Jan 21, 2025 7:54 PM
Southern California Fires Hit the Jazz Community
Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
Guitarist, bandleader and composer Camila Meza is set to issue her fifth leader album, Ámbar, on May 31.
(Photo: Rachel Thalia Fisher)The premise for Ámbar, guitarist Camila Meza’s fifth leader date (due out May 31 on Sony Music Masterworks), has something to do with time, distance, and the excavation and understanding of truth.
A member of Ryan Keberle’s Catharsis and Fabian Almazan’s Rhizome, Meza still found time to sculpt a program of originals and covers by folks like Elliot Smith, Antônio Carlos Jobim, and Pat Metheny and David Bowie.
Debuting here is the bandleader’s take on Milton Nascimento’s “Milagre Dos Peixes,” a tune that maintains some of the original’s folk feel through the inclusion of the Nectar Orchestra’s pair of violins, even as some dark electricity creates tension during the song’s middle portion.
“It felt very intuitive to bring ‘Milagre Dos Peixes’ to this setting,” Meza said in a press release. “One of the messages I get from this song is that Nascimento is also singing about the imminent loss of the human connection to nature, and how a new generation is lured into worshipping the ‘new saints’ that come in the form of TV, isolating them and diminishing their reverence for nature. The lyrics say, ‘They no longer talk about the fishes and the sea, they don’t see the flower blooming, the sun rising, and I’m just one more who talks about this pain, our pain.’”
For more information about the guitarist’s new album, as well as summer tour dates, visit Meza’s homepage. DB
Gerald and John Clayton at the family home in Altadena during a photo shoot for the June 2022 cover of DownBeat. The house was lost during the Los Angeles fires.
Jan 21, 2025 7:54 PM
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