During my time in LA, I had the pleasure of forming some musical partnerships that will be around for a lifetime. Looming tall among them are the members of my band, Heliotrope, which went through several incarnations but always included bassist Pancho Tomaselli and drummer Paul Gonzalez. Together we explored radically different kinds of music, pushing each other into uncharted territory where rock, funk, electronica and world music collide. At our gigs you were as likely to hear an obscure Stevie Wonder cover, a high adrenalin Latin jam, a sample-fueled, Portishead-inspired modern pop song, or a Hendrixian guitar blowout. After we included Colombian percussionist Shangó Dely, there was a much stronger African element in the mix, and Eli Brueggemann brought layers of deep texture and searching jazz sensibility with his virtuosic keyboard playing.

Whether playing ambient instrumental music in Woody Harrelson’s “O2 Bar” on Sunset Blvd while patrons got high sucking on hookahs – of oxygen – or doing our full-band thing at the über-eclectic Temple Bar in Santa Monica, we always found a way to win over audiences with our telepathic band interplay and our sheer love of music.

It was always our strength and our weakness: we wanted to play everything. But each of us agrees that it’s some of the best fun we ever had, and always look for any opportunity to play together again.

So… why “Heliotrope?”

Well for starters, it’s the name of a street in my old neighborhood of Koreatown. Every time I passed the street sign I thought, that’s a band name right there. (Many would later disagree, chiding us with alternate names like Helicopter, Hovercraft, Hello kitty and so on. We stood our ground of course.) But the actual meaning of the word is even better: A heliotrope is a particular flower, but more generally any plant or flower that follows the sun across the sky, literally facing it and turning as the sun moves… then turning back around at night to wait for it to rise again. What could be cooler than that?

Anyway, I eventually had to get out of LA to get some perspective, but the more time goes by, the more I feel it’s important to get this music out there. I’ve assembled the recordings we made together and made them available as an mp3 album download here on the site (click the music tab and look for Heliotrope). Hope you enjoy the tunes…

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