Friday, November 16, 2007

Adrian Goizueta & Luis Enrique Mejira Godoy on Papaya Label


New Papaya Artists


   Papaya Music, Costa Rica’s premier music label, recently announced the release of two new CDs by seasoned Central American musicians Adrian Goizueta and Luis Enrique Mejia Godoy. It is the first release on Papaya for both artists. The two celebrated the tandem release with a live concert at La Vereda Terramall in San Jose.

   Goizueta was born in Argentina but has spent more than half his life in Costa Rica and has a sizeable following in Western Europe. He has put out a plethora of albums with his band, Grupo Experimental. Adrian decided to release a solo project that, “speaks of the past with the sounds of the present”. To do so, he enlisted players from Nicaragua, El Salvador, Peru, Argentina, and Costa Rica, including violinist Ricardo Ramirez of Editus. To put the package together, Dutch producer Jos Haagman was brought on board. The final result, titled “Tangoizueta” proves that incorporating musicians from various cultures was not just a gesture. Goizueta wrote or co-wrote all the songs but plenty of room was given to all the participants, which is brought out by the slick production on this thirteen song, sixty-five minute disc.
  
   The music comes across as a fusion of son, milongas, samba and a jazz influence, especially in the bass lines. One of the songs, “Tangouito Prohibito” has been included in another recent Papaya release, “Guanacaste al Atardecer”, which I thought was a nice marketing touch by the parent company. If I have one knock on the CD, it is that I thought some of the lettering was hard to read in the booklet included in the CD jacket.

   One of the songs on “Tangoizueta” was co-written by Luis Enrique Mejira Godoy, whose own solo Papaya release, “Mis Boleros”, came out at the same time. Born outside Leon, Nicaragua in 1945, Mejira moved to Costa Rica after graduating high school. His father, Carlos, was a popular local musician who also built marimbas. Luis returned to Nicaragua in 1979 to participate in the Sandinista revolution there. With his brother Charles, he established the Nicaragua Company of Cultural Recordings, producing over one hundred discs. In 1999, he received an honorary doctorate from the Nicaragua government.

Godoy performing live
   While Mejira also has many of his own albums under his belt, “Mis Boleros” is his first recording in more than ten years. He was recently quoted as saying, “The bolero is a mirror of all hearts, an inventory of sorrows and the melodies of the soul”. The CD is a project he has been working on for the past three years. He penned every song on the album, some of them as much as twenty years ago. All the songs are previously unreleased. Mejira dedicated the work to Ray Tico, a Costa Rican bolerista who recently passed away. Unlike Tico’s work, “Mis Boleros” has the full accompaniment of acoustic and electric piano and bass, second guitars and percussion and, at times, even strings, horns and woodwinds. The entire disc is a real tribute to Mejira’s versatility and attention to detail. I think it is safe to say that this project is a labor of compassion that comes through on every song.

   The packaging for both CDs are purely Papayan, complete with booklets, perhaps demonstrating their passion for music as well. “Mis Boleros” and “Tangoizueta” have a limited pressing and distribution. In Guanacaste they are available only at Jaime Peligro in Tamarindo, where they will gladly sample the music for their customers. Any comments concerning this article are welcome.

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