Making Movies w/ El Leon & The Strangers

Siembra y llegará. As Making Movies delivers its fourth album, XOPA, the Kansas City band proves true the maxim which, in English, is like an encouraging version of “reap what you sow.” Meant to inspire its recipient to push forward, the phrase is chanted on the LP’s multi-movement epic, “La Primera Radio” — but it’s exemplary, too, of Making Movies’ musical odyssey. 

This is a band that makes American music with an asterisk: because Making Movies’ sound encompasses the entirety of the Americas, not solely the country inarguably centered in mainstream everything. It’s through this broader perspective that Making Movies crunches classic rock into Latin American rhythms — African-derived percussion and styles like rumba, merengue, mambo and cumbia — in a way that feels oddly familiar, yet delivers the invigorating chills of hearing something singularly special. 

Each member — Enrique Chi, vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter; his brother Diego Chi, bassist and experimental vocalist; percussionist Juan-Carlos Chaurand; and Duncan Burnett, newly incorporated into the band on drums — is enthusiastically committed to music history, to uncovering connections between genres and cultures both their own and otherwise. They’re all lifelong musicians too, hailing from disparate yet similar backgrounds — parents that cherished music, fathers that kickstarted cultural movements, families in which gospel is critical to their very existence. 

“The goal is to create music that includes every bit of our individual identities,” Enrique says. “Music is our way to find a deeper understanding of our own stories. It’s a healing of sorts.” 

But none of this earned understanding precludes the group’s perpetual evolving. Enrique Chi, lead vocalist, guitarist, and songwriter, is compelled to share knowledge, but like any sincere historian, though, he also listens. It’s impossible to know everything; in musical lore and its future there is still so much yet to be uncovered.

The band’s collective yearning for exploration has attracted a nexus of connections, many of them legendary players, like Steve Berlin of iconic rock band Los Lobos, a recurring collaborator and steadfast champion of the band. An approach from beloved Panamanian musician Rubén Blades led to joint songs like “No te Calles” and “Cómo Perdonar.” Making Movies has also created with indie-folk band Hurray for the Riff Raff, trumpeter Asdru Sierra of Ozomatli, Puerto Rican salsero Frankie Negrón, and all-female mariachi group Flor de Toloache. On the heels of Making Movies’ 2019 album ameri’kana, the band worked on an eponymous documentary series, through which they connected with the legendary organist Reverend Charles Hodges, an soul music pioneer who played alongside Al Green, and fellow Memphis, Tennessee, musicians the Sensational Barnes Brothers.

Making Movies creates music that is undoubtedly pedagogical, yet inarguably kinetic. And their live shows, despite the precision with which they perform, are not lacking in dynamism. Every time they perform, they are wholly present, feeling every original groove with the same rush of as when they first found it.