Mingos Roomofvoices

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“I never thought about what I wanted to be”, confides Mingo Lewis. “I was just born and someone else knew I was going to be a musician, but it wasn’t me.” Whomever or whatever that ‘someone else’ may be, it is undeniable that the life of James “Mingo” Lewis became one of impassioned musical discovery, mastery, and exploration. From an early life graced by the presence of jazz, soul, and Afro-Cuban music royalty to subsequent decades of virtuosic performances, Lewis now brings a lifetime of profound sonic risk-taking to thrilling new musical projects.
Born in Harlem, Lewis’ childhood seemed inevitably destined towards music given the environment in which he was raised. His father, blues singer Jimmy “Babyface” Lewis once presided over the Cotton Club as the venue’s MC and was fixture at the Apollo Theatre while Lewis’ mother was similarly well-connected in New York’s fertile music scene through her job at Birdland. Once the clubs had closed, the elder Lewises would invite home the performers, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Max Roach among them, from that nights’ performance for post-gig jams.
It was here, in the Lewis living room, that Mingo’s musical education began. After jazz legend Art Blakey had given Lewis his first drum kit at age six, Mingo was considered fair game for the after hours’ sessions. “At three in the morning, I’d get up, ready to hang out with those guys. They didn’t always have a drummer that wanted to come over at all hours of the night. They’d come home all jacked up from the gig ready to play. So, I started playing snare drum and cymbal just giving them a groove to play to.”
Barely in elementary school, the young Lewis was now tagging along with his parents to the Apollo and 125th St. hotspot, Club Baby Grand, and before long was invited onstage to sit in on drums with R&B sax legend King Curtis. Guest spots with Curtis were common occurrences as Lewis was truly showing his worth and development as a player, not doubt soaking in all the sounds of every touchstone musician who came through the venues. Soon, the sounds of James Brown and early Sly Stone were figuring more into Lewis’ strong jazz foundations. But it wasn’t he heard the Cuban percussion giant Carlos “Patato” Valdes playing the congas one night that something really clicked.
Lewis, so taken with the instrument, abandoned the drum kit and moved sharply away from his jazz and soul roots and became utterly consumed with Latin and Afro-Cuban music. “I was sick with the conga thing”, he relates, and soon was regularly sitting in with two undisputed giants of Latin percussion, Mongo Santamaria and Armando Peraza. While the Apollo Theatre and Baby Grand continued to be nightly onstage proving grounds, Lewis was spending his days at a local hang spot in Central Park known as The Fountain, where Latin percussive jams would go on for hours and where the young conguero began to hone his sound and technique amongst other red-hot players.
“I didn’t realize it at the time, but New York is such a competitive place. The competition level is so high at anything you do, if you are good, you’re better than most people.” Lewis progressed quickly in this environment and, through Peraza, secured his first recording date playing bongos on the self-titled first single from Kool & The Gang. Bigger gigs soon followed in areas not previously even considered by Lewis.
Enjoying massive post-Woodstock success and touring behind their recently released third album, Santana arrived in New York to play a sold-out, two-night stand at Madison Square Garden only to have their entire percussion section quit the group on the day of the show as a result of long-brewing tension.
Ironically, a reluctant Lewis was in the hall, checking out the abandoned percussion set-up onstage before the show. “My friend convinced me to go only on my condition that we would go check out some ‘real’ music afterwards”, he says, laughing. It was Lewis’ friend, who upon learning from the band’s photographer they were without a percussion section tipped the concert promoter to the fact that Lewis was a skilled percussionist himself. The promoter convinced Santana and his crew to meet him and see what might be arranged. Hardly star-struck with the band (“the weirdest cats I’d ever seen”), Lewis nonetheless agreed to an impromptu audition an hour before the show.
After a few moments of playing, the band, particularly drummer Michael Shrieve and keyboardist Gregg Rolie, were awestruck with Lewis’ ability, and the gig was on. Shrieve wrote a set list for Lewis, with an order of different rhythms indicated rather than song names (which Lewis didn’t know anyway). The band tore through the set until bandleader Carlos halted the ensemble playing during “Soul Sacrifice” and signaled for Lewis to solo. 15-year old Mingo Lewis, totally unfamiliar with Santana’s music and audience, began to attack the congas mercilessly as the rest of the band left the stage. Left to his own devices, he continued to solo, drawing upon his remarkable musical upbringing and days dueling at the Fountain. Several minutes later, the group returned and Lewis concluded with a hard triplet for final emphasis. The crowd, perhaps more astounded than the band, exploded and served Lewis a deafening standing ovation.
Lewis became an official member of Santana shortly thereafter and left his last year of high school to join the band’s ongoing world tour. First stop: Puerto Rico, then Paris, and beyond.
