Just a sliver of the ocote wood starts a blaze. A few pieces of this pine was all Martín Perna needed to get his cooking fires started in a small fishing village in Michoacán, Mexico. It was there that Perna—known for founding Antibalas, the NYC collective that sparked an Afrobeat revival—found a new direction. For several years, I’d spend time in this little fishing village,” Perna recounts, “living, writing, and doing a lot of green building. People would hear I was a musician and ask me to play some music. It was kind of difficult. What do I say: I play baritone sax, which I left in NYC, with this fifteen-piece band. If I play you some of my music, it’s not going to make sense,” Perna recalls. “I started thinking about what it means to be a musician and having a wide enough repertoire that I didn’t need fifteen people to play. So I picked up the guitar and started writing music in a new way, with more intimacy and immediacy." Yet it wasn’t until a mishap on a biodiesel cross-country trek that Perna found the perfect vehicle for this new sound, and the perfect musical partner in Adrian Quesada, of the Austin-based super-group Grupo Fantasma. The result was Ocote Soul Sounds. The grit and funk of the gridlocked NYC streets intersect seamlessly with the voices and rhythms of dusty Latin American lanes on their latest album Coconut Rock. Perna and Quesada had lived in eerily similar parallel universes. Though Quesada grew up in the Texas border-town of Laredo, and Perna came up in Philadelphia (later New York), both musicians straddled borders literally and artistically. Both had grown up on hip hop and the jazz and funk it was built on; both taught themselves to play multiple instruments; both had founded game-changing, booty-shaking big bands; and both were deeply moved by a powerful spirit of social and political activism, the spirit of ocote. Ocote, the Nauhatl word for pine, is key to starting fires, the fires used for cooking and heating across Mexico and beyond. A tiny handful, and even damp pieces of wood ignite, Perna says. “And I like that metaphor. I have always seen my role in whatever I do as a catalyst. We’re not the big log burning that everybody sees. We are the one that gets it started,” whether it’s the current Afrobeat craze fueled by Antibalas, Quesada’s initiative in Austin to help improve the lives of the city’s musicians, or Perna’s founding of NYC’s first biodiesel factory.
