There are different ways of seeing and understanding the idea of the frontier. There are those who choose to take it as a line that divides people and countries, while others prefer to approach that line to see what lies on either side and bring everything together into a single patchwork. Guitarist, composer and producer Adrián Quesada undoubtedly belongs to the latter group. Born in 1977 in the southern Texas city of Laredo on the border between the United States and Mexico, he grew up speaking English and Spanish and absorbing the culture of both countries. From an early age Quesada was drawn to the arts, first through drawing, and then via the electric guitar. Although he listened to a lot of music, he was not yet playing an instrument, until his father suggested that he take piano lessons. “But at that age I was skateboarding all day listening to punk rock, hip-hop and rock and roll,” Quesada recalls today. “I reckoned that if I was studying piano my friends would laugh at me, and since the guitar sounded more ‘rock’, I told my father that I would study that.” And so it was that at the age of thirteen he began his classical and flamenco guitar lessons and soon got his first rock bands together.
For a North American boy of Mexican descent, it was quite natural for musical styles to start mixing together. While his family listened to cumbia, boleros, rancheras and mariachi, Adrián would stay hooked to MTV for hours watching the videos that were being shown, with a particular enthusiasm for hip-hop artists. But since hip-hop is not a very friendly genre for learning the guitar, grunge bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden swiftly started leaving an impression upon him. With this diverse musical knowledge in tow, he moved inland to Austin to study art, and there he began to play regularly in different bands, his interests expanding into jazz, cumbia and Caribbean music.
In 2000 he was one of the founders of Grupo Fantasma, a nine-piece orchestra focused on Latin rhythms, which in 2011 won a Grammy Award for their album El Existential. Known for their explosive shows, they came to the attention of Prince, who added them as his backing band for a while, about which time Quesada says, "When we started playing with Prince, we had only been together for a few years, and he gave us confidence. He treated us very well; he taught us a huge amount and you were always learning something with him." That same eagerness to learn continues to drive the guitarist today to get involved in projects with other colleagues. "There's a saying in the U.S. that ‘if you're the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room.' That's why I love being in a room with other musicians from whom I'm learning, listening to how all the instruments interact."
Over the years, the composer and producer—he has his own studio called Electric Deluxe—has been involved in plenty of different kinds of projects. From Latin tribute albums to Black Sabbath and Public Enemy, duo collaborations like Ocote Soul Sounds with Martín Perna and The Electric Peanut Butter Company with Shawn Le to trios like Spanish Gold and more soloistic projects like The Echocentrics. Even when he was a member of Grupo Fantasma, he and some of his bandmates formed parallel bands such as Brownout and Money Chicha.
In his role as producer, in 2021 he released the album Look at My Soul: The Latin Shade of Texas Soul, a compilation work that rescues the Latin soul of Texas and that had him recording on tape legends of the genre as well as new performers.
Funk, soul, rock, electronica, psychedelia, and bolero all form Quesada's universe and it is this eclecticism which is his trademark. "I was born into a culture lying between two countries, speaking two languages, so I don't hear so many frontiers between different types of music," he explains, adding, "When I started to study more music, to play things like cumbia, salsa and Afrobeat, I realized that all rhythms have something in common and that something is the rhythm that comes from Africa."
With a wealth of experience under his belt, a career-changing event occurred in 2017. For some time, Quesada had been working on some instrumental compositions, but lacking lyrics, a friend suggested he contact busker Eric Burton. From the first time they spoke on the phone they had a special feeling about working together, and in just a few months the two were able to put together ten songs. The guitarist says, "When we got together, we didn't plan to create a band, we just wanted the music to be felt, not influenced by the industry, record labels or managers." As things happened, the upshot of this collaboration included the formation of Black Pumas and the release of their first album in 2019 which drew praise from critics and the public. Focusing on soul, with funk and rock influences, the Black Pumas became "darlings" of the music scene, earning a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist and fans around the world. "We knew it was something special but everything that happened after that was very fast. Soul is one of my favorite genres, but the most important thing is that it all came from our soul," says the multi-instrumentalist. Quesada also admits to feeling more pressure at this time when they are in the process of preparing the group's second album."The main thing is that we like it; what happens after that we cannot control," he says.
As a way of returning to his Latin roots after the success of Black Pumas, Adrián Quesada released Boleros Psicodélicos, a solo album of twelve songs in which he mixes his own compositions with classics of the genre. In this new adventure he is accompanied by thirteen guest artists, including the Puerto Rican iLe—former singer of Calle 13, the Mexican Girl Ultra and the North American guitarist Marc Ribot. This work is the culmination of an infatuation that began twenty years ago when Quesada was out driving his car and from the radio came on “Esclavo y amo,” a song by another Mexican José Vaca Flores being covered by the Peruvian band Los Pasteles Verdes. For Quesada, the impact was powerful: “I had never heard anything like that. Until that point, I only knew traditional boleros, with harmonized vocals, and a trio comprising acoustic guitar, piano and bongo. But the first band that I heard that were doing psychedelic ballads and boleros was Los Pasteles Verdes, and it was as if Pink Floyd were playing a bolero!” And in spite of it not being unusual for Quesada’s music to be described as psychedelic, he doesn’t feel it this way himself, although he recognises that in the case of his boleros there is a certain amount of psychedelia, a dramatic tinge to the sad songs that transforms the album into a kind of mixtape in which very different genres are all brought together.
With the second Black Pumas album still in production, Adrián Quesada is already planning to release an instrumental album he recorded during the pandemic and to continue considering new genres since, for him, music is pure exploration that comes out directly from the soul and recognises no borders.
