Gabi Moreno has shared the stage with a variety of artists over the years, including Tracy Chapman, Calexico and the Punch Brothers.
Alejandro Barragan
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Alejandro Barragan
Gabi Moreno has shared the stage with a variety of artists over the years, including Tracy Chapman, Calexico and the Punch Brothers.
Alejandro Barragan
Gabi Moreno’s home away from home is a small theater in West Los Angeles called Largo at the Coronet. She was a guest singer and performed her own show at this historic nightclub for over 20 years.
“It just became like this place where I go for inspiration,” Moreno says. “And oh my God, I was so inspired! I really believe that something changed in me, the way I wanted to express myself musically.”
Moreno came to Los Angeles in 2001 and released her first album in 2008. Seven albums later, Moreno found her voice singing various genres of Latin music and a wide range of American music including R&B, soul, pop, rock, country, oldies. and more. Morena writes and sings songs in Spanish and English with equal ease.
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But before the release of the first album, she did not write songs in Spanish. “I think it came about because when I was very young, about 13 years old, and I took this trip with my family to New York, that’s when I first discovered blues and jazz. And I remember being obsessed with this music,” she says.
She bought many CDs on that trip and took them home to Guatemala. Moreno says she would lock herself in her room and listen to Muddy Waters, Big Mama Thornton, Ella Fitzgerald and Nina Simone.
“I just remember thinking that there’s no way I’m going to write in Spanish, I just didn’t think it would sound authentic singing that style of music in Spanish because that’s what I wanted to do , I want to do blues, I want to do jazz.’
Everything changed when she started playing Largo.
Her friend, bassist David Piltsch, had a weekly residency at the club and would invite Moreno to join him with whatever song she wanted to sing. “And I remember him saying to me, ‘Hey, why don’t you bring a bolero?’ And I thought: “Bolero?”, she says. “I mean, really, at that point I knew all these boleros from growing up in Guatemala and that my parents played a lot, but I didn’t know how to play, I don’t think I’d ever sung bolero”.
Moreno went home and started listening to the bolero. Then she came across one called Quizzes, quizzes, quizzes. “And that’s when I first started playing that song quizzes, it was here on Largo,” she says. – And I remember how people came up to me after concerts and said: “you should do this kind of music, songs in Spanish.”
With his seventh album, Alegoría, Gabi Moreno says he’s making music on his own terms.
Alejandro Barragan
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Alejandro Barragan
With his seventh album, Alegoría, Gabi Moreno says he’s making music on his own terms.
Alejandro Barragan
“Gabby got into all this American music,” says fan Jackson Browne. “The one time I saw her at Largo, she was playing electric guitar and playing real rock music, really punk, very punk, you know. She understands, she really gets to the heart of a lot of different musical styles.”
During one of the concerts at Largo, she met the famous composer and arranger Van Dyke Parks, whose work includes writing songs for The Beach Boys and collaborating with Randy Newman, Little Feat and Ry Cooder.
Moreno says they talked for hours. “He said to me, ‘This is the music I grew up listening to, I used to play gigs with my brother in the 60s singing bullfights, rancheros and boleros, and I love this music so much we should do something together!’ In 2019, Moreno and Parks released a self-titled album ¡Splash!. The following year, he was nominated for a Latin Grammy.
Moreno says that even though she’s been honing her craft for decades, something keeps pulling her back to her roots. And it influenced her latest album Allegory. She says she can hear how much she has grown not only as a songwriter, but also as a singer.
“I feel a lot more connected to the songs that I write and to my experience, especially the experience of being an immigrant, here in the US,” she says. “Even after so many years, because I’ve been here for a long time, more than 20 years, I still feel like my home is Guatemala. All my family is there.”
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On “Til Waking Light,” Moreno sings in English and Spanish from the perspective of an immigrant making the treacherous journey from Central America to the U.S.
“And I personally know people who have made this crazy, crazy journey,” she says. “It was really like that, I was just trying to think what was going through their minds. Like, how desperate do they have to be to just like it, to leave everything they know and risk their lives to come to a place where they’ll have more opportunities and be in a safer environment.”
Moreno has shared the stage with a variety of artists over the years, from Tracy Chapman to Calexico and the Punch Brothers. She toured the world with British actor and singer Hugh Laurie as part of The Copper Bottom Band. In 2009, she co-wrote a song for the TV show Parks and Recreation. In 2020, she was appointed as the first UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for Guatemala.
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Guitarist, pianist and producer David Garza met Moreno 18 years ago. “For a creator, a songwriter of her caliber, to be blessed with a voice like that, it’s an incredible package that’s a gift to anyone who comes across it,” he says. “You don’t usually get that kind of voice and writing talent.”
This month, Moreno will go on a big tour of Europe. In six weeks, she will play 28 shows in 11 countries, including Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and Ireland. One thing is for sure, Gabi Moreno will always return to her favorite place, Largo at the Coronet.
