Omar and the Good Vibes
The Kleptomaniacs play at the Sagebrush Inn on April 29
MAYBE YOU DON’T recognize Omar Rane as a singer. You remember him from those epic Wednesday jazz nights at the Taos Inn years back, or playing in the funktastic Monkey Feeders, or as “audio guy” for the Barn Dances or the Taos Center for the Arts or the Taos School of Music. But singing?
It was the pandemic that pulled at Rane’s vocal cords. Had him at home, chorusing along with Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan tunes. He’d listen over and over again like how he does when trying to imitate a Miles Davis solo on guitar — jazz his comfort zone.
Jazz has been a musical glue for
Rane since he was 10 years old and going to nightly jam sessions at a café in Vancouver, Canada. (He spent most of his childhood in British Columbia. The first leg of his life was lived in New Mexico where he listened to the “play your ass off vibe” of Paco de Lucía’s flamenco. Rane returned to Taos at age 19.)
The difficult difference between jazz improvisation and Tom Waits or David Bowie or The Clash or The Smashing Pumpkins? Words.
“It’s easy for me to learn chords, but lyrics are another game,” said Rane, 55, who’s learned so many 60s-erathrough-modern covers now that he calls it “musical A.D.D.”
His cover band, the Kleptomaniacs, plays around town — including a show at the Sagebrush Inn on Friday (April 29) — and puts a new spin on old ditties.
The trio calls in a cast of unlikely instruments. The double bass, for instance. Rane pulled in Giles Shelton (the former electric guitarist for the Monkey Feeders) and his upright, with the idea to strip songs down acoustically. Like how those bluegrass bands now are stringing Led Zeppelin.
Then, there’s the vibraphone. Thirtyone-year-old Happ Schultz is a wizard when his pink mallet heads strike the metal of the instrument he’s been making ring dreams since high school. The vibes were a gateway for Schultz’s love of jazz, which he studied at Boston’s Berklee College of Music and continued playing all over New York City; the genre like a spirituality to him.
“The instrument centers everything harmonically,” said Rane, who plays solo at the Taos Inn on certain Mondays.
Schultz is also a part of Rane’s second musical project, Tierra Incognita, which boasts a chill, loungey feel. The melodies are totally improvised and free, reflecting the band’s name — a reference to old maps and unnamed territories — only tied in by the beats of the drum machine Rane wields. Rane also takes his rhythmic place on the electric bass, while Ken McNamara twinkles across the keys. (The sound reminds Rane of the pastoral and melodic ECM Records vinyl he’d blast growing up.)
No matter the style or the group — words or no words — Rane is enthusiastic about exploration. Liberation in the form and the free.