We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Gina Benalcazar Lopez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Gina thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Two meaningful projects for me have been leading my Latin-jazz ensemble “La Orquestra Esa” and being the resident arranger and trombonist for Lulada Club. I’ve always had a passion for composing and arranging music, and it’s been my greatest joy writing for these two bands. I grew up listening to salsa, dancing with my family, and knowing all the lyrics to all the standards. It was something you just knew growing up. When I pursued my music studies, I had a focus in classical and jazz so I had a really great understanding of those music forms and rhythms, but when it came to Latin music it was just something in my gut that I felt and knew. I had such a spiritual connection with this music that when I played or listened to it I felt like my most festive and liberated self. But in comparison to how well I understood jazz I really didn’t feel like I understood Latin music enough to write for it in a sincere and authentic way so I would actually avoid doing so.

It was through playing and writing for Lulada Club that I started learning the names of everything so I could properly label the arrangements for the musicians in the ensemble. Things like form types, section names, groove names, and how to ask each member to create a specific sound is something I learned from the women in this band. I started to study the music with that same intention that I had studied jazz and classical and started to really get a lot of courage to write for that more in my own band, as well as being a lot more adventurous with my arrangements in Lulada Club as well. Up until this point I had always felt a self-consciousness that the music I wrote ended up being more latin oriented. And the afro-cuban pieces and mambos were always the things that sounded the most like me. But after getting the courage I ended up restructuring my ensemble to unapologetically encompass latin styles. Now I’m writing tangos, cha cha chas, mambos, boleros, and afro cuban pieces with a lot of purpose and intention. It’s been like discovering a part of me that was sleeping for a really long time. I also feel like this has informed a lot of the writing projects that I’ve been doing, and my audience seems to like it as I’ve been steadily working on commissioning more original works for different ensemble types and sizes. It’s really been a life changing experience.

I’m now gearing up to do more large ensemble work with both projects which has been consuming most of my mental space but it has been so fun and meaningful that I’m just constantly excited to sit down and write every day.

Gina, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My name is Ginita, I’m an Ecuadorian-Honduran-American trombonist and multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger, band leader, and educator based of our NYC. I’m the musical director of NYC’s Latin-jazz ensemble “La Orquestra Esa” and the resident arranger for NYC’s all-women Salsa band “Lulada Club”, as well as being a freelancer who loves playing in ensembles of all sizes and styles, including Broadway pit orchestras.

The band which I lead is called La Orquesta Esa, which is a Latin-jazz ensemble’s repertoire encompasses styles with rhythms coming from Central America, South America, and the Caribbean Islands. From salsa, to bolero, to cha-cha-cha and tango, the music of this ensemble takes you on a tour of Latin America. For every concert my goal is to write new music, including requests from the band members and continuously aim to compose music that is interesting for the musicians to play, but also meaningful for my audiences. It’s been a pleasure playing in this ensemble which in my favorite form consists of a 10-tet, but in moments sometimes will be a quintet or big band. The audience favorites have been the original tunes, which has really encouraged me to write write write.

It’s also a pleasure to collaborate with other bands and bring their music to life, and working alongside other band leaders and vocalists to write arrangements that encompass their vision so that both our voices come through in the music.

Lulada Club is NYC’s all women salsa band under the direction of Andrea Chavarro and Katherine Ocampo, and I am their resident arranger. We are a tropical ensemble comprised of some of NY’s finest salseras. Our songbook, ever growing, consists of your favorite classic salsas and boleros. The core of the band consists of an 8 piece band, but we’ve been doing a lot more large ensemble work as well, including bringing the big band on a collaboration with the Metropolitan Opera where we were accompanied by strings to produce an epic show of songs that I arranged to feature arias from Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice. We’re excitedly working on more big band, which has given me a huge avenue to arrange really creatively for Latin ensemble. This is the ensemble I write the most for as our audience has really been ever growing and the people keep asking for more, so I’m very fortunate to be working with a band that not only fosters my musical voice, but also encourages me and even presents me with many opportunities to write on a large scale. We are very excitedly planning even bigger things for the band.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I would really love to give a considerable contribution to the cannon of latin and jazz music by women composers. I don’t think there is enough representation, which made it so difficult growing up to imagine myself in spaces, because there was no one that looked like me. It’s my mission to show young women that there is in fact space for us out here, and that we are welcomed and to continue to encourage them and fill my band with diverse faces so that there’s no one feeling like they don’t belong somewhere.

I also have a deep desire to engage with my community, which is something that I’m able to do through dance and music. Knowing that my music makes you want to wiggle in your seat, or get up and dance is the best thing I could ask for. I want to see all the generations of NY latines dancing together, creating space where we can share our heritage and language and sing together. It’s such a joy to be a part of a music where hearing a song repeatedly makes dancers shout with joy and catch the hits with the band. There is nothing like it. I want to create MORE moments like this.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

The most rewarding part of being an artist has been working with other like minded artists and creating things together. It makes me feel like I’m leaving something behind in this world. It’s also given me many opportunities to listen to new music and learn new things. I’m a huge nerd, I love studying and trying things that I really have no business doing. I am always jumping into situations where I don’t feel ready, and the challenge of figuring it out is so gratifying it’s like a natural high. I’m so lucky that my work is built on constantly learning and doing new things. Each new project brings on it’s new challenges that to me makes them so fun. I think being able to jump from one exciting thing to the next exciting project also keeps my life interesting and fresh. It’s just endless and I love that, it’s very fun for my neuro-spicy brain. I’m so grateful.

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