Getting to Know Bo
Bo Razón is a multi-instrumentalist, recording artist, writer, television director, and educator. Equally fascinated by traditional music of indigenous cultures all over the world and by modern and contemporary music genres, Bo seeks ways in which the two may coalesce organically. His skill sets have brought him to work with several global institutions of art and culture and to perform in venues and festivals in Asia, North America, and Europe.
Bo was born in the Philippines with Malay, Polynesian, Cuban, Portuguese, & Irish strains coursing through his DNA. He was exposed to music at a very early age as his parents both came from musical families and played instruments themselves. Discovering his paternal great-grandmother was from Havana, Bo headed to Cuba in the 1990’s to immerse in the music and folklore of the island. He plays several instruments from many diverse global cultures and he has performed in settings and venues in Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
Bo’s Journey
Bo first picked up the guitar in early high school in Manila and then moved to Baltimore where he honed his Blues chops, diving headlong into Rock shortly thereafter. He then moved to San Francisco and was exposed to Jazz while living in a house full of Jazz musicians in Marin County. While in the Bay Area, he started playing Latin music and learning to play other stringed instruments from other cultures; this expanded into learning to play percussion in the Afro-Latin genres, primarily Cuban & Brazilian. A Bay Area resident for many years, Bo was fortunate enough to meet and perform with legends and notable artists in Latin Jazz & Cuban music idioms like Francisco Aguabella, Armando Peraza, John Santos, Michael Spiro, Karl Perazzo, to name a few. As a core member of San Francisco’s premiere worldbeat band, Big City, he headlined at Berkley’s Greek Theater, the Kabuki, Wolfgang, the I-Beam, and the Great American Music Hall, sharing the stage with a spectrum of notable artists such as Herbie Hancock, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Ornette Coleman, X, Fishbone, Primus, Nona Hendryx, General Public, and many more. He has also performed at the prestigious Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, the Asia Society Concert Theatre in New York, and at the Smithsonian Institution’s Folklife Festival in Washington D.C. In addition, Bo has played in world music festivals in Barcelona and Madrid, and in jazz festivals in San Jose and Hollywood, California. In the late 1990’s, Bo went to Cuba to attend Master Classes and Workshops on Cuban music at the National School for the Arts there. He also conducted field research on Afro-Cuban folklore and music under the auspices of the Anthropological Society of Cuba in Matanzas, the repository of African culture in Cuba. Bo has also performed and collaborated with master musicians and cultural artists from Jamaica, Cuba, Brazil, the Philippines, India, Nepal, Trinidad-Tobago, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and other African and Caribbean countries.
In the intervening years, Bo has immersed himself in the music of the gong cultures of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, apprenticing under master musician Danongan Kalanduyan from Mindanao. Moreover, he has been engaged in the Afro-Caribbean musical spectrum, in the musical mother lode of West Africa, in the rich diversity of Brazilian music, in Iberian musical expressions, in electronic and experimental formats, and in more North American Blues and Jazz. Also within this period, Bo worked with and performed at several global institutions of culture such as the British Council, the Goethe Institute, the Alliance Francaise (Paris), Instituto Cervantes (Spain), and the Philippine National Commission for Culture & the Arts (Manila).
It is within this rich and varied background that Bo Razón brings us his most recent compositions and arrangements through the imminent release of an EP album called “The Saronay Sessions”, a unique blend of world music combining indigenous musical elements from four continents. With your help in this campaign, the album production turns the corner towards its planned release in May.