An Interview Oskar Cartaya – No Treble

We got a chance to sit down with Oskar Cartaya during Gerald Veasley’s Bass Bootcamp this year, and it was an amazing conversation. Oskar’s path and career are as interesting and inspiring as his music.

The last time we saw you, you performed at the 2020 Bass Bash at NAMM. We were totally knocked out. I know you have an incredibly diverse musical background, which shows in your performances with the band. Tell us about your musical journey and how it helped you develop such a unique approach.

Well, I like to think about it like a mixed salad. I really work hard at not being stereotyped as a Latin player. And I say that not with bad intentions. When you’re in New York City, and it’s the mecca of so many different ethnicities and people and music and everything, you can pretty much make a living playing a specific style of music. For example, if you play salsa, you can stay in the salsa scene and live there forever. If you’re a jazz guy, you can just play jazz. If you were like a reggae guy, you could just do reggae. I mean, there’s that much of an audience for everybody.

But I always felt a little weird because if a guy was a reggae player and got called for another gig, they always say, “Oh, you’re the reggae guy, right?” No, you’re the bass player. For me, it was, “Oh, you’re the Latin bass player, right?” I said, well, Latin is my race, not my definition as a player.

So I started pushing and trying to work in all sorts of different aspects that will bring new light to what I can do, ironically enough. Once I got to that point, I started putting all my Latin influence into what I was doing, and then it gave me my own lane on the freeway.

Being able to adapt and play with pop artists, jazz artists, Latin artists, and alternative artists always gives a broader range of things to do. But once you start sprinkling your own taste of things, it always gives you your unique spin on everything you’re doing. Yeah.

And that’s been my approach as a player, writer, and producer. Okay, now I have all these ingredients. How am I going to create my own flavor?

Everybody uses salt, pepper, garlic, onions, and all that stuff. It’s how you combine them that makes it unique.

And that’s how I see having been able to go in and create all these different alternative music choices that I don’t want to say I have mastered because you’ll never master any of them. But I have gotten well acquainted with it, and I can pull and borrow from whatever to create something.

And that was the sole purpose behind Bajo Mundo. It’s literally a translation of, you know, “bass world.”

But it was more of a showcase. I took an imaginary trip with my bass and a backpack, and all the songs were Brazilian influence, Latin jazz influence, straight-up funk, and jazz influence. I made sure that all of them dove into a different area.

I’m not even close to your knowledge of the Latin music scene, but I would guess EWI is not a typical instrument.

No, the first call for Latin stuff is not an EWI player. Right. But in this case, I always had two horn players. So it will be either a trumpet and a sax, trumpet and trombone, sax and trombone – variations. And then I always liked the violin. So I have included a violin also.

What I’m trying to do is have all these options of going to different places. If I want something harder-hitting, I have my horns. If I need to mellow it down for a moment, I can use the violin.

If I wanted to throw on top of the Latin rhythms, like a little country twang to it – all this madness that I hear, it’s just, those were my, my ingredients.

Our saxophone player happened to play EWI. Once he told me, I said, “Bring it,” and then we worked it into part of the show.

It’s really fresh and exciting and me. And I saw it at Bass Bash. Everybody was going nuts.

On the Latin front, what tips do you have for basses to play more authentically?

Everything starts with the desire of how you want to be. It’s no different than learning a language. You can use Duolingo, or you can do you know Rosetta Stone, whatever to learn a language. If you want the basics, you know, “bonjour,” fine. If you really want to get good at it, then you have to do a little bit more diving, and then at some point, you either have to socialize with the people or go to the country. That’s when you realize, “Okay, I have a command of this.” That’s the same thing with music, and in this case, Latin music. I know a lot of players who know it enough to get by in whatever situation, but then I know some other guys who are an encyclopedia. They really went into the rabbit hole, and they studied everyone. They know the history. That’s when you realize, “Okay. kudos. I know what I’m doing.”

You were born in New York and then moved to Puerto Rico as a kid, right?

