Kyle Cervantes on Influenced 01/21

Kyle Cervantes: I first started getting more into composition when I was a senior in college, so around 2018. And I always had a lot of voice memos that I would put in my phone and ideas and stuff, but nothing really stuck until I wrote the first tune, Miss Groves, which is the first tune off the record. I felt like that was a winner of a tune. I was like, 'oh, I really liked what I did with this. I want to continue to explore that.' So after I graduated, I started doing cruise ships and I was a cruise ship musician for a couple of years until Covid. I wrote a couple more tunes during that time, and then once we hit Covid, I actually had some pretty bad writer's block. I just looked it at the piano and nothing would come out. But shortly after I started slowly dipping my toes back into it, and I did The Crossing and then I did the arrangement of Session.

Abi Clark: Yeah. That's the only cover on the album, right? So why did that make the cut? Is that a band that you're really into?

KC: So it was actually, it's funny. So that song is originally from an anime that my sister showed me and was like, Hey, this anime is about music. You might like it. I checked it out and they play that song for I think a minute and 30 seconds. It's so short! And I was like, 'Oh my gosh, that needs to be longer!" And I just loved it and I would loop it on repeat, and then I was like, 'I just need to cover this or do something with it.' It's such a killer tune and the band that plays it is just super tight. And I was like, I want to incorporate saxophone into this.

Andy O: The Crossing, just the title, it made me think about your sea life crossing the Atlantic or Pacific, whatever it was…

KC: Yeah. So that's actually how it came about too. When we started out on this one cruise, we did, I think a week in Alaska, and after that we were going from Alaska to Singapore.

AO: Wow.

KC: So it takes 14 sea days to get from Alaska to Singapore, and I was slowly losing it by that 13th/14th day. I'm a homebody, but not that much. Just the constant waves and everything. So that's actually where the inspiration for riding it came from.

AO: Well, that's a tough part of the ocean too. That's not a smooth sailing as it were.

AC: I really want to talk about the genre of your album because it's Hard Bop and it's also Fusion, and to me that seems like an unlikely combination, but it works so well! Do you have a love for more of the jam vibe, the fusion world, as well as the classic Hard Bob sound?

KC: Yeah. I honestly think that pretty much nails it down, actually. You've put that into words better than I have ever been able to! Yeah, I love Hard bop. It's my favorite era of jazz for sure.

AC: Favorite. Why? What about it?

KC: I think just the combination of the language that was being used at the time and what the players were playing in combination with just, I guess just the depth of harmony that was being used at the time too. Even with Freddie Hubbard's kind of stuff - very energetic playing, but so calculated I think is what drew me to it.

AC: And then the fusion side?

KC: Yeah, definitely the jamminess!

AC: What are some of the inspirations on that side of things?

KC: Oh sure. I mean, one of the first ones is probably The Brecker Brothers. I listened to Heavy Metal Bebop when I was first starting to get into it. Great record! I think besides him, a lot of, and this was kind of one of the other big inspirations for my writing, Steve Gadd's works that he's done with Gadd Gang and he's had a record called Steve Gadd and Friends, actually, a lot of which I'm going to be pulling from for the show. But yeah, just a lot of that. And of course Ronnie Cuber is a big part of Steve Gadd's groups, so that kind of naturally led me into his stuff.