In an interview with KGNU’s Bruce Trujillo, La Lom discusses their debut album, the influences behind their music, and their journey as a band. The group, based in Los Angeles, draws from diverse sounds like cumbia, chicha, and 60s rock, blending them into their unique style. They emphasize their love for danceable rhythms and how they translate the energy of live shows into the recording studio (Interview date: 8/9/2024)
Bruce Trujillo: La Lom on KGNU’s Afternoon Sound Alternative. That’s “’72 Monte Carlo”. This comes from the debut album, out today. La Lom performed last night to a sold out Globe Hall, and they’re performing at the Boulder Theater this evening.
La Lom are my guest DJs for this afternoon. Welcome to KGNU, my fellows. I’m very excited to have y’all. Debut album out now. Congratulations. How’s it feel?
La Lom (Jake): Very exciting. We’re very glad to be sitting here with this situation.
Bruce Trujillo: 10 o’clock last night, came out on streaming services here in Colorado cause we have that advantage. So about an hour after y’all took the stage. It felt like big feelings were happening as you’re all performing to the sold out theater. Tell me about performing in Denver. This is the second time this year you’ve been here too.
La Lom (Jake): I believe it’s the third. We actually did a private party as well for the RedLine Gallery. We were here earlier this year with Cory Wong.
Bruce Trujillo: Oh, okay. That makes sense.
La Lom (Zac): Yeah, it just feels like every time we play there, it’s very enthusiastic crowds that like to dance. And that’s our favorite thing to do – to play for dancers.
Bruce Trujillo: Awesome. So I’m excited to talk about this album. I’m excited to talk about your history together. We’ve got influences coming from Buenos Aires, Durango, Mexico. Y’all are from Los Angeles. You got your start in the Roosevelt Hotel in 2019. Can you talk about coming together as La Lom?
La Lom (Zac): Nick got that first gig for us. He pulled us all together. Jake and I had known each other since we were teenagers, so we had a lot of experience playing together and a little bit of repertoire between us that we brought to the table. We started playing at the Roosevelt. We were playing three to four nights a week, three hours a night. It was a lot of time to get a bunch of material together.
We started out playing a lot of covers and then also just making stuff up on the spot. A lot of the first music we played was covers of old classic Latin music from the thirties. Carlos Gardel, Trio Los Panchos, more romantic ballads and those kinds of tunes. Then we started playing for more dancers, and started bringing in more stuff with energy, stuff that gets people moving. We played a lot of cumbia, and a lot of 60’s soul tunes that we were doing covers of. We just went from playing this background stuff at a hotel to playing in bars in front of a bunch of dancers. It really quickly took off from there and now we’re touring all over the place.
Bruce Trujillo: That’s exciting. The influences, I feel, are obvious. At first, you’re hearing that cumbia, the chicha, I feel like a little bit of rockabilly is in there, but then you get in and you hear these covers too. I was at the RedLine one and I was secretly hoping y’all would have played Selena last night.
Tell me about morphing these songs that are well known, especially among a Latin community, into your own sound and then being able to riff off of that and build your own music.
La Lom (Zac): I think the cumbia that we were interested in when we started playing that stuff was a lot of the music from Peru. The chicha, it’s electric guitar led, usually. Really cool tunes that are influenced by a lot of rock and roll too. It’s like taking old Peruvian melodies, mixing it with the Colombian cumbia beat, and then adding in a lot of elements of psychedelic 60s and 70s rock and roll. We were really interested in that stuff and we used to learn a lot of those tunes. As we started playing for dancers around L.A., people would request a lot of cumbia songs that are really popular in L.A. A lot of that stuff is from Mexico, a lot of the cumbia sonidera and stuff that gets played on the radio in L.A. We’re very lucky in L.A., we have our own cumbia station, Cumbia y Más 103.1. We started working up a lot of those tunes that people were requesting and listening to the radio all the time and finding old songs to work up new arrangements of. That’s a lot of how we developed our sound – in the middle of a set of a bunch of covers, we just started making stuff up that was in the vein of the covers we were doing.
Bruce Trujillo: Easy to build off of that. Your musical background is steeped in that Latin music. It’s steeped in a lot of artistry as well. So talk about growing up in Los Angeles, performing in East Los and the family ties you have that connect to this type of music.