Yes, I was born in Manhattan. At age six, my parents moved to Puerto Rico. So, my education from the first grade until I graduated from high school was in Puerto Rico. During my middle school and high school years, I went to a performing arts school. It was one of the premier music institutes on the island. My main passion was acoustic bass. I played in a symphony, youth symphony orchestra, ensembles… the whole nine yards. Then, little by little, I started mingling with the electric bass. By the time I was in my senior year of high school, I was divided because I spent the same amount of time playing electric as acoustic. There were so many things going on, and somebody brought me a Return to Forever record, and I saw Stanley Clarke’s picture. I said, “He looks like me.” You know, at that time, I had hair, and he was playing both electric and acoustic basses.

You talked earlier about going to a different place if you want to legitimize what you’re trying to do. It sounds like that was big to go to Puerto Rico. It had to have been a master class for you.

It’s like you don’t know you’re having Mexican food every day until you don’t live in Mexico. So, for me, Latin music was just “music.” It was something I heard on the radio in my house. I don’t want to say it was osmosis, but it’s just a way of living. Once I returned to the mainland and started studying other styles of music, people were so intrigued with what was so innate to me. I had to start thinking, “Well, what is the allure of this thing?”

Looking at it from their standpoint, I could understand the complexity of the music. Then, throughout the years, I have figured out how to break it down to make it digestible for people to understand. You know, “This is what’s going on. The beat is here, but you’re really playing here. The strong beat is not one. It’s four.” You know, all these things that I knew, I had to create my own science to explain what was innate to me. That taught me a lesson because I feel it naturally, but now I can help people understand how I can make it something that they can relate to.

Expanding on that, we’re here at Gerald Veasley’s Bass Bootcamp, and you’re an instructor this year. How do you approach music education?

I have always loved the process of sharing information, sharing knowledge, everything. Again, in my youthful days, I was also more interested in going around the world and being on stages and playing and doing all sorts of things, but with time and age comes this sense of responsibility. I have to put this in somebody’s hand because I’m not going to carry this forever, and it’s up to me to help the future generation that is coming up little by little. That’s how I grew up.

It started to become more of an urge to help, teach, and show. And now, for maybe the last 15 years, I have completely submerged myself in a role of wherever I can, whoever I can, whichever way.

Back in L.A., I’ve been the artist in residence at a couple of different colleges. I work with this camp [Gerald Veasley’s Bass Bootcamp], I have done Victor Wooten’s camp, and other things. So I try to find opportunities where I can go in and, you know, whoever wants to listen, I have a few things to say.

So, what advice do you give to aspiring young bassists who might want to follow your career? I know it’s very different now.

Yeah. Well, yes, times have changed a lot, and the goals are different, perhaps. But my approach is more for music in general than for an instrument. I think the same principles will apply to anything. And I don’t mean to sound spiritual or anything, but I truly believe that music is a calling.

There’s a saying that says, “Books pick who wants them to read them.” Sometimes, a book comes into your hands, and it’s that revelation, that epiphany of the world. That book came to you. You didn’t seek that book.

And I believe music has that same purpose: you have to be open-minded about what music is. It’s not any of all the glorious elements that you may see.

And that’s where the confusion comes in because you see a lot of people who want to be stars, famous, and so on. And none of that has to do with music.

So, I always tell my students, “You need to feel the same joy playing for 10 people in a club than playing for 20,000 in a stadium.”

The number of people will not change your love or how much you will put into playing because everything is from within.

And I think that’s what really sets apart people that get frustrated and they want to either quit or they don’t think because the primary purpose of why you’re doing this has to be completely selfish in a way that it’s the joy that it brings you.

I remember being 12 years old, locked up in my room with a guitar, my first make-believe bass. When I was ten, they gave me a guitar, and I didn’t know how to play it. One day, I wanted to play upright. But I had that guitar, an acoustic Spanish guitar. So, I cut my mom’s broom and taped it to the bottom of the guitar so I could play it standing up. Not that I was playing it. I just looked cool.

And that made me happy because I’d be there, making believe I was playing.

