MADERA, Calif. – Steve Alcala was a high school music teacher in Fresno in the 1980s when he heard a Los Angeles-based jazz band was performing at an amphitheater in town.
He stopped by. And the first thing he noticed was the band had a conguero, a percussionist playing conga drums – which are typical in Cuban and African music, but not jazz.
“They had a conguero,” he recalled thinking. “What’s this conguero doing in a jazz band?”
Congas, it turns out, are a standard instrument in Latin jazz, which fuses salsa, American jazz and Afro-Caribbean rhythm. Alcala had stumbled upon this genre by accident.
“I go, ‘Whoa, this is cool. I love this,’” he recalled. “It has that lift, makes you want to dance.”
Alcala was no stranger to music even then. A trumpet player from a young age, he had joined a mariachi band in high school, studied jazz at Fresno State, and at the time was leading mariachi and marimba ensembles at Roosevelt School of the Arts.
Still, the concert hooked Alcala in. He knew he wanted to bring this music back to his students.
But there was a problem. After doing some research, he couldn’t find much Latin jazz sheet music – the pages covered in little black dots that musicians breathe into life.
“That's their textbook. It’s just like math, you have to have a textbook,” he said.
At the time, jazz legends like Eddie Palmieri, Tito Puente and Poncho Sanchez were performing Latin jazz, primarily in major jazz epicenters like New York City and New Orleans, and they were selling albums. But they weren’t typically sharing their sheet music arrangements beyond their bands. And that left students and musicians outside those major jazz scenes without an easy way to learn.
So Alcala set out to provide the music himself.
He’d put his favorite pieces on the record player and painstakingly write down the musical arrangements he heard – note by note, sometimes for 10 or 15 different instruments.
“I started transcribing the music myself,” he recalled, “and the kids really loved it.”
As it turns out, so did other band leaders.
When his students performed Latin jazz pieces at jazz festivals, Alcala said teachers would ask him where he had uncovered the music.
“I said, ‘so you know what? There’s a need here for that. So, I'm going to go ahead and start a publishing company,’” he said.
He started cold-calling the biggest performers, offering them royalties in exchange for providing their sheet music arrangements for students thirsty for Latin jazz. He believes he was the first to approach Eddie Palmieri, a Latin jazz pioneer who just died earlier this summer.
“[Palmieri] kind of revolutionized and was kind of the beginning of the salsa movement in New York,” Alcala said. “When I talked to him on the phone…he sent me a handwritten transcript which I still have in my files.”
With Palmieri and others on board, Alcala’s business took off. He named the company “3-2 Music Publishing” – a nod to the “3-2 clave”, a common Afro-Caribbean rhythm – and now has a catalog of hundreds of pieces by more than 70 Latin jazz composers.
“I started in 1992,” he said. “And it’s just been growing from there.”
A ‘profound effect’ on students
Alcala now runs 3-2 Music from his home office on the outskirts of Madera. From there, he sells to school bands, college bands and even military bands located all over the world.
“Japan buys a lot of music from me, Germany loves Latin jazz, Austria,” he said. “And there was one particular group that played in Iraq during the war.”
One of his regular customers is Richard Lloyd Giddens, Jr., who leads the jazz studies program at Fresno State University and directs the school’s jazz orchestra.
Giddens was also Alcala’s student in the ‘90s. When he went to college on the East Coast, he found Alcala’s reputation had traveled across the country too.
“People found out that I studied with Steve [Alcala]…and they're like, ‘oh, the music publishing guy, I need his number,’” he recalled, laughing. “People wanted his music in New York back in the late ‘90s.”
Before 3-2 Music, Giddens said, teaching Latin jazz was nearly impossible.
“And now there's an outlet, there's a vehicle, there's a platform where this music exists that people can find this music and perform it,” he said.
He’s now teaching the same Latin jazz pieces that he learned decades ago from Alcala. And many of his current students say they’re grateful to have access to this genre.
“It's very fun to play and very fun to listen to,” said Elric Pfeifer, a saxophone player in the Fresno State jazz orchestra. Compared to some other genres of jazz, he said, “it's more to get you just dancing and having a good time.”
“Latin music, Afro-Cuban music…has had such a profound effect on my life and everything I do in music,” said Trevor Kubose, who plays guitar in the jazz orchestra.
Sarah Cline, who leads a jazz band at Berkeley High School, said she’s been teaching Latin jazz to her students for years.
“It’s celebratory, just feels fabulous, makes you want to dance, move your body, makes you feel connected to other human beings,” she said.
Today, a handful of sheet music publishers sell Latin jazz music, and some composers sell directly themselves.
Still, Cline sources almost all of hers from Alcala. She said she’s bought hundreds of charts from him over the years.
She’s grateful for him not just for the sheet music itself, but also because it exposes students to the history of Latin jazz – involving slavery and the migration of West Africans through the Caribbean into the U.S. – which she said is an essential part of music history.
“It's a window into other cultures and that's always just great,” she said. “It's an important part of anyone's education.”
Global reach
Composers appreciate 3-2 Music as well. One of the first to publish with the company was Oscar Hernandez, who remembers receiving a call from Alcala, out of the blue, decades ago. After just one conversation, he said he could tell Alcala was the “real deal.”
“I was happy to be a part of it then because it's something that I strongly believe in,” he said. “[Alcala] represents something that's really good about the world, educating people about good music.”
Hernandez leads the world-renowned Spanish Harlem Orchestra and he’s won three Grammys. Still, he said hearing students play his work is a thrill.
“For me to see young people learning the music, man, that's where it all starts,” he said.
And the reverberations are global, said Felix Contreras. In addition to hosting the NPR music show Alt.Latino, Contreras is a percussionist and even performed with Alcala back in the 90s and early 2000s.
“I think you can say that Steve [Alcala], through his work and his publishing, has broadened the audience for Latin jazz around the world,” he said.
Alcala is now decades into his publishing business. Still, he expands his catalogue when he can. He said it’s exciting whenever a composer calls him to ask to publish with him – or a professional musician tells him his sheet music was what got them interested as a kid.
“That's helped,” Alcala said. “It makes me realize, yeah, I am doing something good.”