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Also this issue: Erratic Thriller Vinyl Smarts Between Language Arts Summer Monster Mickey Hart and Bembˇ Orisha Cornelius |
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August 8-14, 2002
music
Willie and Lobo pull the world out of little wooden boxes.
The unique, sometimes otherworldly sounding music created by Willie Royal and Wolfgang “Lobo” Fink has been called everything from “nuevo flamenco” to “world jazz.”
But Royal, the Texas-born, violin-playing half of Willie and Lobo (the latter is a German-born flamenco guitarist), has his own name for it: Gypsy boogaloo. "That, to me, describes it best, but I don't think it's easily described," the 48-year-old musician says from his home in Sarasota, Fla.
The Bridges of Madison County author Robert James Waller gave it a shot, actually opening his 1995 novel Puerto Vallarta Squeeze with a description of Willie and Lobo playing "Tight and wild, all at the same time."
With its mix of influences (Moorish, Mexican, Turkish) the duo's brand of world music confounds listeners in its ability to both relax and excite, sometimes simultaneously. "When we get going, the plug's in the socket and the music just takes over," Royal says. "Onstage, there's like a transmission switch that goes on between us and the audience. It never fails." The musical alchemy on records and onstage is so strong, Royal says, in part because of their shared love of gypsy-influenced and flamenco music. "My dad was in the service, so we lived in Turkey when I was a child. Those were the Œsponge years' of my life, as I call them, and I just soaked up that culture," Royal says. "Plus, you don't escape that music. So when I linked up with Lobo, it was like he played the chord that unlocked it in me."
The unlikely pair met nearly 20 years ago, when they were both musicians at the same small restaurant near Puerto Vallarta. The two men jammed occasionally over the years, finally joining forces in 1990. A self-produced live recording of one of their early sessions, dubbed Playing Hard, caught the attention of the music industry in 1991. Since then the duo has released seven studio albums and one live record, last year's Live in Concert (Narada), recorded at a small club in Canada.
Some of Willie and Lobo's songs, like the stirring "Midnight Dream," have a mystical, atmospheric vibe; others, like "Moorish Reunion" (which can run nearly 10 minutes onstage) has Royal twisting his violin into indescribable, almost unearthly sounds. "It just looks like two guys with two little wooden boxes up there, but we're like a whole band," Royal says. "People are always amazed -- we're still amazed -- by the sounds that come out of those two instruments."
Willie & Lobo perform Tue., Aug. 13, 8:30 p.m., $15, at The Tin Angel, 20 S. Second St., 215-928-0770, www.tinangel.com.
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