Grupo Fantasma Deal with Changes at Jazz Fest

Grupo Fantasma

“Change is inevitable and change is growth,” Beto Martinez says. Martinez is a co-founder of Austin’s Grupo Fantasma, which celebrates 25 years together this year. Grupo Fantasma will play Jazz Fest on Thursday, April 24 at 2:40 p.m. on the Congo Square Stage.

“We've been through many phases and stages, and outlooks and expectations have evolved multiple times. But it's the only way we've been able to keep doing what we're doing for this long,” he says.

Grupo Fantasma will perform as part of this year’s Mexico showcase, a focus that became more politically fraught earlier this year when the White House decided Mexico was a bad trade partner and people who crossed the southern border constituted a threat. 

The band is first and foremost a Latin funk band, one good enough to be tapped by Prince in 2007 and 2008 when he needed a band. But they’ve also used their voice when they felt the need, whether to record “The Wall” in 2017 with Ozomatli and Locos for Juana, or titling the album it came from American Music, Vol. 7. 

My Spilt Milk interviewed Martinez about where Grupo Fantasma is at now, starting with an upcoming album.

I understand you’ve been working on a new album. What can you say about it at this point? 

This will be our eighth album, and it is being produced and recorded by Adrian Quesada. Adrian is a co-founder of the band and former guitarist [and a member of Black Pumas]. It has been a delight to be able to work with him again. We are currently mixing the record and are very pleased with the results. 

Unlike some of our previous albums, this material is entirely written for the album and has not been premiered live, so it will be a surprise to listeners. We did not feel compelled at this point to necessarily make it a 100 percent dance album or stick to a specific style, so there is a wide variety of material on it. 

That aside, what has been going on with the band? How has Grupo Fantasma been affected by life after the Covid lockdown and changes in the music business? Since you’re a big band, I imagine that it’s hard to make touring your primary source of income these days.  

Post Covid, the band has definitely entered a different phase. Before the pandemic, we toured every year as a matter of course. Over the years that experience has changed for us depending on what was going on at the time. Some tours were big and in busses, most were smaller and in vans, and we went to Europe almost every year for a decade or more. As a matter of fact 2019 saw us tour across Russia and Turkey. 

Post pandemic, with a lot of folks picking up the financial slack through teaching, studio work, or various other day job scenarios, returning to that type of touring wasn't really an option. The interesting thing was that at the same time, we didn't feel compelled to keep doing it that way either. The pandemic put things in perspective for most of us and allowed us to re-evaluate what we valued in our lives and careers. 

Grinding out tours, sometimes at a loss for a band our size with high costs, didn't feel like a priority anymore. The idea that that was the only way to be a band, changed completely. 

How has the national conversation on immigration in general and the focus on the southern border affected the way you think about the band and its music? 

We always thought of our music as dance music and our role being to bring the good times so you could forget all the bad shit going on in the world. Of course, we have not shied from stating our opinions or playing for causes we believed in. After playing for Bernie Sanders in Austin in 2016, we got a lot of "shut up and play" type social media commentary. But, this band was originally made up of a majority of people from the border. 

Myself and Greg Gonzalez remain the only two members originally from there. Jose Galeano is a naturalized US citizen from Nicaragua. I think there will always be meaning and intention behind our songs and music, whether overtly stated or not, that reflects where we stand and that is for human rights, equal rights and that being an immigrant is not a crime. 

In 2019, you released American Music, Vol. 7. This may be related to the previous question, but what statement were you making by giving the album that title? 

When we made that album and chose that title, we were taking ownership of our identity and not letting someone else define us as "other" or foreign. We were saying that we are from here, from this country and our music, regardless of it being in Spanish or stylistically Latin American, is from here. This is our national identity as well, multi-cultural. 

Finally, for those of us who have never been in successful bands, what’s going through your mind when you walk out onstage at a big music festival like Jazz Fest? 

It's always an honor and a thrill. We love New Orleans and cherish any opportunity to play in that beautiful city. The fact that we are invited to play alongside so many brilliant and influential artists is both intimidating and inspiring and we will never take that for granted.