But that joy in those years is still present. It’s been that pursuit of this thing that I do that sometimes comes out of nowhere. The idea, the feeling, the sound, the interaction with people, the look on somebody’s face when they hear something that, you know, the neck swirling. All of that is contagious.

And that emotion and that feeling happens, as I said. It happens when I’m in a little dive club playing or on the biggest stages.

Because your joy coming out is received as joy.

Yes. The main purpose of everything is that I’m serving; I’m trying to be a vessel for the music. I’m not the music. I’m a vessel. Something is supposed to come from wherever it is, come through me, and go out there and hit whoever’s supposed to hit. The moment that I start thinking I’m the main component of this, this is where all of this gets wrong. I’m just part of the whole thing. And through that joy, you go like, “wow.” That’s when you finish playing sometimes, and you look at your guys, and everybody has this euphoric look.

Unfortunately, it’s a business, too, because I make a living from it.

And then I have to understand that there’s a fine line between what I love and adore and will give away any day of my life and what I need to get compensated for. Because it’s the services I’m rendering that sometimes get, you know, tried to take advantage of. So it’s a dichotomy of how I do what I love to do that I will do for free, but I have to charge people. Right?

And I know you’re making money out of my talent, so why can’t I make money out of my talent? That’s what’s wrong today. It’s spread to all the stages of music, from the player to the writer to the artist to everybody.

This greed thing at the very, very top, which wants to extract everything from every little component, is helping the exact same person at the top get all the big slices of the pie.

But the thing is, it’s something that became—I don’t want to say generational—but what happens is there’s a whole generation of people who completely lost the concept of buying music because the music started being given away.

So people from our generation went out and bought a record. And it was 12 inches, where the art mattered.

When I came from Puerto Rico in 1982, I went to Musician’s Institute. Tower Records was really big still at the time, and I was a student who couldn’t afford to buy all the records I wanted. But Tower Records had listening stations. On weekends, I would take a blanket and a sandwich to Tower Records and spend five or six hours just listening to stuff.

I’m sure over the span of your career, you’ve seen these changes that we just talked about. What do you miss the most as a performer in the way that the music industry used to be and is now?

I remember a lot of dedication and pride went into going to a record date to do a session, and you can brag to your friends you did it in “one take.” Because that meant that you were at the top of your craft

So, you’re in a situation where there could be a lot of pressure from the sense that it was a big artist you’re working for or if you’re doing a jingle and the advertising agency is there with the client, or whatever. So, if it’s a if it’s a big arranger, you know he knows every note that he wrote. All of these things require a certain amount of training and experience that you have to put in. The level of craftsmanship for your instrument started to fade away, because people can “fix it.” They can time shift it, or they can tune it up, or they can copy and paste. So, the need for skilled players has pretty much vanished. To be a studio musician 30 years ago, you needed to be on top of your game. You needed to know the kind of music you were working on. You had to know how to read. You had to have a good sound. You had to be able to groove and play the part the whole night. Now anybody can pick up a bass, look for the notes, play them all wrong and out of tune, and then they go in there and fix it. So, all the time and effort I put into rising to the top of my game and my skills are almost useless because anybody can do it. You know, for the last 20 years, you have had fabricated talent. It’s a product.

Technology is a tool. It really has helped us in so many ways. But at the same time, it has taken away a lot of the essence of what art is. And when I say art, we are artists. We create. There’s got to be flaws. There’s got to be imperfection. There’s got to be the human element to it. And when you do all this stale stuff, that is just 100% just all processed, then you go like, “Huh?”

It’s a lot like food, right?

Exactly. The processed stuff is not good for you. But people love it. They’ve been fed all this processed food over and over and over. And that’s all that they know. But that’s because they have never had any of the good stuff. Then one day, somebody goes out to a market and goes to a 100% organic place and loses their mind.

That’s what happens with music. A lot of these kids go out and find 30-, 35-, 40-year-old records that become like Noah’s Ark to them. And they are amazed. “How can people cut a track from scratch and without a computer?”

Who were your main influences growing up in music?

