When it comes to live music in the city of Miami, it’s hard to make yourself known, considering that it’s a town ruled by the DJ and big club sounds. But, when you have a sound that’s as traditional, yet contemporary, as The Spam All Stars, well…then that’s a whole other story. The band’s had their fair share of success, even nabbing a Latin Grammy nomination in 2003, but the sky’s still the limit for their sound that resembles a jambalaya of genres. Blending funk, jazz, Hip-Hop, electro, Afro-Cuban, Latin jazz, and dub into their mix, The Spam All Stars are a true force to be reckoned with.
NocheLatina recently caught up with The Spam All Stars founder, DJ Le Spam, on the band’s improvisational techniques, their residency at Hoy Como Ayer, and what 2009 has in store for them.
nocheLatina: How did last year treat you guys?
DJ Le Spam: You know, I think that our best year ever was 2006. But then in 2007 we took a little dip, but last year was actually up, but not quite as high as our best year ever. I can’t complain, we worked a lot.
nocheLatina: How does the organization work when you guys structure your songs?
DJ Le Spam: Typically, the way a song will evolve, I’ll get an idea for a bass line, which a lot of times will come from an old record. I don’t really sample stuff anymore, but a lot of times when I’m playing records in the house or I’m out somewhere, sometimes I’ll hear things that maybe I can use as a jump off point. That’s where a lot of bass line ideas come from. So the genesis for most of the tunes is a bass line, but then I’ll go through my library of drummers I’ve recorded, and I’ll find some live drum loops that’ll work with that bass line, and I’ll add drum machine patterns that could be used as alternate breakdowns. We then have a drum and bass pattern that I’ll put on my sampler, and I’ll just tell the rest of the guys ‘OK, it’s this key, this’ll be the cord,’ and we’ll just start playing it. It’ll evolve into a live arrangement. So it starts from a drum loop and it revolves from there.
nocheLatina: What percentage of your shows would you describe as improvisational?
DJ Le Spam: I guess you can say that maybe it’s 40% improvisational. It really depends on the particular show, but at this point we’ve been playing a lot of these tracks for a long time and these guys will have their arrangements worked out. Even transitioning from one song to the next, they’ll be certain transitional beats that go with the tune. So they’ll hear a drum machine sound, or whatever the next drum rhythm pattern is, and they’ll be able to tell from that what the next song is. I guess there’s a lot of intuition at this point since we’ve been doing this for so long. I think one of the challenges of performing as often as we do is that we have to keep the material fresh for yourself, otherwise you can get stuck in a rut creatively.
nocheLatina: You have a very special residency at Hoy Como Ayer. How meaningful is that menu for you guys?
DJ Le Spam: It’s really become our home gig and it’s special for a number of reasons, one being is that it was the residency where people really started finding out a lot about the band. We’ve built an audience, but it’s not like we have a full house every week and making tons of money. But once we started playing Hoy Como Ayer, it was a full house within two months. People were really curious about what we were doing. We recorded a full CD there and that became our best selling CD up until that time. I’m the kind of person that likes places that are out of the way. We control the vibe as far as the music goes and we keep it only vinyl…very old school. For all those reasons I’d be real sad if we had to let that one go.
nocheLatina: As a DJ, what are five records you’d take with you to the grave?
DJ Le Spam: Whatever five records I didn’t have with me the week before. If I played that song the week before, I can’t play it in the same menu. It really depends where I’m going. Hoy Como Ayer, I make sure to keep it strictly old Cuban, vintage salsa, and Latin funk. Whatever I play one week, I’ll go through my records and get all new stuff for the next week. I think I have way too much music to be repeating tunes like that. There are some DJs that have to play to a crowd that expects Top 40, but I’m lucky in that we’ve cultivated something where I can play anything that’s grooving.
nocheLatina: What are your thoughts on the music scene here in Miami?
DJ Le Spam: We’re surviving. I don’t know what else to say about it. We have a handful of venues. It could be better but it could be worse. I think that every year there are new bands that are coming up that are interesting. But it’s definitely relegated to the background when you compare it to the real club scene in Miami. Miami is a dance club driven town, but we’ve worked around that. I can’t complain at all, but I would say that it would be nice if we had a little bit more out of town artists coming through.
nocheLatina: What’s musically exciting to you right now?
DJ Le Spam: I think I’m more excited when I get old records more than anything else. I don’t really have my noise out there to pull something out of the air. I really spend my time finding ‘60s and ‘70s records. That’s kind of what gets me going. Not that it’s specific, but more whatever I stumble across. You never know what you’re going to get.
nocheLatina: What’s your answer to fans out there that still don’t understand why you guys haven’t reached national success, being that you have so much notoriety as a band?
DJ Le Spam: I never imagined us having as much success as we have, even though you can say that it’s not on a national level. This band I started as an experimental little side project while I was playing guitar in other groups. This is something that I can say is mine. Obviously that was a long time ago, and we have a lot more people involved now. Now there are 10 people that are living off of this project and it has come to a point where we just try to keep our business strong. We’ve invested the last four to five years in doing a hell of a lot of touring and that brought me to two new realizations. One, I don’t really want to spend my life on tour. I’ve done that since I was 25-years-old and I don’t enjoy it anymore. And two, we’re extremely lucky that we’ve been able to stay in South Florida and make a living. I’m almost to the point where I’m completely satisfied. We’ve had a lot of really great experiences. At this point I really want to pick and choose the rational things that we do, because I don’t want to keep investing in something where I’m not sure if it’ll work out financially. We’ll keep playing until we can’t anymore.
nocheLatina: Where do you think you’d be without music in your life?
DJ Le Spam: There was a little while there when I kind of finished high school and went to college in Canada. Then I sort of more or less abandoned the idea of doing anything in music. I think that was the part of my life where I was really the most self-destructive. It was a hard time for me. But soon I moved to Miami and decided to make music full-time. I decided to give it ten years and if I didn’t make any progress then I’d put it aside and just get a straight job. But one thing led to another and this started and it began to have a life of its own.
nocheLatina: What can everyone look forward to from you guys this year?
DJ Le Spam: We have a lot of recordings going. I have one album, which is going to be a really pure Cuban rumba percussion records. Very traditional and I’m recording it all in analog. Everything is live but only the background vocals are going to be over-dubbed. That’ll be called Rumberos de la Calle Ocho. There’s also an album in the works, which is basically the Spam All Stars, but a la 1974. It’s like our vibe, but very vintage as far as the instrumentation and the recording techniques. I have three tunes mixed from that project already, and we’re calling that Los Gatos Lecheros. Then we’ll be recording our next album. This year I think we’re going to be doing less touring out of town and more recording here.
For more info on DJ Le Spam and The Spam Allstars, click here.
