Ozomatli

L.A. band Ozomatli — known for its fusion of funk, salsa, ska, rock, Afro-Cuban jazz and hip-hop — is breaking new ground again. On Street Signs the band incorporates the sounds of an Egyptian string orchestra as well as the rhythms of the Gnawa — a North African sect that draws on Arab and Black African traditions. Wil-Dog Abners, the band’s bass player, explained the Arabic connection.

“Our last album [Embrace the Chaos] dropped on September 11, 2001. We were already on the road, but after 9/11 we canceled the tour and went home. It was pretty intense. We’d already been exploring the music of North Africa and with the intense focus 9/11 brought to the Arab world, we committed ourselves to learning the culture and the music. The way to build bridges is through understanding, not military action.”

The Arab-influenced tunes on Street Signs — especially “Love and Hope” and “Believe,” the latter inspired by the singing of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan —have a big, wide open swing feel, due in part to the soaring string charts, arranged by Chris Lennertz and played by The Prague Symphony. How did a band from L.A. hook up with a Czech symphony orchestra?

“We worked with Chris on a movie soundtrack that hasn’t come out yet called Tortilla Heaven,” says Abners. “So we asked him to do some synthesizer string parts for the album, mainly because of budgetary restrictions. He didn’t think the synth sounded right, and hooked us up with The Prague Symphony. We were able to send them a score using a digital T–Line, which let us see what they were doing in real time. They were a bit stiff at first, so I told them to ‘play sloppy, like Americans.’ They got a laugh out of that, and we did the string parts in two-and-a-half hours.”

Street Signs also includes guest spots by MC Chali 2na, an original Ozomatli member who’s now in Jurassic 5; Gnawa sintir player Hassan Hakmoun; the French-Jewish-Gypsy band Les Yeux Noir; Los Lobos guitarist and tres player David Hidalgo; and salsa-piano giant Eddie Palmieri, one of the band’s long-time idols.

“We’d been talking to [Palmieri] for a while,” Abners says. “He was going to play on the last album, but his wife got sick. This time, since we’re on the same label, we were able to send the files for ‘Nadie Te Tira’ to New York and he did it.”

Ozomatli’s cross-cultural groove makes it one of today’s most interesting and surprising bands; sometimes they even surprise themselves. “‘Cuando Canto’ starts out as a Jarocha, a typical [folk] style from Vera Cruz [Mexico] but it slowly evolves into a low-rider R&B thing. We started working on the merengue tune [‘Dejame en Paz’] for the last album but it didn’t click. This time we added a blast of punk-rock energy at the end and it all came together.”