1	Film & TV Empire director Franc. Reyes is back with two new movies this fall: Illegal Tender and The Ministers. read more...
2	Music The B-Side Players become A-List artists this month with their new album. read more...
3	Books Literature turns an eye to Mexico this month with three titles: The Savage Detectives, The Life and Times of Mexico and former President Vicente Fox’s Revolution of Hope. read more...
4	Calendar Our monthly list of premier events throughout the U.S. read more...

MUSIC

The Fifth Element
On the move for over a decade, The B-Side Players continue to shake body and mind.

The elaborately dread-locked, bearded and tattooed artist Karlos Paez, leader of San Diego’s B-Side Players, fingers the neck of a charango, a small Venezuelan guitar with a gourd-shaped body. He is in the lobby of a South Beach hotel, a temporary stop for Paez who is on his way to New York City, where the band will play the Latin Alternative Music Conference.
On his left arm is a tattoo he points out. “It’s the Aztec symbol for movement; it is their fifth element, which is music and dance and which is just as important as earth, sky, fire and water,” he says. The symbol could not have found a more appropriate home.
Since 1994, the B-Side Players have built a career and an identity based on this element of creation. “We pretty much dedicated our first years to hitting the road hard, non-stop,” says Paez after putting down the guitar. His soft-spoken laid back manner is pure West Coast, and may be a key to the B-Side Players’ longevity despite their grueling cross country touring schedule.
Fire in the Youth is the group’s seventh release and first with boutique label Concord Picante, known for its high quality Latin Jazz recordings. The band’s bilingual cross-cultural sound, in keeping with the spirit of movement, draws from influences around the world, finding its still center in the twin powers of Paez’s songwriting and the octet’s hypnotic jam band grooves.
Throughout the 11 tracks that comprise Fire in the Youth is everything from reggae, to salsa to cumbia, and sometimes all within the same song. It’s what the Fania All-Stars might have sounded like had they spent a decade rehearsing in Kingston, Jamaica, picking up a strong contact high, as well as heavy doses of English.
“It used to hurt us in the past when people wanted to categorize our music and were confused about what genre to lock us into, whereas now it’s opening many doors and pushing us in different directions,” says Paez. Indeed, as Paez notes, the group is as at home opening for reggae legends The Wailers (which they have done twice) as they are playing a salsa festival, a rock show or a Latin funk night. And interestingly, the band kicks off a tour this month with Salvador Santana.
It’s important to note that while a B-Side Players’ gig isn’t complete unless one is on one’s feet and dancing, this is idea-driven, even spiritual music. Just a cursory glance at the titles on Fire in the Youth speaks to this fact: Unplug this Armageddon, Nuestras Demandas—which has emerged as an anthem of the pro-immigrant movement—and Warrior Culture, to name just three.
Paez picks up the folkloric guitar again and plays an offbeat reggae-inflected, two-chord groove on the instrument, humming the figure of a melody between the changes. “A lot of times people just don’t know,” he says. “They think we are up there singing about shaking asses, but really we’re talking about shaking your mind. We are not preaching, though, telling people who to vote for, but we are hip to what is happening politically in the world.”