Daniel Villarreal Holds the Groove Gently

Drummer Daniel Villarreal is at the tailor when we get in touch with him. He’s running errands to get ready for touring, including picking up a vintage jacket he’s had taken in. It’s a brief moment before we get down to business, but this underlines the style that he’s brought to his two albums as bandleader, Panamá 77 and Lados B, two platters stacked with grooves and guided by the easy hand of the genuinely hip. These are not off-the-rack records, no fast fashion here — just a deep understanding of what makes grooves hum and percussion sing.

“It’s going to be kind of catching the beginning of something fresh,” Villarreal tells the Scene ahead of his show Friday at The Blue Room at Third Man Records. “I usually tour with a five-piece band. But I’m doing a trio version of my band, which is upright bass and electric bass, and also vibraphone and drums. [We’re] playing music from my two records, and then some new music also that I’m doing for the first time on the road.”

If your Cal Tjader-loving heart just skipped a beat, you’ve got a good sense of where this is going. These songs are exploratory in nature but grounded in melodicism, finding harmonic textures in the subtle use of each instrument’s natural decay and sustain. Villarreal’s drumming creates song spaces that allow other players to flourish, nudging the songs forward, keeping the pockets deep and uncrowded. The compositions are loose and natural, sliding above, between and around genre conventions while touching on several continents’ worth of sound.

 “The thing is, being from Spanish descent and all this stuff, people think that you play Latin jazz or Latin music most of the time,” says Villarreal. “But it is not the case sometimes, because my background is mainly rock ’n’ roll and punk music and also psychedelic jazz. … I combine everything.” 

As he works with his fellow players, Villarreal has plenty of ideas, but is wary of micromanaging. “I want the players that play with me to be themself,” he explains, “and I don’t want to infect their creativity and their own style by doing something totally written or totally on a sheet of paper.” 

The results are solidly funky tracks that reside in that post-hip-hop mélange when Tony Allen and Chico Hamilton are cued up on opposite sides of the crossfader. The tunefulness in Villarreal’s percussion plays with ideas of global traditions and minimalist recontextualization of rhythmic discourse. To put it more succinctly: These drums are catchy as hell. These are sing-along drums, steering-wheel-tapping drums. 

“I love all the classics,” says Villarreal. “I like from Afrobeat to Coltrane, and I like all kinds of styles of music from salsa to boogaloo. And then I also love punk rock and classic rock. It’s kind of like I try to mix it all in. … I add my own percussion, extra percussion, meaning besides drums. I add bells and congas, and I also have the players play some kind of percussion, even though they don’t play percussion. I give them some bells or some wood blocks and shakers because everybody has some rhythm in them. 

“I like things that sound warm and familiar, and instead of going for a clean sound or going for too much of a pop sound, I like things to sound a little bit more organic,” he continues. “I like tape machines and … I like to go through a Space Echo, analog tube amps — I like all that stuff. Then it’s kind of keeping integrity as much as I can of the organic takes, and makes it interesting for the audience.”

And while there may be a number of, ahem, analogs for this sound in midcentury music — João Palma’s work at CTI Records springs to mind, or Sly Dunbar at Channel One — it feels incredibly modern. That may be because we’re living in a new golden age of instrumental music. Khruangbin is playing amphitheaters, Glass Beams are stacking critical raves, and there are a dozen other bands bringing wordless vibes to the contemporary touring scene. And it makes sense: The appeal is in the humanity, the authentic human experience, of listening to other humans banging out some beautiful sounds. 

“I never thought that drums can be in the front. I never thought a drummer can do this stuff, because people [are] expecting you to want to be busy and flashy and all this. So no, I keep it in the pocket and I have my moments. I can do a solo, but I bring it always back, because I want people first to feel good and dance or feel familiar.”

Features

Trumpet Virtuoso Jaimie Branch Carries Jazz’s Social Conscience Forward

• Charlie Zaillian