La Lom (Zac): L.A. is a super diverse place, obviously. There’s a lot of different music that we grew up around, more than just Latin music, too. There’s a really great collective of musicians called the Blasting Company that I grew up playing with. It’s a group of guys that are all playing different bands. The Blasting Company is one of them, but they have all these different offshoots. They play Eastern European brass music, old jazz. A couple of the guys started a group that does norteño music. Shout out to Carlos e Charlos. For a while they were doing chicha and cumbia and some of the guys play rockabilly and country music. I’ve always been interested in all these different styles of music. I think with this band, it was always important to us to be really open minded about the styles and not think too much about genre and just draw from everything and make it our own.
La Lom (Nick): I was definitely inspired by my grandma and I really wanted to create a Latin band. I’d been trying to for a few years. When I met Jake and Zac, I found the right guys to create this hybrid sound that was influenced by the old school Latin music from the 30s and 40s and then combine it with the 90s cumbia. It was a rare thing. It’s hard to find the right guys to play with.
I just got really lucky to play with these guys. Zac was saying we’ve been playing together since we were 16 years old. In Los Angeles with all these different types of music, in one night you’ll hear a brass band that’s playing Eastern European music, to a ranchera band, then go dancing to a jazz band all in one night, then being called in for gigs when somebody can’t make it for any of those bands and making sure that you have the chops. You have this really interesting combination of styles that are all coming together in Los Angeles.
Bruce Trujillo: Each of you seem pretty masterful at your instruments as well, and we’re going to get into gear. I’m really excited to talk about your instrumentation, but how long have each of you been playing what you play? Maybe this is a good time to also introduce what you play. The guitar is front and center, you hear it, but then the percussion holds everything together. The bass underlying all of those things. If you see La Lom on stage, you’re going to see a couple of different options for each song. Introduce your instruments and then how long you’ve been playing and the gear that you brought along.
La Lom (Zac): I play guitar with La Lom. I’ve been playing guitar since I was a little kid. I grew up with it, my dad’s a musician. I primarily consider myself more of a banjo or mandolin player. I play all these different things like fiddle and stuff too.
Bruce Trujillo: Your father is prominent in the bluegrass scene in California.
La Lom (Zac): Yeah, so I grew up playing a lot of bluegrass with him. I was usually playing banjo or mandolin and he’d play guitar. But I’ve always played guitar too. I play all these different instruments. I like them all equally, I use them for different things. The guitar I mostly play with La Lom is a National guitar from the early 60s and a K from the same time period.
Bruce Trujillo: I feel like that tone really follows through. Percussion.
La Lom (Nick): I’m Nick, I play drums. I grew up playing the congas – I started when I was eight. I had a mentor named Roberto Miranda who taught me all the Latin percussion instruments, but I gravitated toward the congas because I really like the melodic aspect of them. They’re just very pretty. You can make beautiful melodies with them. So I started with that. My favorite congas are Gon Bops which were made in California. I like a lot of the drums from the 40s. Leedy are the ones I prefer.
La Lom (Jake): And you do that very special thing where you combine the conga with the kit, you do a real contraption kit.
La Lom (Nick): Yeah, that happened naturally from us playing gigs. First it was just the congas and then I slowly started to add all the other things when I was like, I just want to make a fuller sound and see what we can do. We added the bass drum so people have something to dance to.
Bruce Trujillo: And then performing, you’re using your hand and you’re using a maraca like on top of all of that.
La Lom (Nick): Yeah. Because in cumbia there’s normally three percussionists. In most Latin music, there’s a lot, like three to four percussionists playing all these different instruments. So I was like, I got to octopus it and try to play all of them. And they would be like, Nick, come on, you got to keep the clave. I was like, okay, I can do this, I can do this.
La Lom (Jake): I’m Jake. I’m the bass player. I switched to bass when I was about 17, 18 years old, so I could keep playing with Zac. There were a lot of good guitar players, so I moved over. Best decision of my life. For my gear this time around, I have a bass from a shop in Pasadena called Fantastic Musical Instruments. Tom’s a real character, he and his daughter run the shop, and it’s a beautiful off white bass.
I actually went in there and was like, I think I’m gonna get a bass that goes with the band, and he’s like, how about that one? And it was exactly what I was looking for. And then I’ve got a Fender P Bass, which was something that I actually switched to. I was playing old K basses my whole life. With cumbia, you need such a rich, robust sound that’s given to you on the P Bass, whereas the older K’s, which I loved, just didn’t sound as good with what we were doing. So that’s why I switched over.