After the tour, Lewis would figure prominently on Caravanserai, a record that marked a crucial demarcation point between Santana’s earlier radio-friendly period, and Carlos’ new fascination with the music of John Coltrane, Miles Davis and the spiritual teaching of guru Sri Chinmoy. The band was encouraged to experiment and explore and so the stage was set for Lewis to contribute two startling original compositions, “Future Primitive” which jazz historian Hal Miller called “a truly daring and revelatory piece of music for that and any other time” as well as the joyous and incendiary, “La Fuente Del Ritmo”.
Lewis continued to tour and record with the band, playing with John McLaughlin on the follow-up to Caravanserai, the even more radical and spiritual Love, Devotion and Surrender. While on tour supporting the album, Lewis was tipped to the debut by a new genre-defying project led by keyboardist Chick Corea called Return To Forever, a moment which served as Lewis’ own profound musical and physical departure point. Lewis: “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I freaked out. I left Santana because I knew I was going to play with Chick somehow.”
A few months later, RTF’s drummer, Lenny White, invited a stunned Lewis to join the group onstage at San Francisco’s Keystone Corner. Lewis thought the gig was just a one-off, but in fact, his appearance was a planned secret audition, which naturally he passed. Lewis joined RTF and began work on Hymn of The Seventh Galaxy. Through Corea, Lewis then met another musician of astounding talent willing to push boundaries, guitarist Al Di Meola. Lewis, now as much a composer as a player, wrote and recorded songs for the first seven Di Meola albums, considered the guitarist’s finest recordings. During this period, Lewis not only played with Corea, White, bassist Stanley Clarke and guitarist Bill Summers from RTF, but sat in with Weather Report and recorded with the Brecker Brothers, Steve Gadd, Jan Hammer, Anthony Jackson, Les Paul and Paco de Lucia, pushing himself into creative territory he could previously only imagine. Simultaneously, he continued to work with a growing range of artists, appearing on Buddy Miles’ Booger Bear and Billy Joel’s Turnstiles.
Shortly thereafter, Bill Spooner, guitarist for The Tubes, invited Lewis to join the band, beginning an eight-year stint with the group that found Lewis stretching yet again into new ground. The band combined performance art, societal satire, theatrical production and blistering rock and roll into a shock-value stew that was far removed from Lewis’ previous work in jazz-fusion. Then in 1980, Tubes’ drummer Prairie Prince was asked to be involved in an ambitious Brian Eno/David Byrne project known as My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. Prince convinced Byrne the album would also require Lewis’ intrinsic knowledge of rhythm and ability to deliver standard-bearing performances. “I came into help set the rhythms up and lay down a ground floor for them to play around.” Eno and Byrne then had Lewis play his patterns not on standard drums or congas but “garbage can tops, bata, and weird metal pipes” which were reconstructed in a strange but transcendent construct of rhythm and sound that proved hugely influential in modern music construction techniques and in the emerging sounds of ambient, electronica, worldbeat, hip hop and even pop. Lewis calls it “By far the most outstanding record I’ve been on.”After The Tubes dissolved in 1985, Lewis played briefly with guitarists Pat Thrall and Joe Satriani before heading off again on yet another musical adventure; this time in Bogotá, Colombia. While there, Lewis wrote songs and produced albums for various musical projects through CBS records, played in folkloric and reggae bands and taught university courses in the history of Afro-Cuban music. Then after hearing a group of Nigerian street drummers while on vacation in the south of France, Lewis decided to root up and move to Europe and began another fertile period of musical exploration and development. Lewis quickly took to the continent’s open-minded attitude towards music of all different types and found audiences to be “willing for anything to happen”. While living in Berlin, Lewis began composing music for a new project called Room Of Voices that would reflect and build on his early R&B roots. With sweat-drenched grooves, molasses-thick funk, electronic and world touches, and Lewis’ husky vocals, the band’s sound is aimed directly at both the dancefloor and the bedroom.
Having returned to the Bay Area, Lewis is now re-igniting Room Of Voices for a stateside debut along with another multi-dimensional project known as Vortex Tribe. Featuring Lewis, keyboardist Isaac Ho, and flautist Deborah Yates, Vortex Tribe is literally three-bands-in-one putting forth acid jazz, Sly-inflected funk, and Arabic-flavored worldbeat into an innovative musical and theatrical performance, soon to debut as X-Revue.
Throughout the band’s work, one can hear the treasure of seminal musical experience that Lewis has unearthed and displayed throughout his career: the early influence from the greatest practitioners of the form, the ability to deliver in the moment, the confidence to experiment, the good sense to never become complacent and the constant desire to grow.
Lewis is not one to think about or rest on his past musical experiences all that much. To him, music is just what he does and has no choice but to continue doing, leaving the rest of us to enjoy and marvel at his life’s work. .