(Twenty-ninth of a series)

In 2004, Pinoy Jazz Traditions was launched at Merk’s Bar in Greenbelt 3, Makati. The following year it won the National Book Award. Its author was better known to many Manila listeners as a drummer than as a historian.

Richie Quirino had spent three decades behind a kit before Anvil Publishing put his name on a spine. The publisher then signed him up for two more books, and the three together now form a chronological history of jazz in the Philippines. Most historians write about a life they haven’t lived. Richie wrote the ending only after 30 years of playing it.

The email list

The book began on an email list. In 1998, Jim Ayson of Philmusic set up an egroup called Pinoyjazz. “Almost all the local jazz musicians and impresarios joined,” Richie recalls. Some wrote about releasing original material on CD. A few wrote about “dreaming of opening up a jazz club one day.”

Richie did something else. He started interviewing elderly musicians and posting the results, and the response encouraged him to keep going. “After compiling a lot of interviews I told myself that maybe it could turn out in a book one day,” he says. The draft he brought to Anvil covered the American era in the Philippines, 1898 to 1945 (Pinoy Jazz Traditions). The next two volumes were Mabuhay Jazz (1945–1969) and Contemporary Jazz in the Philippines (1970–2010).

Drummer Jun Regalado pointed him toward Angel Peña, considered the arranger’s arranger of Manila’s music scene from World War II to 1969. Mang Angel, first a guitarist and later an upright bassist, migrated to Hawaii that year and spent 20 years as principal arranger of the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra.

The interview filled 19 pages. “I was overwhelmed!” Richie says. Mang Angel went on to introduce him to Toots Dila, Vestre Roxas, Bading Tuason, and a host of aging musicians. “[Mang] Angel was like a conductor wielding his baton and directing me toward an era gone by and slowly fading away.” Without that help, Richie says, there would never have been that first book.

They corresponded by email from 1999 until Mang Angel moved back to Manila in 2001 to retire at home. In 2006 Richie wrote the introduction to Mang Angel’s autobiography, A Man and His Music, published by Ateneo Press. That year he and fellow Berklee alumnus Gerard Salonga, brother of Lea Salonga, also produced Ugnayan, an all-original Angel Peña Big Band album, and the US Embassy granted Richie $10,000 for a three-day concert billed “60 Years of Harmony.” 

The family trade

The project also reached back into his own family. “My father was a prolific writer and my German mother, Liesel, was a novelist,” he says. His father, Carlos Quirino, was a pioneering Filipino historian and biographer. In 1997, when President Fidel Ramos created historical literature as a new National Artist category, Carlos Quirino was its first recipient. He died in 1999, the year Richie and Mang Angel began corresponding.

“Somehow, writing these three books connected me to the experience of what my folks went through as writers,” says Richie.

Each volume has three parts: a narrative of the period, a “photo chest,” and one-on-one interviews with the leading lights of Philippine jazz. 

The first book was the hardest, because he had to unearth the American era. The third came easier, because he was already a participant in the scene. “Most of those that I interviewed in the trilogy are long gone,” he says. “Had I not documented them, their stories would have forever been lost in the annals of Philippine music history.”

Richie goes on to explain the two aspects of the genre, Pinoyjazz: “The first is we were good copycats in the sense that what American musicians performed we simulated in a Pinoy manner.” The second belonged to visionaries such as Mang Angel, Ryan Cayabyab, and Bob Aves, who drew on indigenous instruments and theory from the Ifugao and Kalinga Apayao traditions of Northern Luzon and the Maguindanao Muslim traditions of Southern Mindanao.

To be sure, the books were one part of a larger effort. “I felt that somebody had to document the history of jazz in our country,” he says. In 2001, he founded the Jazz Society of the Philippines (Jazzphil), becoming its president. Gus Lagman served as vice president. They staged five festivals at Monk’s Dream, Gus’ venue at Power Plant Mall in Rockwell.

Richie also set up the Jazzphil website, and in 2006 he co-produced, with director Collis Davis and Gus, a 70-minute DVD documentary, “The History of Jazz in the Philippines,” which premiered on ABS-CBN’s The Filipino Channel. Richie went on to represent the Philippines at festivals in Bremen, Jakarta, Taichung, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. 

The bands and records

All the while, Richie had another project, one built for playing. “I always loved Brasilian music and percussion performance,” he says. He had also grown weary of promoting his own jazz gigs. “Tired of begging people to watch my jazz gigs, I formed Guarana with Eileen Sison in 2001.”

Guarana lasted 18 years, coming late in a long run of studio and live work. 

In 1977 he and pianist, composer, and fellow Berklee student Ed Crisologo Jose formed Sunlight Band, with Ed as leader and keyboardist. They performed 10 of Ed’s original tunes live at the University of the Philippines’ Abelardo Hall, and singer Pat Castillo recorded the concert.

A second project with Ed and guitarist Johnny Alegre grew into Universe, the band that recorded the vinyl album The Light of Peace, with Richie as producer and chief audio engineer, singing on three tunes and playing drums on one. He traces a straight line through it all: Destiny led to Sunlight, and Sunlight led to Universe, with Ed as their “fusion guru.” 

In the late ‘90s Richie was the drummer for the hard bop-influenced JR Cobb Jazz Chamber, alongside some of the best younger jazzmen of the time.

The early years

Where did it all start for him? Richie points to a power rock trio he formed in 1973 with Gabe Ascalon on guitar and Sam Sen on bass. He was 17, and the venue was his uncle’s TV show, “Seeing Stars,” hosted by Joe Quirino. He gave a copy of the recording to dzRJ radio, and it became an instant hit. (The track was “A Taste of Honey,” still on YouTube for anyone curious about what a teenage Richie sounded like.)

By 1975 he was Destiny’s bandleader. They played fusion; in the 7-Up RC Cola nationwide battle of the bands, Destiny tied for first place with its sister band, Mother Earth.

That same year he enrolled at the UP Conservatory where he was a scholar for three years. Ryan Cayabyab invited him into The Ambivalent Crowd, a show band that performed Broadway medleys and OPM. Soon after, the group played a three-gig stint in Tokyo. Richie was 19.

At Berklee, Richie graduated cum laude with a double major in professional music performance and audio engineering, then trained on the job at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles. He holds lifetime membership in the Musicological Society of the Philippines and belongs to two New York-based organizations, the Jazz Journalists Association and the Audio Engineering Society.

But the drums were the real siren call, pulling him in when he was 14. A year later, a friend, Gabby Lopez, came home from college in Boston with a stack of vinyl: George Benson, Larry Coryell, Frank Zappa, Carlos Santana, Gabor Szabo — guitarists, every one of them. It didn’t matter. “I wanted to play jazz for the rest of my life,” he recalls. Piano and soprano saxophone came later, added to the drums that set him on the road to jazz. 

Richie has since left jazz history aside to pursue what he describes as his own “spiritual journey through light and sound.” His most recent book, “The Amen Vibration Vol. 2” (Central Books, 2017), became an Amazon bestseller and is available as an ebook.

That full-circle arc sits at the center of Richie’s career. A boy who fell for records a friend had carried home from abroad became the man who made sure his own country’s records would be kept. CS

Read more: Portraits in Jazz: Dix Lucero plays the long game