Tesoro

I once believed flamenco, a beautiful harmony of rhythm, passion and lust, was a dying art form. In my mind it was a solitary silhouette of a once great ship sinking on the horizon, lost to the ages as it slowly fell beneath the blackened sea. That may sound overly dramatic, but I do have an overactive imagination. I suppose it doesn’t matter. My wild fantasies of sunken ships and forbidden flamenco treasures were all about to change.

It was another late night in the production booth at KAMP Student Radio on the University of Arizona campus. Former KAMP engineering director Matt Brailey and I were reviewing a few mixes we prepared for our next show. It was 10:30 p.m. on a white-hot Arizona night and the band we scheduled for an in-studio recording still hadn’t shown any signs of making an appearance.

“They did say they were gonna be a little late,” Brailey said as I impatiently checked my cell phone for the time. “Here, bring the levels on that guitar up a little more…You know what, check this band out. I think you’ll like them. I mixed this one a while back. Tell me what you think.”

I laughed. He was always good at holding my attention with his rapid change in subjects. He pulled up a file on his hard drive and tilted the studio speakers in my direction. What I heard sounded like a piece of history. If it’s possible for a song to have an old soul, this song certainly did. It had all the elements of a classic flamenco song with speedy finger picking solos, brief yet forceful guitar strokes and a dash of hot spice that left your throat burning for more.

“What is this?” I asked him, consumed in curiosity.

“Tesoro,” he said.



(Click the pic to hear the Live at KAMP Studio recording with Tesoro)


And that was that. I had to know more. Brailey was a great sound engineer, but he wasn’t too keen on organization. The song he played me didn’t even have a name besides “Song 6_mixdown – take1.” It didn’t matter though. I wanted more.

After a few failed Google searches (apparently I’m not the world’s greatest typist when I’m excited), I stumbled upon the band’s Web site. Little did I know their musical repertoire was is no way confined to flamenco stylings. The remarkable Tucson locals managed to fuse classic Spanish flare, jazz and rock to both create original material and perform popular flamenco covers. I leaned back triumphantly in my desk chair with a broad smile on my face as I scanned the site, their song “Trampoline” happily bouncing out my speakers.

New, innovative music to a college DJ is like tripping over a pot of gold. You could spend hours sifting through the stacks of new CDs and never find something this good. I suppose the best way to describe it is, it just feels right. You get chills down your arms as you push the slider on the control board up to “Max” and hear the song spilling out onto the airwaves. It’s a legal high and the station was essentially paying me at that moment to take a hit. Tesoro was my new favorite drug, in a metaphorical sense of course.

To my dismay, the Web site doesn’t promise any upcoming shows as far as I can tell. I placed a call to Ultragroove Entertainment, Tesoro’s management company, in the hopes of posting the band’s tour schedule here. Sadly, their manager Alan Thomas was unavailable.

In the meantime, check out the Tesoro official Web site or their Myspace page and see what the “high-pe” is all about.