A letter from Alexia Weber Morales

Hello, Claudio! Perhaps you already heard the news, but in case you haven't... We won a Grammy!

Yes, Pacific Mambo Orchestra has won the Grammy for Tropical Latin Album, beating out Marc Anthony, Carlos Vives, Los Angeles Azules and Sergio George. Steffen Kuehn and Christian Tumalan, our bandleaders, were at the Grammy pre-telecast to accept the award, while most of the band was back in the Bay Area (though several of us had come down to Los Angeles the week before to perform on the TV show Good Day LA and attend the NAMM music merchants conference).

Much of the press following this upset win has focused on how we could have possibly done it. Some pigeonhole PMO’s success into the social media meme. But we were no YouTube phenomenon. As Steffen joked a few days before the Grammy’s, “I was thinking of putting in my acceptance speech, ‘We’d like to thank our 100 Twitter fans and 1200 Facebook fans for this victory.’” Those numbers are minuscule to begin with, and laughable when you’re up against Marc Anthony.

No, there are three reasons PMO succeeded in grabbing a Grammy nomination:

1. Regular gigs in the San Francisco Bay Area, which built an enthusiastic live — not virtual — fan base.

2. A fresh-sounding, highly original album.

3. A Columbia Artists-produced national tour.

There’s one reason we won: FOCUS.

I’ll be honest: If it had been my band, I am not sure I would have pushed as hard as we did. I might have assumed I could never win, that the nomination was a token honor, and that was it. With our win, however, the value of that final sprint is hammered into my head now.

As soon as we had the nomination, the real work began. In band meetings, we strategized and divvied out lobbying for the hearts of the Grammy voters, members of NARAS. The task was enormous, but the purpose was singular: We needed people to listen to us. We accomplished this via the Grammy 365 members-only web site, a Facebook group for Grammy voters, in person, at gigs, at the San Francisco Grammy chapter meeting, advertising in Billboard, and via the band’s and some of the member bandleaders’ own mailing lists (such as mine).

I’ve been in many bands. I’ve even been on a Grammy-nominated record before. But I’ve never felt the drive and camaraderie of the “march of the 19-piece army”, to use engineer Michael Lazarus’ words.

I hope this victory shows people that miracles do happen, that indie bands can succeed, that teamwork and community are critical and that focus is a beautiful thing. Those are the lessons I have learned from this process.

Many of us in the band are bandleaders ourselves. Some are Grammy winners many times over, and have traveled the world extensively (Jeff Cressman and Karl Perazzo with Santana, Tommy Igoe of Birdland fame). The arrangers, primarily Mike Rinta and Aaron Lington, are deserving of some notice. Trumpeter Jon Ruff is such a character, riding his motorcycle around like Evel Knievel and sharing stories from his life as an active musician with the military. And my friend Mara Fox deserves a shout out as the only other woman on the record besides me and the toughest gigging trombonist you’ll ever meet......

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