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Making Movies Goes Deeper With Array Of Influences From The Americas (And Elsewhere)

Courtesy photo

The Kansas City-based band Making Movies comes to Wichita this weekend for a live performance. Its founding member explains that the group is interested in bridging a variety of musical styles in the hope of making something new.

Enrique Chi had had quite a bit of success as a rock musician by his late teens. The Kansas City-based guitarist and vocalist played with a band that had landed a record deal and was already attracting attention for his unique style of playing. But playing rock shows night after night wasn’t satisfying. He says that he quickly decided that rock music, at least at that time, began to sound the same to him. He began reconnecting to the Latin music he’d heard in his youth and paying close attention to how it was composed and performed.

“If you’re at a club, and they’re playing an old salsa orquesta, like a 10-piece band through a big, loud speaker,” he says, “you really don’t hear all 10 pieces. You hear the bass, you hear when the horns stab, you hear the moment when it’s quiet, when the piano’s really driving or the folkloric Latin American guitarist. But the 10 pieces kind of come in and out of the forefront when you’ve got something like that cranked in a dance environment. I had an idea, ‘I want to make a band that’s like that!’ But it’s also like a rock ‘n’ roll band where you can hear the individual people the whole time.”

Chi continued exploring and discovered more connections between rock, Latin and Caribbean music.

“It makes sense,” he says. “The blues was the genesis of rock ‘n’ roll, the blues was something that the slaves adapted, mixing with some European influences and in Latin America the cumbias in Panama and the sons from Cuba, all of that stuff is a similar mix.”

As Making Movies began performing in Kansas City and then around the Midwest, the members quickly discovered that what people seemed to love most about the band was that it was easy to dance to.

“The more intricate that our rhythms got, because we were studying the deeper traditional rhythms, the more universal the music became, the more it didn’t matter if there was an American person in front of us, or if it was a Hispanic person or an African-American person,” he says. “I could see that when we really dug into those rhythms everybody moved. And, as a performer, it’s like, ‘That’s the point!’ The point is to have people enjoy something together.”

Making Movies released the album A La Deriva in 2013 to some acclaim. That record, as well as the band’s upcoming 2016 album, was produced by Steve Berlin of Los Lobos. Chi says that they met when Making Movies opened for the veteran L.A. act one night. Although he and his bandmates had become accustomed to headliners showing up to the venue long after Making Movies had left the stage. The members of Los Lobos, however, were onsite when Making Movies played and so a new collaborative partnership was formed.

“That night we got lucky and for whatever reason they were already at the venue,” he says. “Steve heard us play and really loved it. He asked us, ‘Hey, are you guys looking for a producer? I’d love to produce your next record if you guys are into it.’ And we were. He caught us right at the time. We were writing stuff to make a recording.

“Working with him turned out to be a really defining moment for our band,” he continues. “And not just because of the prestige of working with someone so respected as Steve. Everyone knows Steve, and everyone loves Steve in the musical world. But for us it was not only a defining moment because of the prestige. It was defining because he gave us the confidence to really be ourselves.

"We thought a producer would normally lean you toward more concise ideas or more predictable ideas. We would often self-edit our weird ideas out before we had worked with Steve. We thought, ‘Well, we like this but probably nobody else would. This is just too weird.’ Steve opened the door to say, ‘No, go deeper.’”

Making Movies performs at Pandoras in Old Town on Saturday evening.

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Jedd Beaudoin is the host of Strange Currency. Follow him on Twitter @JeddBeaudoin.

To contact KMUW News or to send in a news tip, reach us at news@kmuw.org.

Jedd Beaudoin is host/producer of the nationally syndicated program Strange Currency. He has also served as an arts reporter, a producer of A Musical Life and a founding member of the KMUW Movie Club. As a music journalist, his work has appeared in Pop Matters, Vox, No Depression and Keyboard Magazine.