Growing up in Puerto Rico, and once I decided I wanted to play the bass, I started looking at my local people. That was my first direct influence. I have a cousin, Edwin Morales. And Edwin has a band to this day. He’s been a band leader for 40-something years, and I thought he was the coolest guy on earth because, you know, he led the band. He would throw his arm for cues.

Then there was a bass player named Bobby Valentin, who was called El Rey del Bajo, which means the “King of Bass.” Throughout the 70s and early 80s, he was great arranger and producer. He also had his own band, and he played with the biggest Latin group we have had in, I want to say, the last half-century called the Fania All-Stars. Fania Records was the equivalent of Motown Records, and Fania All-Stars was comprised of all the main artists of the label. They were a super band. And back in the 70s, they did concerts at Yankee Stadium, Africa, all over the place where there were big concerts. Bobby Valentin was the bass player for the Fania All-Stars. So he was like, whoa, that’s my dude.

Then, like in the late 70s, early 80s, a new sound started to happen in Latin music. There was a bass player for Sal Cuevas. He was the equivalent of if you would have taken Chuck Rainey and had him play Latin music. So, he was doing double stops. He was plucking in salsa. For us bass players, the world got flipped upside down. So there is “before Sal” and “after Sal.” Because before Sal, it was all either Ampeg Baby bass or very deep sounding, just rooted, simple bass lines. But then Sal came around, and he’s playing double stops. He’s playing slap. He’s playing harmonics. He’s playing solos. So I lost my mind. I think that was what pushed me more towards electric bass than I was playing acoustic. Because at that time, I was playing both. But hearing that, I saw a world of possibility.

At that same time, I started to discover all these other players. There was Cachao, like the grandfather of Latin music. Israel Lopez Cachao. Bobby Rodriguez, you know, played with Tito Puente, Tito Rodriguez, everybody. These were the pillars. Then, the second generation. Then Sal comes with his stuff.

It was the days of buying a record and listening to see what Sal did on the record. Because he will always be doing something. At the same time, my friend brought a record of Return to Forever, and I see Stanley. And I hear him, and I’m like, “Oh, shoot, what is this guy doing?” Because I never heard somebody playing acoustic and electric bass like that.

Then I heard Jaco, and I started looking for Weather Report. I was in my mid-teens, like 14, 15. That was my period of discovering a new world.

So now I have the Sal Cuevas influence. I have the Stanley, the Jaco.

Then I got to New York City, and I started listening to Marcus Miller, Will Lee, Neil Jason, Francisco Centeno. I was in school in L.A., so I met Abe Laboriel, Neil Steubenhaus.

What was that movie, where “Johnny 5,” the robot that is trying to learn everything about the world? It was like, “I can’t, no more.” You know, it’s like that was me trying to assimilate all this information. So it was great time of just every day finding out something new.

I might be biased, but I don’t think you can top the 70s for music.

Man, I think so much music was made in that era that everything has been rehashed.

But I mean, it starts with Motowns and the 60s and stuff, but then the 70 brought all these, you know, eccentricities and all this, you know, the pot started to melt because there was the influence of like African artists playing, you know, like what they do with soul music. Then you still have Latin guys trying to play like Soul. So it was like Latin Soul.

And then, you know, Herbie Hancock wrote “Watermelon Man” for Mongo Santa Maria. You know, all this is happening.

You got Santana, you know, playing with percussion and the rock guitar. So everything that is happening today started then.

I know you’ve done a lot. You’ve done pop, jazz, Latin, and I’m probably just scratching the surface. What have been one of your favorite projects of your career?

I’ve been blessed to be involved in so many scenarios. I recorded a lot of the legends: Willie Colón, Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Hector Lavoe, Ruben Blades. The list goes on and on.

Then, I worked with modern artists: Jennifer Lopez, Robbie Robertson, Steve Winwood, Spyro Gyra… So, with each of them, I had the opportunity of wearing a different hat.

