Album Notes

THE DEBUT ALBUM from Bay Area heavyweights, BAYONICS.

Here's what was written in an article about the band...

All of a sudden, the recorded music stops. A conga-drum-fueled Latin percussion groove takes over, followed by punchy horns and a driving bass line. The evening's headliner, Bayonics, has taken the stage.
Jairo, Bayonics' lead singer, croons in Spanish, followed by a rapper, June, who lends a sense of urgency to the proceedings. After another salsa-fied percussion break, another emcee, Dreese, lays down his rhymes. The crowd is immediately transfixed. Shouts of "ay ay" fill the air, and when Jairo asks the audience to say "It's all right," they happily comply.
By 1:15 a.m., a full-on reggaeton -- a mixture of cumbia, reggae and rap -- session has developed, in which the sweat-drenched crowd eagerly participates. Jairo dances with audience members as the band chants, this time in English, "Shake that thing, work that thing."
For those used to watching rappers posture onstage by themselves, or backed by a DJ, experiencing a group like Bayonics is a real eye-opener. As Jairo later explains, hip-hop is "definitely the easiest way" to reach young people these days. However, "when you see a live band playing hip-hop, it kinda blows your wig back."
Some call it a movement. Others say it's a revival. But there's no denying that the blending of hip-hop with live instrumentation and a variety of other genres -- including funk, jazz, salsa, reggaeton and rock -- is one of the freshest, most happening things going in the Bay Area's multicultural music scene.
The idea of a band fusing hip-hop with live instrumentation is far from an anomaly in the Bay Area -- it's part of local tradition. During the mid-'90s heyday of the acid-jazz era, groups like Alphabet Soup, the Mo'fessionals, the Broun Fellinis, Mingus Amungus and Jungle Biskit enthralled hipster crowds at such San Francisco venues as the Up & Down Club and the Elbo Room. For these artists, soul, jazz and hip-hop were all interchangeable elements of the musical mix. But though acid jazz eventually fell out of fashion, the music never stopped -- it's just taken on new forms.

As Bayonics' Jairo puts it, "musicianship in itself" qualifies as a movement. Noting that school music programs have been severely underfunded, he laments that today's kids would rather emulate Jay-Z than Sonny Rollins. "Everyone wants to be a rapper. No one wants to pick up the saxophone."
The upshot is that local musicians have had to become more savvy about self-promotion to survive -- MySpace and YouTube have helped in this regard. In the process, the sites have created a community of like-minded artists who have found their groove and are beginning to find their audiences. As Jairo says, Bayonics' monthly residency at the Elbo Room is "packed tight. You can't even move."
Bayonics' multifaceted sound could be seen as the hip-hop generation's answer to the Latin fusion of the '70s -- think Malo and Santana, minus the guitar pyrotechnics and with a more street-wise style. Getting that sound has been an evolutionary process. The band started six years ago as a traditional salsa group, Mala Fama, that emerged out of the Loco Bloco drum ensemble.
"We all grew up doing folkloric music," Jairo explains. After-hours jam sessions led to excursions into funk and hip-hop -- which Jairo says was as much a part of the group members' experience growing up as traditional Latin and Chicano music. Historically, he notes, West Coast rappers like Too , E-40 and Snoop Dogg "all recorded with live music," adding, "The majority of us are Latinos, but the urban culture is definitely us."

(From the article "Hip hop Takes the Stage," by Eric K. Arnold, SF Chronicle 1/14/07)