Etienne Charles on Music, Creole Soul Orchestra, and Coming to Denver

The following transcript was edited for length and clarity.

Steve: I want to dig in, since I've got the man, I want to talk a little set list theory and practice. 

Etienne: Sure. 

Steve: I'm sure it's what you're teaching the students, but how you put together the balance and keep it moving. Love that you referenced that dance band experience in New York. I'm trying to envision you with your trumpet wearing the same suit and having to learn dance steps so y'all could be synchronized as a horn section. Did you do any of that? 

Etienne: Yeah, I mean, when I lived in New York, I was – part of the, what we call, back then we called it the club date scene or the society fan scene. So we do a lot of weddings, galas, you know, corporate events where, you know, the sole goal of the band is to entertain through the classics that people know, so we spend a lot of time dealing with, from the fire, Michael Jackson, we go down along with Frank Sinatra, Beyoncé, I mean, so, and yeah, of course, you know, it's not just playing the music, it's that music you have to dance it, you know, so, I definitely have my have done my fair share, but... 

Steve: Well, I know Tina told you, no shade to those garden parties in the Hamptons. I'm just saying, when you get to Denver, we gonna get down. We gonna have fun. 

Etienne: Hey, I'm ready to, you know, I actually one of them many years ago I did was in Denver, one of these big parties. It was a big football players’ or football, some, it was a big NFL person connected with the Broncos, I believe. Yeah. We got down in Denver. It was a whole, it was a whole riot. So I'm looking forward to seeing the KUVO supportive crowd come out, specifically not just a concept, but come ready to move. Come like you're coming to see your favorite DJ. You know, that's what we're trying to create. 

Steve: Yeah, You know, one of the quotes that you gave to Rodney in the last conversation was about how Miles taught you to play the now. And that's one of the quotes that we're going to use as we get ready for his centennial next week on Tuesday. So that was, you're a young man. Did you actually play with Miles? 

Etienne: No, Miles Davis passed away in 91. I didn't move to the US until 2002. So I missed out on that. 

Steve: I say you had to be a child in the band. 

Etienne: Yeah, exactly. But I mean, I'm definitely heavily influenced by his music and some of his former musicians or something, some of my friends and mentors, people like Marcus Miller, people like Vince Wilbur Jr., Robert Irving III, Munyungo Jackson, you know, like go down along with Dow Jones, a musician that spending a good bit of time playing in mouse's groups. And so, you know, I definitely learned a lot just from interacting with that. 

Steve: Let's talk a little about the playlist and how you do it as you described it, doing all this mix. We had, you mentioned Monty Alexander. We had the Harlem Kingston Express in here, must have been about 10 years ago. And people had fun at that as well. If you're not from South Florida or the New York area, this island influence, you might, you might get, you might miss it as a listener, as somebody that appreciates music. So thanks for keeping this music on the playlist and even in a dance or a party context, bringing this to the table, to the dance floor, if you will. 

Etienne: Of course. I mean, you know, I mean, with the way we do it in the Creole Orchestra, it's about, you have to feel the audience, but it's also about featuring the band, right? So, one of the Monty tunes that we do is a tune he wrote called “Think Twice,” which I have means for, we recorded on my Creole Orchestra album. It's about the bounce of the reggae groove plus the soul and energy of the blues. You put that together with instrumental virtuosity and you'd really get the balance of what that piece is about. So it's really like to jumpstart, you know, the energy. 

And then, you know, in terms of other tunes in the repertoire, you know, then of course they're the classics from creole orchs and stuff, like my calypso old school. But then we're probably bearing away from the record and moving more into using the big band the way the big band used to be, which was specifically as a vessel for dancing for the audience. 

So we're going to jump into some classic R&B. We're going to jump into some classic salsa and mambo. Miles Davis is all about playing them now. So I've been doing…I've been playing Bad Bunny's music in my set. And then I've done some big man remains much of some fusion of Bad Bunny, a traditional mambo and salsa just to see how people move. Because you know, the thing about a party that you've never been to is you don't know how, you don't know what people are going to vibe to. 

So for me, a big part of getting ready for this show is making sure that we have tastes of as many different styles to figure out what people are going to bite on and then what avenues we can go down to really create a high energy and create a sense of euphoria. And then when we get super high, then we bring them down with something slow and then we come back up again. You know, that's why, you know, we have this great vocalist, Tanya Boyd Cannon. So that's the idea behind the set list.