Bruce Trujillo: Nick, you made a great point with the cumbias. There’s so many people doing so many different things within the band. You’re a three piece and somehow making all these sounds happen. You’re also somehow making the guitar go along with the vocals on some of these songs, but still keeping the rhythm. So tell me about making that full sound as a three piece and really just making it happen.
La Lom (Zac): Yeah, I think that’s something that’s still developing. When we started out, we were playing a lot of songs where there’s piano, strings, a ton of percussion, a bunch of different things going on at once, and singing. So we’ve always tried to find a way to make it all work. If we’re covering a song where they’re singing, I’ll really try to play it the way this singer sings it and then differentiate between that and the instrumental sections. I think of them as very different things.
La Lom (Jake): I’ve always thought that Zac has a real talent for melody, coming out of the folk music that you grew up playing. All that stuff is very melody driven so even when you’re going off into solos you’re still thinking in those parameters.
Bruce Trujillo: Absolutely. Alright, let’s hear another song off of the album and then I want to get to some of these songs that you’ve written. Y’all picked. Here are some of these influences that you have. We’re gonna hear “Danza de LA LOM” from the debut album out today here on the Afternoon Sound Alternative.
“Tema de los Jóvenes Enamorados”, one of the picks from my guests this afternoon, La Lom, that is Los Belkings. Nick, you chose this one. You play percussion. Tell me why you chose this band, this song.
La Lom (Nick): Yeah, Los Belkings. They’re a band from Peru. They started in 1964. I was attracted to them because they really carry that California sound even though they’re obviously very far away, and very inspired by the rock and roll from the 60s. There’s a lot of influence that we have similarities in. I love their melodies.
Bruce Trujillo: We’re sitting here listening to this and I can see you playing along. Are you listening to different types of percussion as you’re going through your day? Are you thinking about how you can add that into La Lom or is it just, oh, that sounds sick, I like it. What’s the listening like now that you’re in the band and this far in?
La Lom (Nick): Yeah, for them, it creates this flow feeling for me. Some of the ballads that we do capture a similar feeling for me, so I think it’s just something to relax to, something to cruise to. I love driving in L.A., in California. So it’s perfect driving music.
Bruce Trujillo: A lot of the songs that we are going to hear this afternoon are along the same vein. Tell me about discovering 60s cumbia, 60s chicha, rock and roll. Why is that such an influence? Why do you love it so much?
La Lom (Zac): I think the cumbia rhythm is so danceable. It’s always really fun for us to play for dancers and get people moving and stuff. So I think that’s a big part of it.
La Lom (Jake): I think just the basic cumbia bass line. If we’re playing a song and it’s just Nick and I playing percussion and bass and that they hear that, there’s something really instinctual. You want to groove to it. And so we felt the same way when we first heard this music. Because we are musicians, we just threw ourselves head first into it.
La Lom (Nick): For me, it’s a very inspiring rhythm to write melodies over. I start hearing things when I hear that. It’s almost like a galloping sort of rhythm. It reminds me of a horse galloping. A lot of old American Western music has a similar kind of feel to it. I grew up playing banjo with the claw hammer rhythm, which is really similar to that. I think I’ve always been attracted to that sound and rhythm.
Bruce Trujillo: Debut album, The Los Angeles League of Musicians, out today from my guests, La Lom. Talk about going into the recording studio. Getting a start as a live band is different and you’re really cutting your chops that way. Going into the studio, how do you get that sound to transfer and get that feeling onto record?
La Lom (Zac): I think that our philosophy about recording is to, at first, basically do what we do live when we’re playing. So we’re all in the same room, we’re all playing live together. It’s very similar, really, to playing live. I guess the main difference is, we would record these basic tracks like that live and then we added on a lot of interesting sounds layering over it, like keyboards and sound effects and additional percussion.
La Lom (Jake): We were very lucky to work with our producer, Elliot Bergman, who was in Wild Belle before this. He really pushed us to explore the studio as an instrument, as people say. So really trying out different ideas and approaches to what was going to go on top of the live performance. And that really pushed the record into what it is now.
