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Bobby Oroza
June 25, 2022 // Brooklyn Made
After years of grinding as a sideman in the Finnish music scene, Bobby Oroza has stepped up to make his voice heard. Always with an air of crude romanticism, Bobby pushes towards an expression transcending the borders of soul and rock balladry. His dark and intimate debut single ”This Love” didn’t take long to reach the ears and hearts of a worldwide soul music community and is already a proper classic amongst the lowrider and soul collector scenes.
Bobby was born in Helsinki, Finland into a family of musicians and artists. During frequent family parties Bobby’s Bolivian grandfather would pick up a guitar and sing Latin canciones and Cuban classics. Bobby’s mother is a singer and his father a gypsy-style jazz guitarist. All his siblings work in show business and music. As a kid, Bobby was lucky to grow up surrounded by his parents’ record collection which included early jazz and blues, Motown hits, gospel ensembles, and doo-wop groups like The Drifters and The Clovers. The Soul records were balanced out by Brazilian ones, African ones, his mother’s collection of North and South American folk songs, and Nuyorican Salsa albums. All of these influences show up in Bobby’s music.
Bobby started working professionally as a musician in his early teens. His main instruments are guitar and percussion. Before finishing high school Bobby decided he needed to experience the rhythmic source that had inspired him the most, and travelled to Santiago, Cuba. There he studied percussion and singing intensively for months. Since his return he’s been producing, recording and performing music to make a living for his family. Teaming up with the Timmion Records house band Cold Diamond & Mink, led by Jukka Sarapää, Sami Kantelinen, and guitarist/composer Seppo Salmi, he has a tight quartet of musicians to support his vision. With his instant classic, debut album “This Love” Oroza has shared his strange and unique shade of Soul with the world, creating a cult-like following for his sound from Finland to sunny Southern California and beyond.
Kolumbo
Since he was a landlocked Dallas, Texas kid, beach culture has held a tropical mystique for pianist/composer Frank LoCrasto. Family trips documented by camcorder videos, featuring slinky jazz-fusion soundtracks are etched in the Brooklyn-based artist’s memory. In his mind, there will always be a fantasyland replete with wicker furniture, pristine beaches, swaying palm trees, the smell of vanilla-scented suntan lotion, and breathtaking aqua water expanses.
These days, LoCrasto uses his imagination, evocative musicality, prodigious chops, and eclectic sonic palette to create dreamy musical locales. His transporting compositions are genre-defying, but loosely informed by the feel of jazz, ambient music, Latin, vibey 1960s and 1970s B-movie film scores, and exotica. LoCrasto has just released his soundtrack to the 2012 comedy-drama, Sandbar, and, in 2022, he will issue his first album with his band, Kolumbo.
His Sandbar score is a warm, lo-fi collection of dreamy 1960s soundscapes evoking the movie’s “everything is gonna be alright” mix of sadness and quirkiness. He will follow this up with an official Kolumbo album in 2022. This album will be polished, featuring luxurious string, woodwind and brass orchestration, and compositions that wind through a multitude of thoroughly composed sections. The record will offer a variety of transporting vibes, including Iranian musicality, Brazilian samba moments, and songs that sound like they were pulled from 1960s French New Wave films.
To date, the Texas-born, Brooklyn-based artist has released four solo albums (When You’re There 2006, El Dorado 2011, LoCrasto 2015, and Lost Dispatch 2019). He has composed and recorded music for three feature length films (Sandbar 2012, Union Furnace 2015, Stranger in the Dunes 2016), and has had songs placed in the 2014 movie, Obvious Child, and the 2020 HBO series, How to With Jon Wilson. In addition, LoCrasto has recorded and toured with Cass McCombs, Pat Martino, Jeremy Pelt, James Iha, Parquet Courts, Fruit Bats, Nicholas Payton, Greg Osby, Okkervil River, and Wallace Roney. He has also appeared as a sideman on over 70 albums. Prior to the pandemic, LoCrasto was actively touring with his band, Cass McCombs, the Fruit Bats, and Grateful Shred.
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