He has performed with Poncho Sanchez and Stanley Jordan. Lopez is a multi-instrumentalist, ethnomusicologist, and composer who is also a member of the Latin/Funk band the B-Side Players. Omar Lopez provides the bass in Juice Box. Around town he has backed up powerhouse vocalists Leonard Patton and Whitney Shay.įellow San Diego State graduate Louis Valenzuela, who received his bachelor’s degree of music in jazz studies, is a freelance musician who can also be heard with the Afrojazziacs, an enterprise that performs contemporary and traditional Cuban music, as well as reggae, salsa, jazz, and funk. An East Coast transplant, he is primarily a jazz performer, although he has also performed in blues bands off and on over the years.
Kornhauser is one of the finest up-and-coming keyboardists in San Diego. Playing the Fender Rhodes in Juice Box (and the member of the band credited with coming up with the band’s name) is Ed Kornhauser. Smith had no certain group in mind for making these songs, so he cast about for players who could recreate the sound of Funkadellic and Parliament. “So the next thing was that I wanted to get them out there,” Smith says. They also seemed like tunes that a small ensemble could get their arms around pretty quickly. I wound up, in the end, with 21 tunes.” Reviewing his 28-day process, five or six of his compositions stood out from the others. Smith says, “I had some time off at that time, so I set a goal. The genesis of Juice Box goes back to February of this year. Hey, at least he’s not considering issuing copies on eight-track tape. “I wanted that retro sound that I thought could attract a younger audience,” says Smith. And it was also a time when people got their recorded music on round pieces of vinyl called record albums, which they bought at places called record stores and played them on things called turntables. The sound of his soul/funk band Juice Box harkens back to the days, 30 or 40 years ago, when funk and soul were ubiquitous across the airwaves and dance floors, when James Brown was a sex machine and George Clinton’s Maggot Brain assured us that Mother Earth was indeed pregnant for the third time. “You’re putting your new recording out as an old-fashioned record?ĭrummer Matthew Smith explained, with his project Juice Box, that issuing the recording as a long-play album was part of his commitment to the retro sound of a couple generations ago. Believing that the last recording committed to an actual two-sided 331/3 RPM long-playing record album was put out by Michael McDonald, or the Doobie Brothers, or some sort of disco act in 1978, I was understandably incredulous. Juice Box (left to right): Louis Valenzuela, Omar Lopez, Matt Smith, Ed Kornhauser
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