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At Vancouver International Jazz Festival, Mestizx conjures warm soundtrack for troubled times
Flowing from a rich mix of ancestries, the duo’s electronic-based sound points to forgotten but ever-present connections to the natural world
Frank Rosaly and Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti of Mestizx.
The Vancouver International Jazz Festival presents Mestizx at the Revue Stage on June 27 at 9:30 pm
IT’S LATE AND IT’S hot and I’m frazzled, walking through the streets of this unfamiliar city, where steep hills lead down to an industrial waterfront but leafy outdoor cafés beckon the weary traveller. I can’t stop, though: I’m on a mission, and my quest is to find a copy of Mestizx’s first album, so that I can give it a spin before my early morning interview with that Bolivian-American–Puerto Rican–Dutch band’s singer, Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti.
Eventually, the grail is found, tucked away in a small indie record store, and the music is revealed: softer and folkier than the band’s self-titled 2024 effort, but nonetheless beguiling.
And then I wake up.
It doesn’t take a Freudian to decipher this as an anxiety dream. A habitual over-preparer, I’m distressingly underprepared to chat with Guardia Ferragutti. And while Mestizx’s acoustic album does not exist, I’ve only been able to listen to the band’s real debut twice through. Fortunately, the gracious singer and multi-instrumentalist quickly puts me at ease, and we’re soon laughing like old friends—especially once I tell her my dream.
What’s obvious—to me, at any rate—is that Mestizx’s music has made an immediate impact on my subconscious, in part because it’s the perfect soundtrack for these challenging times. It references various folk and jazz traditions, but within an immersive matrix of electronic warmth. It’s clearly rooted in collective improvisation, but leans on particularly strong individual performances from Guardia Ferragutti, her partner and percussionist Frank Rosaly, and cornet player Ben LaMar Gay. And whereas the overall tone of the record is soothing, even comforting, it posits the existence of a better world that can be won through struggle.
Despite its obvious topicality, however, the Mestizx project—which makes its local debut at the Revue Stage on June 27, as part of the Vancouver International Jazz Festival—has been simmering for a decade, ever since Guardia Ferragutti met Rosaly at a storied Amsterdam concert venue. “I was going to a show in the Bimhuis,” Guardia Ferragutti explains, “and I saw that there was an extra band playing that I didn’t know about, [U.S.–based psychedelic folk act] Ryley Walker. I saw them and I was really impressed, even more than with the band, by the drummer. And then we fell in love that night, immediately. We went out with some friends to have some drinks, and since then we’ve never stopped seeing each other.”
Music allowed the two to maintain a long-distance relationship before Rosaly’s move to Amsterdam became a necessity. “On one hand, there was the artistic spark between the two of us, but also, of course, the love,” says Guardia Ferragutti. “We immediately started working on a practical level, because Frankie had a residency in Chicago at that point with a band called ¡Todos de Pie!—which means ‘Everybody stand up’—which was trying to harvest old Puerto Rican songs from New York. He invited me to sing with them, but it was also another way for us to see each other. And then I invited him to play in my projects in Amsterdam, because there was immediately this really intense connection, artistic connection, with Frank, but also with a lot of other people in Amsterdam and also in Chicago. So a lot of other collaborations were born from our connection.”
Guardia Ferragutti and Rosaly quickly found a shared purpose beyond music. Mestizx means, essentially, “mixed”, and both musicians were trying to discover and explore their individual ancestries. Rosaly was born to Puerto Rican parents who were urgently trying to assimilate into American culture. Learning Spanish was discouraged in the Rosaly household, and the drummer’s love of Latin rhythms emerged only after deep immersion in rock and jazz. Guardia Ferragutti, in turn, was juggling her Brazilian mother’s culture and her Bolivian father’s roots. There’s also the additional complexity of being a person of mixed European and African ancestry in a majority-Indigenous culture, something Guardia Ferragutti admits that she wrestled with.
“In Bolivia, there is a very big separation between the Indigenous people and people like me, that are also half-Spanish, from the Spanish colonists,” she explains. “I always felt that I didn’t belong, that I was not allowed to be part of the place, not recognized as a person that belongs to that territory because of the colonial part of me—and also because of certain privileges that I had that others didn’t. I always felt really bad about it, and also that I didn’t want to appropriate anything. So I started asking a lot of permission. ‘Can I do this? Can I do that?’ And the amazing thing was that Frankie and me, we were both invited to different rituals and could just feel the world telling us ‘No, no, no, you are part of the fabric of things. You don’t need to think too much in terms of the separation.’ Not only the colonial mindset but also the capitalist mindset is to make us feel separated from everything, to feel guilt and shame. And they were really receiving us like other members of the family.”
“Sirinus”, the final track on Mestizx’s debut, is a good example of how the two mix Indigenous concepts with modernistic music. Set to clanging, twanging strings and earthy bass percussion, it finds Guardia Ferragutti intoning a text by anthropologist Henry Stobart describing a unique, animistic interface between water spirits and the human world.
“In Bolivia,” she says, “it is believed that there are these creatures, sirenas, that are not allowed to have human exchange. They are just allowed to have sonic exchanges with instruments. The colonizers saw them as mermaids, but we don’t see them as mermaids. We see them as the beings of the water, but they are not necessarily like a cross between a woman and a fish.”
Water is important, she continues, not only for Indigenous agriculture, but as a link between the earth and the sky that is best expressed in music. “The humans, the people, make instruments, and then they go to these wells where the water is very, very pure, and it is believed that the sirenas are there. And if you put the instruments close to these wells and then leave that place, during the night the sirenas will whisper the songs for the next season to the instruments. Next day, the people come back, they pick up their instruments, and then they play for four months non-stop.
“Sadly, that ritual is not happening anymore, but it used to be like that. It was like this incredible drone-festival party!” she adds, laughing. “And everybody has to play the whole day—I’d play in the morning; you’d play in the afternoon—so that the drones continue. That is the communication method of dialogue with the earth, because that helps the crops, that helps the weather… It’s a mutually reciprocal relationship with the earth. And then the other people are busy with the carpets, weaving textiles. They translate those tunes into graphic form, so that afterwards you have these textiles that are actually scores for different seasons—and you can read, in that way, how it’s going with the earth in terms of climate. So that’s the relation of sound, climate, earth, and the sirenas.”
Mestizx, the record, operates on similarly wholistic principles. Opening by calling down ancestral grandmother spirits in “Invocação”, it proceeds with the dream-logic of a ritual, taking the listener through unsettling and occasionally deeply political territory, but always with the intent of affecting a positive transformation. It’s unabashedly intense and unashamedly beautiful music—and, like I said, perfect for now.
“My purpose, maybe, is reminding myself—and reminding other people—that there is an Earth,” Guardia Ferragutti says. “We’ve created all these borders and this separation, but we are just all part of the fabric of Earth.” 
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