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How The Mavericks’ singer paid tribute to his Miami hometown — without using words

Raul Malo, singer-guitarist of the made-in-Miami country group The Mavericks, may surprise people with his new instrumental album, a 10-song, 38-minute set that could function as an auditory Miami travelogue.

“I got stopped in the airport and this gentleman asked me, ‘Why with one of the greatest voices, why would you do an instrumental record?’

“Why not, you know?” Malo said in a recent phone interview with the Miami Herald from his Nashville home. “I get it to some degree, but this is something totally different. The real answer is that I’m a musician and sometimes I use my voice and sometimes I use the guitar but sometimes I use anything.”

“Say Less,” with its vintage Latin, rockabilly, surf guitar-noir instrumentation and cinema-styled mono-sounding mix feels like one of those Space Age 1960s cocktail lounge instrumental records by Martin Denny, Esquivel and Jackie Gleason’s Orchestra that Malo’s mom and dad would slap on the family’s hi-fi record player after work to relax with a drink and cigarette in hand. You may know the system: a turntable housed in a wooden cabinet piece of furniture that took up a quarter of the wall space in a living room and kept the cocktail parties groovy.

The music also functions as a soundtrack to cruising some of the same South Florida thoroughfares that the 57-year-old Class of 1983 Christopher Columbus High School graduate once pedaled his bike down or cruised along to in his dad’s Pontiac GTO with its top down.

The album’s “Granada Boulevard” and “Liberty City” are his most obvious homages to his hometown, the Miami-born Malo says.

And “Cosa’s Cumbia,” while not naming a location, is meant to evoke the feel of the Fania All-Stars salsa records Malo loved while growing up in Miami. Ditto the melodic “Havana’s Midnight” in which members of The Mavericks back the guitarist. On “Peach Blossom Blues” Malo’s son, 27-year-old Dino Malo, plays percussion and has a songwriting credit.

“It’s a little bittersweet because you’re going, ‘Oh my gosh, here’s my kid, you know, he’s diving full steam ahead into this thing.’ And as a parent, there’s like a Cuban parent in me where it’s like, ‘I want them to become a doctor or a lawyer,’” Malo says, laughing.

“I try not to sound like my like my parents did,” he says, still chuckling, noting that though traditions were strong in the Malo Miami household, both of his parents — his late father, Raul Sr., and his mother, Norma — had broad musical tastes and supported their son’s interests.

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3200 Granada Boulevard in Coral Gables. This block is near the Biltmore Hotel around 7 p.m. on June 1, 2023.
3200 Granada Boulevard in Coral Gables. This block is near the Biltmore Hotel around 7 p.m. on June 1, 2023.

Granada Boulevard

Malo’s “Granada Boulevard” is named for the winding gumbo limbo-lined thoroughfare in Coral Gables that takes in the University of Miami on the intersection off U.S. 1 and Ponce de Leon Boulevard, along with private homes and parks, and Coral Gables Country Club to the north en route to Eighth Street.

Granada also feeds into picturesque landmarks like the Biltmore Hotel on Anastasia Avenue, Salvadore Park on Andalusia Avenue, Venetian Pool on De Soto Boulevard and the Granada Golf Course.

“Granada is one of the most beautiful boulevards in the world, and I’m so proud to see that it’s still that. That is that beautiful boulevard that I used to ride bicycles with my friends down the sidewalks and play among its beautiful trees. That song to me is what it sounded like driving down that boulevard with the top down, you know, in a convertible and that’s what I wanted for the vibe of that song,” Malo said.

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Granada Boulevard in Coral Gables with the central street fountain and street entrance to Venetian Pool top right around 7 p.m. on June 1, 2023.
Granada Boulevard in Coral Gables with the central street fountain and street entrance to Venetian Pool top right around 7 p.m. on June 1, 2023.

Liberty City

The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration parade held in Liberty City on Jan. 16 2023.
The Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration parade held in Liberty City on Jan. 16 2023.

The “Say Less” album’s “Liberty City” is named for the area of Miami roughly bounded by Northwest 79th Street to the north, Northwest 27th Avenue to the west, the Airport Expressway to the south, and Interstate 95 to the east.

“Liberty City didn’t always have the greatest of reputations. I remember early on the first riots happened there and it was always written about in a very negative light. I mean, ‘Grand Theft Auto’ named one of their games after Liberty City. I don’t remember it quite like that,” Malo said.