Live, one of the most eclectic tours that I’ve ever done, and I don’t think I’ll do one again. In the 90s, I went out with Tito Fuente, Arturo Sandoval, and Steve Winwood. It was called “The Latin Crossing.” And, mostly, we did Canada and all of Europe. But it was so much fun because it was the dream tour of being able to play everything on one stage. I mean, we would play “Oye Como Va,” we would play “Cherokee,” and then we would play “Higher Love.” You know, back to back to back. And that was the whole night.

We will go from one of Tito’s songs to like a jazz tune with Arturo to
Steve Winwood, Traffic… anything. Back and forth. And everybody was collaborating. So Steve was playing like some mean organ on, you know, “Give Me Some Loving,” and we played it in a merengue style. And he was loving it.

I don’t think anybody would dare to put a bill like that again.

Did it get recorded?

Actually, there are some videos on YouTube that I’ve seen.

How have you balanced your solo work and your collaborations?

I’ve been fronting a band for the better part of 30 years now, on and off.

My solo projects are like my forbidden pleasure, and then everything else is
my work, my career. I have two solo albums as an artist, and then a collaboration with a dear friend of mine, my high school best friend.

I feel so responsible when I want to release something when I want to put a project together. I need to feel that I gave it my last ounce of blood. You know, I don’t want to put a record out just for putting a record out, or I don’t want to do a project because somebody told me, well, you know, how much is it? I can’t do it. I…

So, my first CD came out in 2004 as a solo artist. And then my other album. Then I did the collaboration, and I think that 2015. Then Bajo Mundo came out in 2017. Now, I’m in the process of putting all the pieces together to come out with another project. While all this is going on, my writing doesn’t stop. I love to write, so I’m constantly writing. I end up… Material ends up being used for everything, either other artists will record it or film and TV. That’s like the big thing now, your library. You know, you got a call at 11 o’clock at night: “Do you have something for a club scene in Rio de Janeiro?”

Tell us about your gear.

I’ll start with my bass. I’ve been with Roger Sadowsky for the better part of… I want to say almost… God, it sounds a lot, but I think it’s like 40 years. I first met Roger in 1982 in New York City, and I took a bass of mine to get completely transformed. It was a Yamaha BB 3000, and it was a PJ. He turned it into a jazz bass and put in a guitar preamp, and that’s how he and I first met.

Then I moved to New York in 1984, and now he was my repair shop guy. It will be
every week I’m there doing something. That kept on into 1988.
Then, he came up with his first bass. The three people who first signed up as Sadowsky artists were Will Lee, the late T-Bone Walker, who used to play with Hall & Oates, etc., and myself.

Will and I are still playing live with Roger’s basses. That’s my longest-standing relationship with a manufacturer in the industry.

Still, the very first bass I got [from Roger] is my main bass.

It’s the one that I’ve been using for 30-something years. Pretty much anything that I’ve done, that’s the bass. Others have come around and, you know, have different basses for different situations, but we call it the “TBS, the Black Sadowsky.”

I’ve been a LaBella string user artist for, I want to say, over two decades, easily, maybe three. Same thing… Good guys there. I started with Richard, the father. His son, Eric, used to go to the NAMM show and be sitting there. Fast forward, now Eric is pretty much the guy in the company, and Richard comes and sits there, you know? Yeah, so that’s family for me.

I just switched from Aguilar Electronics to MarkBass, and this is literally in the last month or so. I had a very long-standing relationship with Aguilar. I knew Alex Aguilar, the founder before he even thought of making a bass amp. His office used to be across the hall from Roger’s office. So I would open the door from Roger’s office, take three steps, and go to Alex. Eventually, he started making his amps
and sending me prototypes, and I tried it. I spent many years with them.

You know, Aguilar got acquired by Korg. Everything in the world of business changes. I’ve known the people from MarkBass for a while, and we hope to establish as long a relationship as I had with Aguilar.

I deal with Dunlop. Darryl is my brother from another mother. And I use everything from pedals to strings.

Gruv Gear is another good company for me because I travel a lot. They have the Kapsule. The strap is my favorite strap on earth because it’s a big four-inch neoprene strap that distributes the weight so well. The first time I tried it, I told them, “I’m not giving it back.” It was a prototype.

For more on Oskar and his music, visit his website.