Grupo Fantasma bringing the funk back to San Antonio
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Grupo Fantasma blends smooth guitar riffs with infectious conga beats that you can feel deep within your pelvis.
The group's haunting rhythms transport you to a sweaty illegal nightclub — because those are the best kind — hidden in the woods where you can leave your inhibitions at the door and just groove. They're pretty much funktastic.
The Austin-based Grupo Fantasma has swooped into the pop-culture subconscious as the hardest-working Latin orchestra you may have heard. The group's most recent album, the 2008 Grammy-nominatedSonidos Gold, spent several months in the Top 10 of the College Music Journal world charts and garnered the attention of Prince.
Prince, you say? Guitar player Adrian Quesada explained that Grupo Fantasma knew someone who worked with the pop legend and sent a CD to Prince's management.
“We never heard anything for a long time, we never really expected anything from it, but then we knew he had a club in Las Vegas, and he had a Latin night,” Quesada said. “Out of the blue, we just got contacted to go play Las Vegas, and next thing you know, we're playing there every week.”
Nine years ago, in a city not so far away, a grupo was born.
“We used to just be a group of friends that used to play together all the time, and we had two bands, one called The Blimp and one called The Blue Noise Band, and we would just play shows together and basically just kind of hang out,” Quesada said. “We were a group of musicians who were friends and had similar tastes and essentially used to hang out all the time. So that's how the band came out of that little scene.”
Quesada also works with Martin Perna of the Brooklyn-based Afrobeats band Antibalas.
Grupo Fantasma has performed at the New Orleans Jazz Festival, Bonnaroo, Montreal Jazz Festival and North Sea Jazz Festival in the Netherlands. The horn section has performed with Prince at Coachella and on the “Tonight Show” with Jay Leno, as well as with Spoon.
“Our horn section played with Spoon, they actually play with them quite a bit,” Quesada said. “Austin's a small music scene; it's a really close-knit music scene, so you just kind of meet people along the way from all different, sort of, genres.”
Sonidos Gold is infused with groovy tunes and funk-infested jams that represent the diversity of the 11-piece ensemble. The name Grupo Fantasma came out of a night sitting around drinking, Quesada said.
“We really just kind of laugh, a lot,” Quesada said. “We make fun of each other a lot and really just kind of not take ourselves too seriously. I think at the end of the day, there are a lot of personalities in the band, a lot of big, big personalities, and we're pretty low on ego.”
Jordan Gass-Poore | 210SA contributor
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