“I remember our first gigs as The Mavericks [near] Liberty City at a place called Churchill’s and before that we used to go to churches to hear bands. I was going to Liberty City at night for quite some ... and nothing ever happened. It was a wonderful, amazingly vibrant, colorful community that had the sounds and the smells I would hear as I drove to Churchill’s,” Malo said.

That’s the sound the composer tried to replicate on the track.

“You’d hear a mix of calypso, Caribbean music, funk, blues, R&B, all the good stuff,” Malo says. “You just hear bits and pieces of it emanating from people’s cars or homes as you’d go through the neighborhood together. And to me that’s kind of what ‘Liberty City’ sounded like to me. And that’s why the song ended up sounding the way it did: not too sophisticated, almost more like guys playing in a little nightclub with whatever instruments were laying around. My son played drums on it.”

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Churchills Pub was a fixture for more than 40 Years at 5501 NE Second Ave. in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood. This is a file photo from 2019.
Churchills Pub was a fixture for more than 40 Years at 5501 NE Second Ave. in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood. This is a file photo from 2019.

Where’s Westchester?

Raul Malo’s sophomore year yearbook photo from Christopher Columbus High School in the Westchester neighborhood of Miami-Dade in 1981. He graduated in 1983 and went on to form the country music band, The Mavericks.
Raul Malo’s sophomore year yearbook photo from Christopher Columbus High School in the Westchester neighborhood of Miami-Dade in 1981. He graduated in 1983 and went on to form the country music band, The Mavericks.

Malo cracks up when asked why there is no instrumental homage on his new album to the Westchester neighborhood of West Miami-Dade that birthed Columbus, the private boys’ Catholic high school he attended at 3000 SW 87th Ave.

“I was going back home recently and making a left on Eighth Street at 87th Avenue and seeing this big sign, ‘Welcome to Westchester,’ and I was like what? When did we get so proud to welcome people to Westchester? Like, this is incredible. Look at this! That’s fantastic,” Malo says, chuckling.

“I love Miami. Of course, it’s changed like any city. But there are bits of Eighth Street from 17th Avenue all the way to 107th that haven’t changed a bit. The stores that I went with my parents to buy lamps for the house, they are still there. Furniture stores that were there when I was a kid are still there. The little bike shop that my dad bought me my first dirt bike at is still there. I love that. That as much as Miami changes, as much as life changes, it’s so cool to see that there are parts of Miami that just stay the course.”

That feeling flows through Malo’s “Say Less” album. For him, a new instrumental genre, perhaps. Nostalgia, too.

Writing without words

Raul Malo’s “Say Less” instrumental album features songs named after Miami locations like Liberty City and Coral Gables’ Granada Boulevard. The 10-song set was released on May 19, 2023.
Raul Malo’s “Say Less” instrumental album features songs named after Miami locations like Liberty City and Coral Gables’ Granada Boulevard. The 10-song set was released on May 19, 2023.

“Say Less” has its origins in a proposed Netflix documentary on The Mavericks, Malo says. The musician was writing melodies during the pandemic and “no lyrics ever came to mind,” he said. “And I thought, ‘Well, this is cool. I’ve never really done this before. I’ve never really written instrumentals. So let me just see if I can do it. Let me see if they sound like complete pieces of music to me.”

When the documentary’s director died in a plane crash, the film project, which may have used some of Malo’s melodies as a soundtrack, was shelved, Malo said.

But the tunes that were inspired by those Denny, Gleason and Esquivel records his parents played in his childhood Southwest Miami-Dade home, and the Johnny Cash and The Clash rebel records he’d get into in high school, gelled.

“It’s been kind of a guilty pleasure and that’s kind of what this was like to make. We were having so much fun making this record,” Malo said. And if Frank Sinatra, at the height of his vocal talents in 1956, could conduct an instrumental album called “Tone Poems of Color,” then why can’t this singer paint his own poems via his 1963 Fender Jaguar guitar in 2023?

“It’s just a musical exercise, man. And I think fans that are curious and dig music, I think they’ll dig this. I’m sure I’ll get somebody going, ‘He’s not singing. No way, I’m out of here.’ ”

The Mavericks in a 2015 file photo, from left: Eddie Perez, Paul Deakin, Jerry Dale McFadden and Raul Malo.
The Mavericks in a 2015 file photo, from left: Eddie Perez, Paul Deakin, Jerry Dale McFadden and Raul Malo.