Huayucaltia’s Multicultural Stew Edges Toward Jazz With ‘Amazonas’

Los Angeles was just a place where Ciro Hurtado had ended up in 1975, carrying an electric guitar and ready to join some fine American blues or rock band. He’d come from Peru with plans to play the same sort of pop music he grew up hearing on big-city radio, but now he was having second thoughts.

Somehow, Hurtado says today, joining the crowd of local musicians already playing in that genre just didn’t make any sense. “It made more sense for them to be playing that type of music,” he says. “I realized the Latin American groove of music was closer to me. So I picked up an acoustic guitar and started studying.”

Besides, he was soon to discover that in Los Angeles, the American musical immigrants from the south included Mexicans, Argentines, Ecuadorans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans and Colombians. And many of them were coming together in ways that young Hurtado had never really witnessed back home.

It was in this atmosphere that Hurtado and Hernan Pinilla, a Colombian, finally created the band Huayucaltia (an Aztec word meaning unity and brotherhood) in 1985. At first, the ensemble performed social-political lyrics against a backdrop of largely traditional Latin rhythms. But by the time Mexican-born Antonio Ezkauriatza and Cindy Harding, of the United States, had joined the following year, Huayucaltia had already started adding modern elements of jazz to the mix. Since then, the quintet’s dreamy multicultural stew has earned a steadily growing following on the local club scene.

“We are very lucky to be here at this time,” Hurtado says. “Cindy is American, but the rest of us are all immigrants. We would have never learned to play all these instruments or rhythms from our neighboring countries. We learned them here.”

“It’s unlikely this kind of thing would have happened elsewhere,” says Keith Holzman, president of ROM Records, which has released Huayucaltia’s albums since 1988.

Huayucaltia’s newest record, “Amazonas,” documents another step in the band’s continuing evolution. The traditional Central and South American elements remain the dominant musical characteristics, but there’s also an increased use of electric bass, synthesizer and improvisation that leads the music in a more aggressive, jazzier direction.

Unlike the band’s first two releases, “Amazonas” features songs that are mostly less than five minutes long, in part an effort to win some radio airplay.

As for the use of synthesizers and other electronics, Ezkauriatza says: “We’re very careful of blending it, so the technology is not upfront. It gives a layer effect in the background.”

It was the prospect of experimentation and improvisation that had originally attracted Ezkauriatza, who had played in traditional Latin folk bands for years, to Huayucaltia. “Anybody can play what others have done,” he says. “The trick comes in producing original material.”

Holzman was moved to sign the group to his independent label when he first saw a local club performance in 1988, and released Huayucaltia’s “Caminos” debut later that same year. “It was the unique nature of the instrumentations, the nature of the melodies and how extraordinarily well that they play a wide variety of instruments,” he says. “They managed to fuse tradition into what is a totally contemporary experience.”

Singing the occasional vocal part among the instrumental tracks on the new record is Harding, who married Hurtado in 1988 and is an expert on Latin music. Her father is a professor of Latin American history at Cal State Los Angeles who spends his free time playing the music of eastern Mexico. She is a classically trained flutist, but also learned to play a variety of Latin instruments while studying Spanish in Mexico City as a teen-ager.

“While I love traditional music, and I love to perform it, it feels more natural for me to play this blend that we’re doing now,” she says. “I feel it’s a better expression of my talent.

“There is a focus in this band on improvisation,” Harding adds. “And each member of the group brings something different to the composition, to the arrangement. And that makes each time we perform a piece exciting because each time it’s different.”

Although Huayucaltia has yet to tour outside the country and its albums remain unavailable in Latin America, the band has won praise from critics there, Hurtado says.

“Traditional music has been there forever, so when they hear this fresh approach to Latin American music, it’s a little different. I think we approach it in a more cosmopolitan way because we have traveled a lot.”

Huayucaltia performs at 8 and 10:30 p.m. June 19 and 20 at At My Place, 1026 Wilshire Blvd., Santa Monica. Tickets $12.50. Call (310) 451-8596.

NEW VOCALS: Another collection of promising young singers will perform in Beverly Hills on Tuesday evening in a showcase sponsored by the Opera Buffs, the local opera support group.

Directed by Mona Land, “Future Divas and Divos” will present a quintet of area singers, including mezzo Michelle DeYoung, a student at Cal State Northridge who is also among this year’s winners at the New York Metropolitan Opera auditions.

Others performing in the 500-seat Beverly Hills Presbyterian Church are Richard Bernstein and Paula Rasmussen of the Los Angeles Opera, Brian Asawa of the San Francisco Opera, and Seung Choy, who will make his performance debut.

“They have extraordinary voices, and they have extraordinary stage presence and the will and the determination to make it,” said Rena Cohen, Opera Buffs president. “You need all that. You have to be willing to learn musicianship and vocal technique; you’ve got to have that tremendous drive to succeed. These kids have it all.”

“Future Divas and Divos,” a showcase of young opera vocalists, will be presented at 8 p.m. Tuesday at Beverly Hills Presbyterian Church at Rodeo Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard. Tickets $10. Call (310) 826-8000.