Bahía de Ascenso

Bahia de Ascenso is an orchestra born from keyboardist/composer Roberto Verastegui’s drive to get together a recording session with the most creative musicians he could find to play some new ideas he had been working on. Established in the Mexico City area, Verastegui called up his old Texas friend and phenom bass player Jacob Smith, booked the session at the beautiful and powerful studio El Desierto CasaEstudio, and put together a band that included up and coming star vocalist/songwriter Silvana Estrada, woodwinds extraordinaire Diego Franco, creative guitarist and composer Aaron Flores and long time friend, composer and drumming master Andres Marquez. Since the beginning of the session, the music clicked, and what started as an experiment, became the core of the band’s debut album in less than 12 hours of studio time. Bahia de Ascenso (which means ‘ascension bay’) was created; a platform where the musicians involved could orchestrate a given song with complete freedom. What Verastegui is trying to achieve is overcoming the risk a producer or bandleader takes when he lets go of egocentric decisions over his own compositions, and let the performers take improvised artistic decisions on their own, trusting the ears and sensibility of each and every one of the improvisers involved, only providing them of some simple structures in which rhythm, harmony and overall atmosphere are subject to change. Since the recording session in february 2018, Bahia de Ascenso has played in different venues in Mexico City as well as jazz and contemporary music festivals around Mexico. With the release of their debut, self-titled album, they look forward to keep searching for new sounds and new ways of exploring the music, and bringing to the scene an artistic voice that expresses the times and shifts in the world.