more bass, actually.
Ayala: That is something I have to keep in mind for the next album. [laughs] Play more bass!
McCree: Afro-Puerto Rican Jazz was the first record by another artist released on Miguel Zenón’s Miel Music label. How did that come about?
Ayala: Well, it’s a funny story. When the record was done and I was searching for a label to release it, I kept getting offers that were not really good offers, and I was getting a little bit frustrated. So I emailed Miguel, who’s an idol of mine, asking him for advice, and we talked on the phone for over an hour. And in the end he was like, “Man, listen, you are already doing everything. You are composing the music. You are recording the music. You are paying the musicians, you are doing everything. What exactly does a label have to offer?” And I was like, “Yeah, 100%.” So the next day I went to the computer and did all the due process and opened my own label, PMC records. And I was gonna release it myself.
A couple of weeks later, he called to talk to me about an idea that he had in his mind for a long time: “How about I help you with the distribution of the album and sponsoring your music and put it out under my label Miel Music?” Which was also a sign from The Almighty, because when I originally called him, that’s exactly what I wanted to pitch him.
McCree: And he ended up pitching it to you.
Ayala: Yes, and when he called me and said, “I want to get behind you on this project,” I thought I must be doing something right. Every now and then, we need something that gives us fuel to keep going. And Miguel putting my record out on his label gave me a million gallons of fuel. DB
“It kind of slows down, but it’s still kind of productive in a way, because you have something that you can be inspired by,” Andy Bey said on a 2019 episode of NPR Jazz Night in America, when he was 80. “The music is always inspiring.”
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