MUSIC: PACHANGA FEST

Lady canta the blues

Musician's sound is part soul, part Latin, part singer-songwriter

By Joe Gross
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Wednesday, May 27, 2009

When Gaby Moreno was 19 years old, she already had been obsessed with American blues singers for years. 'I traveled on vacation to Florida when I was about 13 or 14,' the 27-year old singer-songwriter and Guatemala native says by phone from her home in Los Angeles.

'I had never in my life heard of blues, but this music started coming out of a shop.'

Moreno was blown away. 'I asked the person behind the counter what it was and he said 'That's blues.' I asked my mom to take me to a record store and the first CD that I picked up was by Robert Johnson,' she says. 'I just kept listening to more and more. I learned to speak English listening to blues.'

It is hard to imagine anyone else has said that since about 1960, but Moreno's music harkens back a ways. The songcraft on her debut album, 'Still the Unknown,' is part soul, part Latin, part Anglo singer-songwriter.

'I got a guitar at 14, but I was about 16 or 17 when I started taking songwriting seriously,' she says.

In 2001, when she was 19, she came to the U.S. to study at the Musician's Institute in Los Angeles.

'I came here to make a living at this, and that means writing your own songs,' Moreno says. (Members of bands who don't get songwriting credits, read that last comment carefully — the money is in the publishing royalties for your own songs, people!)

Oddly — for the native Spanish speaker — she started writing in English first. 'I really love blues and jazz music and I had never heard that music being done in Spanish I decided to start writing in English,' she says. 'My Spanish stuff does have Latin rhythms.'

'Still an Unknown' mixes styles and languages, but at the moment, her best known composition is a 30-second piece of music Moreno co-wrote with fellow songwriter Vincent Jones that was chosen as the theme to the NBC sitcom 'Parks and Recreation.'

Moreno's been making friends in, if not traditionally high places, very interesting ones. 'I did a show of old Latin American songs with this upright bass player named David Piltch and he knows Van Dyke Parks, who ended up sitting in.' Parks is probably best known as the arranger for the Beach Boys 'Smile' album, but is a cult figure in his own right.

'We did a bolero and Parks is in love with boleros,' Moreno says. 'He told me he would love to make a CD with me of boleros with his arrangements.'

But first she has songs to write, most of them not even for sitcoms. At this rate, she sure won't be unknown for long.

jgross@statesman.com; 912-5926