Bruce Trujillo: That’s amazing. the video for “‘72 Monte Carlo”, which we kicked off the show with, that’s also out now. We do see another musician, another keyboard player. So talk about some of these other musicians that you were able to work with on the record.
La Lom (Zac): Yeah that’s Joshy Soul playing the keyboard on that. On the record we have Dominique Rodriguez playing some additional percussion. Cody Farwell plays really great steel and some electric bass too. Joshua Kaufman, who’s the founder of that group, the Blasting Company I was talking about earlier, plays some piano in there.
La Lom (Jake): Dominique also plays with that group.
La Lom (Zac): Yeah, that’s right. He plays with that group too. There’s a lot of really great musicians. Some of the keyboards we added ourselves. Elliott, who produced it, did some of that stuff too.
La Lom (Jake): I was going to say that a lot of the bird sounds, Elliot was part of a box set that won a Grammy for bird song. It’s funny, I dare say he was bird brained.
La Lom (Zac): That’s also a theme in a lot of the tropical cumbia stuff, especially from Peru. They often have bird sound effects.
Bruce Trujillo: Yeah, those natural sounds are in there, you’re right. Listening to the album last night as it came out, it was like, some of those things that you don’t get to capture live, which were really nice touches. What studio did you record at?
La Lom (Jake): We did some of the basic tracking, the live stuff, at a studio in Cypress Park called Big Bad Sound. And then we did the rest of the recording at Elliot’s two studios. One in Los Angeles called Figueroa Studios and one in Chicago.
Bruce Trujillo: And there’s photos of the recording process on y’all’s Instagram, @the_lalom. We’re going to get back into the music, Sensation Latina is next. This is your pick. Talk about “En Mi Escritorio”.
La Lom (Zac): That song, from my understanding, is a really old folk song. That group is from Ecuador. The song comes from the huayno tradition, which is a style of music from the mountains in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia. And a lot of those melodies from that music really influenced chicha. A lot of the Peruvian bands were combining the sounds of those old huayno melodies with the Colombian cumbia rhythm, and we’ve always really liked that old huayno music. This song has something we’re always really attracted to, which is like these kind of really uplifting sounding songs that will go from major to minor and also have a really deep sadness to them.
The words to this song- this guy is talking about being at his desk writing a letter to someone saying he’s leaving, and it’s vague about where he’s going, if it’s the afterlife or if he’s just going somewhere else or he’s not going to return. It’s just a really heavy feeling to it.
Bruce Trujillo: I’m Bruce Trujillo in a guest DJ session with La Lom. They performed last night at Globe Hall to a sold out crowd and are performing tonight at the Fox Theater up in Boulder. Let’s talk about “Hindou” real quick before we get into the details for tonight. Why did you pick this song?
La Lom (Zac): Lecuona Cuban Boys had a big influence on us, especially when we were starting out at the Roosevelt Hotel. It’s a historic hotel with 20 foot palm trees in the room that we were playing in. Drawing upon that style of music just felt right to be playing in the room. It felt like we were calling upon the ghosts that were there. That song itself was recorded in ‘36. The band name was after a composer named Ernesto Lecuona. And he actually left, he never played with the band. He’d opened for them, gave them his name, and then went back to Cuba. He took them all over to Europe, where they stayed from ‘32 to ‘39. I found out about the group through a friend of Zac’s. Frank Fairfield sold me one of their records with Maria Belén Chacón on it, which is another song we used to do at the Roosevelt. But the way that song feels and the timelessness of it, I think is really what drew us to that song. We even did a version of it at one point.
La Lom (Nick): We actually do have a recorded version of it that we’ve never put on anything.
Bruce Trujillo: Oh, you got another 45 coming out soon.
La Lom (Nick): We just might.
Bruce Trujillo: Are there any songs from the Roosevelt era that you just hate playing now that you would never want to revisit?
La Lom (Zac): I mean we were trying out new things almost every day and not all of them made the cut. But we could tell pretty quickly if it wasn’t working.
La Lom (Jake): And they could be songs we love. We tried several times to get “The Loco-Motion” into our sound and it just didn’t translate well for whatever reason.
La Lom (Zac): Yeah. It’s like a lot of songs don’t necessarily work that well instrumentally, or at least we couldn’t find a way to make ’em work.
