How to Smile: Helado Negro and Friends at the Great American Music Hall

Seemingly a light crowd for a sold out show. Opening live performances should not be so easily dismissed. This was my first time at the Great American Music Hall, and though I am new to Helado Negro’s music, the quality of This Is How You Smile (2019) had me expecting an intimate performance, and the bill’s other two performers, Meernaa and Angelica Garcia, gave me the expectation of a very Hispanic night of music, something less common in the Bay then in my home of Los Angeles. The night was not what I expected, but was consistently entertaining and introduced me to not only new artists, but a renewed faith in the songwriting skills of contemporary musicians.

The crowd chatted away as she walked on stage, set up, and began without any fanfare. Meerna’s vocals filled the room for a hot minute before her guitar was allowed to roam around. My eyes had been on the stage since getting there, but for most of the audience this was their first notice of Meernaa. Her takeover of the venue was so unexpectedly a power move that the free style of her guitar and the controlled flight of her voice came as a surprise. 

To the fans not there for Meernaa, expectations were far surpassed by the way she handled herself. Her voice is beautiful, and though someone at her merch booth would later claim she was the next Joni Mitchell, the first likeness I heard was more that of Dolores O’Riordan, with the yelps of “Zombie” coming to mind. Her music is soft and atmospheric, but not in any means weak. It expertly straddles the line between intimate and spaced out. If she was as nervous as she said she was, it certainly did not show in her songs. Her worry became comical as she prefaced with, “I’m going to play a new song and it’s hard so I might mess up.” The image of a singing face can be a ridiculous work of art, and as one of her last songs demanded her full vocal range, Meernaa’s beautiful visage contorted to please the crowd “that’s been too nice.” 

During Meernaa’s set, all the fashionably late trickled in to fill the hall and the front became crowded as she attracted more disciples. The next act was not expected or mentioned previously, but later I would learn that the surprise who revived folk was Tré Burt. Whereas Meernaa’s act was almost psychedelic in its practice of the drawn out and emotional, Burt’s was disciplined and straightforward storytelling, obviously drawing from different 60’s inspirations, most obviously the folk of Bob Dylan. As a fellow Dylan fan I perked up when he brought out his harmonica. He would often announce the theme of his next song, and my favorite was probably his reflection on the passing of time, “What Good.” 

I have been a proponent of the idea that all kinds of music and genres are still being practiced and having their barriers and challenges overcome in creative ways, if you can find those special, niche artists. As Burt finished his debut album’s title track “Caught It From The Rye” I failed to think of another current performer who so faithfully recreates the feeling of this specific style in a new and interesting way.  Folk demands life experience and wit, and Tré Burt delivered on both fronts as well as on musical skill. He was also unapologetically political and honest,and his poetic straightforwardness could be a sharply comical weapon: “I can’t tell if those are boos or woos, such is the state of 2020.”

Angelica Garcia could not go unnoticed as Meernaa did, in her bright pink silk dress and blue eyeshadow announcing her presence and tattooing her image into the back of my eyelids. She took a zen approach to set up, sitting with the equipment with eyes closed, mentally preparing herself. Having never heard her, my assumption of her minimalistic electronic setup was that her set would comprise prerecorded instrumentals with her manipulating these effects and contributing live vocals, and I was right. But I was not expecting her use of looping to create an ethereal cacophony of voice. Her singing had a Latin flavor to it, but tinged with a haunting operatic tone that made her first songs sound experimental, toying with harmony and growing larger and larger into an entity that swallowed up the entire hall; her incantation of “La Llorona” hit a little more literally than one would have guessed. After a while, when the format of building these looping layers became predictable, she picked up her guitar and changed up her rules. More melancholy, and more technical, these songs brought us closer to Angelica.

Her embrace of the avant-garde in her music and on-stage gave off the sense of danger, an old throwback to new wave freshness that still gives off that implication, though not as popularly practiced. From the biting delivery of her lyrics to her hand gestures and confident attitude, I felt like I was watching David Byrne in Stop Making Sense (1984), except instead of a lanky white guy it was a young Latina who, I would learn when meeting her, is from El Monte, nearby my hometown of Whittier. I was filled with pride, and charmed by the feeling of warmth and home that our interaction gave me. I love music as an art and I love playing music, but the human interactions with musicians at this level are so honest and reminding for me. Speaking to her felt like conversing with an old friend, though I had never met her; I could see her in Los Angeles. Her mother asked if I wanted a signed copy of her album, and she was embarrassed, though of course I did. My mother would have done that, and I probably would have reacted in the same way. “Jícama, jícama, guava tree!”

Helado Negro, real name Roberto Carlos Lange, had longer hair than in the pictures, and through the night he kept his mane rockin’. From his pictures and the reflective, laid back grooves of This Is How You Smile, I was imagining him as a soulful, serious musician. That Latino soul was there, but a hardy helping of physical antics and nonchalant speech made for a much more lighthearted affair. His spoken voice was incredibly soft and precious as on “Please Don’t Please,” the opener to his new album. He and his two supporting musicians, dressed in a uniform of primary colored shirts with belts and jeans, played through the album in its entirety. Though saxophones, violins and other live instruments did provide a more “lively” sound, the performance was groovy and calm, with no urge to electrify the tunes for a live performance. 

“Running” was the biggest song of the night, with audience participation and the meandering Lange hovering above the crowd. His face, unlike Meerna’s, held steady during croons. Rather than shifting his face to either side, Helado Negro opted to bare his teeth and push what he needed from the depths of his core. Much like Angelica before him, his Latin roots not only dug into some of his music, like “My Own Brown Skin,” but into his on stage presence. He couldn’t help but shake his hips to his own music, and though he was a humble shy guy, he knew he was good.

Article and Photos by Stanley Quiros