Cochemea

Cochemea Gastelum, a New York multi-instrumentalist and arranger, first drew notice through his longstanding role with Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings and soon became a fixture in Brooklyn’s mid-2000s Afrobeat and soul community. Regular work with Antibalas and the Budos Band led to further demand as a flexible session player for acts ranging from Amy Winehouse and Public Enemy to Lady Gaga, Archie Shepp, and Aaron Neville. After releasing his wide-ranging debut solo album The Electric Sound of Johnny Arrow in 2010, he contributed centrally to the Dap-Kings’ Grammy-nominated 2014 set Give the People What They Want before returning to his own projects with the 2019 jazz-and-world-fusion release All My Relations, which examined his indigenous heritage, and its 2021 companion Vol. 2: Baca Sewa.

Raised in Southern California, Gastelum began music studies early, spent a brief period at Berklee College of Music in Boston, then settled back in San Diego and joined the avant punk band Creedle. He spent the balance of the 1990s on saxophone with Robert Walter’s 20th Congress before relocating to New York in 2002, where he quickly joined the city’s expanding Afrobeat and soul circles. Within several years he was performing regularly with Daptone-affiliated groups, touring with Antibalas, the Budos Band, and Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, on which he played baritone saxophone, while also logging studio work for producers such as Quincy Jones, Mark Ronson, and Rick Rubin.

Although chiefly identified as a saxophonist, Gastelum had matured into a versatile multi-instrumentalist and arranger; he deployed those abilities on the 2010 album The Electric Sound of Johnny Arrow, directing a large ensemble through Latin, funk, soul, Afrobeat, and jazz material while performing on sax, flute, bass clarinet, keyboards, vibraphone, and drums. The next year he served as a featured soloist in the Broadway production of Fela! and later appeared with the cast in Lagos, Nigeria. He maintained his primary post with Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings while taking on additional live and studio work for David Byrne, Beck, the Roots, Archie Shepp, and Paul Simon. Gastelum played an essential part on the band’s Grammy-nominated 2014 album Give the People What They Want, which contained his original composition “You’ll Be Lonely.” During the Dap-Kings’ final touring year before Sharon Jones’ death from cancer in 2016, he began shaping his next solo effort with assistance from bandmate Gabriel Roth. Issued in 2019 under the name Cochemea, All My Relations presented a personal, percussion-centered survey of his Yaqui and Mescalero Apache Indian ancestry interwoven with improvisational jazz and funk, earning strong critical praise and prompting a stylistic return on 2021’s Vol. 2: Baca Sewa. The title derived from his family’s indigenous designation before Spanish colonization and featured vocals and percussion by the Baca Sewa Singers, which included several generations of his relatives.