Don’t stop, can’t stop, the dance. Something else to fill your expanding Balearic canon: Randy Tico’s Earth Dance. Not quite jazz, world beat, tribal, or New Age, in 1990, in the dead heat of summer, Randy released on the aptly named Higher Octave Music record label a burner of a New Age album that put the rhythm of myriad nations front and center.
Santa Barbara, California is an apt place for someone like Randy Tico to develop the influences and tone he’d explore on Earth Dance. Located on the coast, Santa Barbara is known as California’s Riviera. Even as he explored deeply experimental solo works he created music that could be used for theater or public performance. Randy always wanted to have an audience for his art. When Randy originally began his artistic career he took towards the bass naturally, using his devoted practice to parlay it into a spot with transplanted, Wisconsin-based jazz group Matrix.
In due time, as his session work with others like Strunz & Farah, Airto Moreira and Flora Purim grew, so did his admiration for Brazilian music. With them he’d absorb all those influences (both musical and temporal) to develop a melodic, harmonics-based bass technique allowing him to explore all sorts of Latin jazz and funk styles. Brilliant musicians like Cesar Camargo Mariano, Ivan Lins, and others based in Brazil would soon come calling. Commercial music and soundtrack work would also come ring his bell.
By the late ‘80s, Randy Tico would venture into exploring more of his own ideas. Composing for multimedia installations and experimental art shows, Randy took the helm on releases like Soundscape to create a Pan-Latin sound that had touches of the “fourth world” sound that Jon Hassell had gleaned from Eastern and African influences. In 1990, Higher Octave Music (home of like-minded “tropical”-leaning New Age from the likes of William Aura, Anugama, Cusco, and Peter Davison) would present him with both the budget and clout to release his leftfield, “exotic” ideas.
Earth Dance’s album cover gives you some clues to the inspired, rhythmic, New Age music, Randy wanted to create. Images of American zoot-suited dancer mingle with Greek, African, and Native American indigenous dancers. A fantastical, imaginary world, where they all come together under a unified song is painted on this small album canvas.
A song suite entitled “Towards The Fifth World” yields further clues. On Earth Dance, Randy tries to use deep dance-influenced grooves to move what can be heady “fourth world” music into a terrain anyone can understand: the dance floor.
Enlisting the help of Costa Rican acoustic/electric guitarist Jorge Strunz, fusion keyboard whiz Dom Camardella, and Brazilian jazz heavies like percussionist Airto Moreira, his wife, vocalist Flora Purim, and guitarist Ricardo Silveira, as you read further on the list of credited session cats, you pick up a decidedly experimental Latinx group. As a unit augmenting, Randy’s foundation on fretless bass and his arrangements done originally on a Fairlight computer system with all sorts of synthetic instruments, flow wonderfully in, adding very real swing to a weightless electro-acoustic soundbase.
Moving all the touchtones we (or, at least, I) love — our head, heart, and booty — on songs like “Passage”, “Persian Dance”, and “In Amorata (For Robin)” we get equal ideas from minimal Africa, techno Jamaica, and chromed-out Brazil, in a small example, woven together as one greater picture: this is heady music you can actually enjoy moving to on a hot summer day. At the heart of this whole vision is Randy’s spirited ability to shift from bass and keys, depending on the necessity of the composition.
When the music gets reflective, as it will on tracks like “Aotearoa”, “Beyond This Day (Forever Friends)” and “Delicate Balance”, truly inspired guest spots by flautist Steve Kujala, violist Charlie Bisharat, and percussionist Junior Homrich, touch upon their own quiet work elsewhere exploring a fourth world via other rarely trafficked routes.
In the end, rather than become a pastiche of world music, each song uses a different palette, perhaps a different musical stroke to paint the grander picture, keeping you on your toes not entirely sure of what’s coming next. Maybe to head towards that fourth world, we might need to skip towards that fifth one right in front of our toes?