Bruce Trujillo: Yeah, making everything instrumental for the most part, being able to translate it and especially make it into more of the cumbia/chicha sound. Are there any songs that you’re listening to now that you’re like, oh, that might be cool to try out after tour or something like that?
La Lom (Zac): Actually that one that we played, “E Mi Escritorio”, we’ve been trying to work on a version of that.
Bruce Trujillo: Playing tonight at the Fox Theater up in Boulder. This will be your first time in Boulder?
La Lom (Zac): Yeah. First time playing in Boulder.
Bruce Trujillo: Awesome. And Denver’s Ritmo Cascabel will be opening. That’s going to be fantastic. Great pairing. Talk to me about how this tour has been going, leading up to today with the album release.
La Lom (Zac): It’s been going great. We had the opportunity to play some really great festivals. Maybe this was our first tour of a bunch of festivals that we’ve done.
La Lom (Jake): Started in Nelsonville, Ohio, and then got to go play at the Newport Folk Fest, which was a real dream come true.
Bruce Trujillo: That’s amazing. That’s huge! And then headed to Telluride also, for a jazz festival. So for the show this evening, what would somebody expect to come and see if they haven’t seen you before?
La Lom (Zac): I think we’re probably going to play a lot of the songs from our brand new record. Maybe all of them, maybe we’ll just play them in the order of the record. That might be cool. We always change it up a lot. We have so many songs in our repertoire, whether they’re originals or covers or ones that we’re still working on. We’re always playing things that are unfinished. So yeah, we’re just gonna mix it up. Even if you were at the show in Denver, it’s gonna be totally different tonight, the one thing I would come expecting to do is dance.
Bruce Trujillo: Absolutely. Yeah. You’re jamming on stage, and I feel like that might come from a tradition of folk music and getting into it. Do you find yourself doing that often on stage, or are you moving more towards playing your songs?
La Lom (Nick): Zac keeps us on our toes.
La Lom (Zac): Yeah, Nick’s told me a lot, you come from a tradition of improvisation with percussion, right?
La Lom (Nick): Yeah, exactly. Afro-Cuban percussion, it’s very improvisational based.
La Lom (Jake): Nick and I met playing jazz.
Bruce Trujillo: So it’s a very comfortable place to be.
La Lom (Zac): Yeah, and we get really inspired by dancers, so when people are dancing and everyone’s having a good time and everything, it will inspire melodies and beats and stuff. So that’s usually when we make up the most stuff is when things are going really well.
La Lom (Jake): You’ll hear jam bands talk about the back and forth that they can have with an audience, and that it becomes one show that includes everybody. I don’t think of us as a jam band, but I’ve definitely had that experience with a good audience.
Bruce Trujillo: We called you an emo band, a jam band, a whole bunch of things. Make sure you’re checking it out this evening at the Fox Theater up in Boulder. One thing that you mentioned last night, also on stage, is being inspired by the places you go, the cities, neighborhoods. So talk about how scenery and place finds its way into your music.
La Lom (Zac): Yeah. In L.A. I guess we have all these different influences. A lot of ’em are just stuff you hear on the streets walking around L.A., so that’s a big influence. I’m always listening to the radio and music I hear around when I travel too.
I didn’t grow up hearing much bachata music, from the Dominican Republic. But when we were just in New York, I was hearing a bunch of it on the radio. And I think last time we were there, I woke up in the morning and heard it playing out of someone’s taxi cab outside my hotel room. And I’ve been listening to that music a lot now and getting really interested. Which I wouldn’t know if I didn’t go to New York and play gigs.
La Lom (Jake): Another example of that is, we had some friends who have a little coffee shop and art space in Montebello. They invited us to play a show there. We had a wonderful time and it was so inspiring to us that we named a song after it. It’s called “Moonlight Over Montebello” on the new record, Los Angeles League of Musicians.
La Lom (Zac): You’ll notice that a lot of the titles of the songs on our record are named after streets, neighborhoods, and places in L.A.
La Lom (Jake): Yeah, Nick’s from San Fernando, so we called it “San Fernando Rose”.
La Lom (Nick): Yeah, San Fernando Valley.
Bruce Trujillo: All right. So we’ve got one more. Again, La Lom this evening at the Fox Theater up in Boulder. Thank you for coming in after the sold out show last night. I really appreciate each of you coming in and congratulations on this debut album. This last one, “Figueroa”.
