24 Nov 30th–Dec 6th, 2023 phoenixnewtimes.com phoenix new Times | NEWS | FEATURE | FOOD & DRINK | ARTS & CULTURE | MUSIC | CONCERTS | CANNABIS | THURS 11/30 FRI 12/1 SAT 12/2 MON 12/4 SUN 12/3 MIKE BOURNE SHOwTIME @ 8:00PM THE MARCH DIVIDE wITH R&B HOUSE BAND FEATURINg, gEORgE BOwMAN, CHRISTINA CHIlES, lUCIUS PARR, BAM BAM & MS. lAyDEE JAI SHOwTIME @ 7:00PM BlUESMAN MIKE & THE BlUES REVIEw BAND PlUS FRIENDS SHOwTIME @ 6PM BUMPIN BUD & THE INFlIgHT gROOVE SHOwTIME @ 7PM RHyTHM & BlUES HOlIDAy PARTy wITH R&B HOUSE BAND FEATURINg, gEORgE BOwMAN, CHRISTINA CHIlES, lUCIUS PARR, BAM BAM & MS. lAyDEE JAI SHOwTIME @ 7PM Fresh Beats Pijama Piyama are the pied pipers of psychedelic cumbia. BY CHRIS COPLAN C OVID was rough for most musicians. That includes Jonathan Saillant, a multi- instrumentalist who fronts the local psych-cumbia band Pijama Piyama. “I was in Chicago when I started this [project] during COVID,” he says. “I was thinking, ‘OK, well, this won’t last forever. I’ll be back out there playing soon.’” So, how did Saillant, like many of his musical brethren, actually make it through the deep challenges of this global pandemic? He did the thing that made him the most happy. “And I just had to think, ‘What is my favorite shit out there?’” Saillant says. “I had gotten to play all these styles of music, but I thought my favorite thing is being at a quinceanera, hearing cumbia.” It’s a tad hard to form a proper cumbia band when you’re all alone in a new city. Fortunately, Saillant had a magical tool at his disposal: the SP-404 sampler. A main- stay of hip-hop, the device allows anyone to sample and remix sounds on the go. “Ras G was an early pioneer of the SP-404 and the L.A. beat scene,” Saillant says. “He had a cool quote that I discovered shortly after he died, and it was something along the lines of, ‘What is your soundtrack to your world? Take that, chop it up, and bump that shit.’” He adds, “So that’s what the sampler is used for. But I don’t chop up records or old VHS tapes, so why don’t I sample myself?” And in what Saillant calls his “bedroom producer phase,” Pijama Piyama released a few tapes and projects, exploring the realms of cumbia, psych rock and other Latin music via this new and novel lens. It was also around this time when another major feature of the music developed: the layered storytelling and conceptual exploration. “That’s been seen in a lot of music,” Saillant says. “I mean, Frank Zappa’s ‘Joe’s Garage’ does that — unless you listen to the whole thing, you just hear these wacky stories, but you don’t maybe get the full picture. The Meridian Brothers have done that ... formed imaginary collectives that they’re playing through the lens of. So it doesn’t go that deep as those two projects, but each song has a subject.” But the stuff from Pijama Piyama takes it a step further — there’s something distinctly whimsical and playful about some of these underlying stories. Chalk it up to yet another thing learned while in the Windy City. “The lyrics originally were a bit secondary, and they’re not as much on the newer material,” he says. “But that really plays into just a very imaginary aspect, which I do like to bring into the music. And I would say it’s important. It brings a very non-serious, very playful feel. That comes from teaching music classes in Spanish in Chicago. Even though these were Spanish- speaking kids, like 3 to 5 (years old), just like the English students, a lot of them didn’t know the nursery rhymes that I knew or grew up on.” So, like all great samplers and bedroom producers, Saillant decided to improvise with his students. “It came down to us making our own little songs,” he says. “And that’s what kind of inspired me — I think a lot about how to have some authenticity in this digital age. I look at kids and their imagination and I’m like, ‘That’s probably the closest thing we have now.’ So we’d come up with these little jingles and little stories and that was super fun. I’d never written music in that way. And I was like, ‘That’s really fun to just use your imagination and run with anything.’” Eventually, though, COVID came to something resembling an end and Saillant moved back to Phoenix in 2022. He quickly went about building Pijama Piyama from a solo project to a proper six-piece band, including drummer Ben Wise, bassist Brady Saillant and singer/percussionist Pablo Bastidas. But the more things changed, the more they also stayed the same. “It became (about) still coming from the same place of these chopped and screwed samples and having that almost lo-fi sound that you get from these old samplers,” he says. “And then saying, ‘How do we reimagine that for a full band while still keeping the essence, the ambiance that was created by using these digital devices versus a live ensemble.’” On the one hand, having a proper band does make the approach inherently streamlined. “It does make it easier because for me, being an instrumentalist, there’s a bit of laziness behind it,” Saillant says. “Like, ‘Oh, this part I want to have a stomp to fill it.’ And I maybe don’t want to do that on a drum pad. So my awesome Pijama Piyama meld the worlds of cumbia and psych music with true prowess. (Photo courtesy of Pijama Piyama) ▼ Music >> p 26
