Sideman steps out with Charanga Cakewalk

In his 30s, Michael Ramos realized trad was rad

Charanga Cakewalk at Pachanga photo by popolio.

Michael Ramos' story is somewhat typical of Tejanos of a certain age, but it needs to be told again because it explains how the longtime Austin keyboardist came to make the engaging chillout cumbia sounds of Charanga Cakewalk. The ethereally exotic LP Loteria de la Cumbia Lounge was recorded in the basement of his Lake Travis home and in various hotel rooms and dressing rooms while on tour with Patty Griffin.

The 2006 followup Chicano Zen was even better. Listen to it as you read along.

As a teenager in El Campo, Ramos cringed when his parents would pull up, Mexican music blaring, to him and his friends. "I didn't want anything to do with that old people's music," Ramos says. He was all about Aerosmith, Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. "In high school, you're just trying to fit in and when you grow up Hispanic, it becomes twice as hard. You're eating McDonald's hamburgers or corndogs with your friends and then at home it's rice and beans or cabrito. You live in two different worlds." As a sideman for both Pat Green and Los Lonely Boys has learned to keep a foot in both.

In his 30s, Ramos became intrigued by the traditional Mexican music he once shunned. To pay the bills, he played keyboards for the BoDeans, a popular Midwestern rock band, and then the Rembrandts, whose one and only hit was the Friends theme. During down time, however, Ramos listened to Latino radio and messed around with the piano accordion his girlfriend told him he had wasted his money on.

But a few years later, it was his growing skill on the squeezebox that had Paul Simon's people offering Ramos a gig in New York. The project, Simon's 1998 musical The Capeman, was a notorious flop, but Ramos calls working with the icon a career highlight. "His musical mind, his knowledge of all kinds of music, is just incredible," Ramos recalled.

The phone hasn't stopped ringing: John Mellencamp added Ramos to his touring band in the late ‘90s, after which he began a long association with Griffin. Ramos produced “Mil Besos,” translated as 1,000 Kisses as the title of Griffin’s 2002 LP, after urging the singer to cover the traditional song. When the Spanish ballad went over well in concert, Ramos realized that sort of music had a market outside the cantinas and wedding receptions.

"I was intrigued with the cumbia groove, with that caballito (little horse) cowbell rhythm," Ramos said over coffee at La Madelleine on North Lamar. "To me, it was the perfect music to add electronica touches to. Also, I'm a big fan of Ennio Morricone's movie scores, plus Esquivel's bachelor pad music and the great Jamaican B-3 player Jackie Mitoo."

Cakewalk is a mix of all that and more.

Ramos said he usually writes about 80 percent of a song, then leaves it laying around for a blast of inspiration. He had a song, "Mexicanos," for instance, that was languishing until he saw comedian George Lopez at the Erwin Center. "His observations of what it was like growing up in a Mexican-American family are so brilliant, so dead-on, that I went home emotionally recharged and finished the song that night."

Ramos wasn't sure his indulgence would ever be more than CDs burned for friends and movie music supervisors, until the day, circa 2003, that David Garza came over to the basement studio to work on a score for a low-budget movie. "I played him some of the cumbia material and we worked on it all day," Ramos said. "He just elevated every song with his creativity. After David put his touches on it I knew I had an album."

The folks at Artemis Records' world music spinoff Triloka agreed. But crediting the record to "Michael Ramos" just didn't build up curiosity for the album's exotic tilt of ideas, so at the label's behest Ramos named his "band" Charanga Cakewalk after a song inspired by a sign seen in a church parking lot.

Because Ramos played most of the backing tracks on the record, often using synth loops and computers, he didn't think he'd be able to play this music in concert. Austin's keyboardist of choice since quitting a lucrative Houston cover band gig and moving here in 1980, Ramos had always believed that live music should be played by real people. Using canned backing tracks was cheating.

But there was an offer for the Cakewalk project to open a Patty Griffin tour, so Ramos enlisted the rest of the Griffin band to help him pull off the sound. Still, there had to be taped augmentation to fully create the LP mood. "After a show in St. Louis a few people came up to me afterward and said how much they liked it and I asked if it bothered them at all that we were using loops and computers and they said, 'Huh?' They couldn't tell," Ramos says. "After that, I stopped talking about it."

Mexican singer Lila Downs became a frequent collaborator, and spent a week in Austin working with Ramos at his Brown Recluse studio. "One day we drove to San Antonio to record with (conjunto legend) Flaco Jimenez and I was thinking, 'My parents would be so proud.' To tell you the truth, I secretly hated hard rock in high school."