Richard Hildner Armacanqui & Juan Tomás Martínez

[guitar music] – Richard: Pnte una clave all.

(Put a key there) Porque vamos a asimilar.

(because we’re going to make it like that) [clapping] De dum.

Djate llevar (Let yourself be led) por el nio que quiere jugar (by that child that wants to play) Dum be boom, boom bee boom, boom bee boom Boom bee boom, boom… Pero so pasa naturalmente.

(But that happens naturally.)

[scratching pen on paper] – Juan and Richard: Un, dos, un dos tres y… (One, two, one, two, three and) [guitar music and percussion] – Juan: Music and what we are is a mix of so much things, and I think that’s the richest thing that we do together.

Like, we mix everything that we, that we are.

My name is Juan Martnez and I play the cajn and sing.

– Richard: I’m Richard Hildner Armacanqui and I play guitar.

[guitar music] I would describe myself as a musician, self-taught, and then having learned really like everything I know from mentors that I’ve had throughout my life and I grew up hearing a lot of musics from the records, you know, that my parents had.

I’d hear my father play piano, he would play a lot of Western classical music, but when I first played was music from the Andes.

Andean folk music.

First, it was my grandfather who showed me, and then as my uncles came to the United States.

My uncle Numa is the one who really had a full mastery of the guitar and he really showed me how the guitar works.

[guitar music] – Juan: I grew up, ah, with a family of musicians.

My father is a opera singer.

My grandfather did the first child orchestra in Venezuela.

And I were around classical music my whole life.

[Richard and Juan chatting in Spanish in background] The day that I think I decided music it was my life, what I, what I came to this world to do, actually was playing African-Venezuelan music in the coast of Venezuela, a place in the coast, Chuao.

And first time that I hear all this community playing all that drums and singing a cappella, and playing the wood with sticks, and, all that music together in that place, I remember something in my chest jump, and I couldn’t stop to play from that day when I was eight years old.

[cajn percussion rhythm] [background chatter in venue] – Juan: Life is about experience.

It’s nothing material, it’s nothing that you can touch, it’s something that it, just, is part of you.

I think experience is what forms you as a person, no matter what you’re doing, in this case it’s music.

In the music that we do together, we got a few bands, right?

It’s a mix of everything.

It’s kind of like what we are, actually.

[Juan singing] – Richard: I would say definitely that the music that we play is an expression of identity.

We’re from immigrants of Latin America and that we play Latin American music, but there are so many cultures in the world, so many different types of people.

That’s the one thing I, I love about music, is that there’s so much wisdom in, in the things we have in common, and the universals, but I would say there’s just as much, if not more, wisdom inside of our differences.

That’s what I would say my identity is to try to be able to code switch as best as possible.

And then maybe whatever comes out is what you are.

[guitar music in background] – Juan: Music is another language.

How we’re speaking right now, not everyone can speak the language that we’re speaking.

But music is actually a global language that everyone could communicate, and express your feelings and your thoughts and, and your energy and your love.

You can connect and communicate with the rest of the world without limit or frontiers.

[guitar and percussion] – Juan: Cuando el sol aparece (When the sun comes up) este nio amanece (This little one wakes up) de la cama corriendo a jugar (Runs out of bed to go play)