Meet Bravo Pueblo: A Pop Trio Electrifying Charlotte’s Music Scene

By 1 a.m. Sunday morning, the hearing loss is already rampant. The Snug Harbor rock club in Plaza Midwood has been hosting the Springadelia psychedelic music festival for four days. The guitar solos are stimulating and the amps are loud. Lee Herrera, who plays in the trio Bravo Pueblo, stands near the main stage, getting ready for his set. “All the bands are really in shape, and we’re not really a rock ’n’ roll band,” he says with a shrug. “We’re going to do our best.”

A few minutes later, Bravo Pueblo takes the stage, plugs in pedals and syncs electronic drum pads. Herrera, nervous and intense, is on guitar and synthesizer. Claudio Ortiz, shaggy and friendly, is on bass and synthesizer. His little sister, Liza Ortiz, cheerful and energetic, is on vocals and synthesizer. She wears a jumpsuit decorated with a pattern of large colorful mushrooms.

At first, the music is a hushed groove of bleeps and bloops. But then Liza starts singing in Spanish, accompanied by effects that make her sound like a choir of Latin synth-pop angels. The band layers one loop on top of another, taking the sonic palette of electropop groups like Luscious Jackson and the Ting Tings but adding the unexpected punch of Caribbean rhythms.

The crowd grows larger and larger, and what started as a rhythmic head-nodding becomes a full-fledged dance. By the final song, “Y Te Dicen,” in which the chorus repeats and then rewinds, the crowd cheers as the song reaches its climax. Liza looks ecstatic, as if she’s landed somewhere in the mental space between a woman hoisting a championship trophy above her head and a woman who’s just heard the funniest joke in the world.

Before the end of the concert, Claudio tells the audience: “You could be anywhere else, but you are here.”

ObviouslyThe pandemic was the worst thing that could have happened to the Charlotte music scene: clubs closed, bands broke up, audiences dispersed to the safety of their own living rooms. The unexpected upside was that it was the biggest reset button possible for Charlotte musicians. When you can’t safely be in a rehearsal room and make music with other human beings for over a year, what happens when you’re finally free to harmonize, to jam, to groove? You want every note to count.

Charlotte’s music scene still has systemic problems: not enough venues, too many unadventurous bookers, a force field that seems to push back most national tours. But over the past two years, a wave of local bands have played like their lives depended on it. The three members of Bravo Pueblo have been in a multitude of bands. But when they emerged from the pandemic, they knew Bravo Pueblo was the one that mattered to them.

Claudio says: “The sounds, the textures and everything we create are probably the closest representation of what’s going on in our heads and the closest I’ve ever gotten in my life as a musician. And it’s exciting.”

Claudio is 37 and Liza is 35. (They share the same birthday, March 19.) Their mother is Puerto Rican, while their father is Venezuelan; the family moved to Charlotte in 2000 when the political situation in Venezuela became tumultuous.

The lyrics to Bravo Pueblo’s song “Cambural” were inspired by her experience on a banana plantation in Venezuela. “It was the most precarious place,” she recalls. “We could sled down the muddy hill on banana leaves. It was full of beauty and chaos—the jungle is beautiful, but there are so many things that can kill you.”

The Ortizes’ mother taught them to sing and harmonize with each other while they were learning to speak. “A lot of our family sings, like a Caribbean von Trapp family,” Claudio says. He grew up playing violin while Liza took piano lessons, so they didn’t really collaborate musically until college. “In most of the bands I played in, I invited Liza to join me,” he says. (She immediately points out one notable exception: her old hardcore band, Lost in a World of Color.)

Their first band was called Members of the Sea, and it had a strong Arcade Fire vibe. “A nuevo-folk thing,” Claudio says.

“We had a banjo,” adds Liza, who played the glockenspiel in the band.

“A lot of vests,” jokes Herrera.

Claudio, who served in the army reserve For nine years, he jumped out of airplanes and arranged pallets of supplies with parachutes. He unexpectedly immersed himself in his Latin musical heritage while serving for a year on a military base in Southwest Asia in 2010. Members of the SEA gave him a ukulele that he took with him into the desert, but once in the Middle East, he began checking out classic salsa records from the base library. “Up until then, it was background noise to me,” he confesses. “Stuff I heard at family gatherings.”

After his return, Claudio and Liza collaborated in the Latin-influenced indie rock band Patabamba, which evolved into the beloved local band Chocala (Spanish for a high five), where Ortizes cranked up the polyrhythms. But in 2019, Chocala drifted away.

Herrera, meanwhile, has played a variety of instruments in a variety of bands, including guitar in Yardwork, bass in Patois Counselors, guitar in Harvard (which renamed itself HRVRD after a cease-and-desist letter from the University of Massachusetts), and guitar and synth in HRVRD’s hit band Foreign Air. He grew up wanting to play drums, but switched to guitar because his parents thought a drum kit would be too loud.

“I don’t think I’m a great player of any one instrument, but I play every instrument as if it were drums,” Herrera explains. “It’s all about rhythm. On the guitar, your right hand plays a rhythm, your left hand does something rhythmic. It’s the same with the keys. How do they interact with the rhythm that’s happening?”

“I knew who Lee was, but we had never spent time together until we went to a friend’s wedding together,” Claudio says. “He came with me in the car and told me that I had never thought about playing music in that way, focusing on the rhythmic element. And that was one of my first musical revelations with Lee.”

“It looks like cologne!” Herrera interrupts.

“Epiphanies, by Lee,” Claudio intones in a deep voice.

Herrera, 40, invited himself to Bravo Pueblo and quickly became friends with the Ortiz siblings; they all took long bike rides and camping trips together. Herrera also grew up in Venezuela, so they found themselves in symbiosis musically — “the pocket can be weird in Caribbean music,” Herrera notes — and culturally.

Bravo Pueblo comes from the Venezuelan national anthem: it means “brave people.” So I’m a little ashamed to admit that with my native Spanish, I thought it translated to “Hooray, city!”

“That’s what it means, technically,” Claudio concedes with a laugh.

Liza’s favorite musicians are cinematic in their ambition, creating what she calls “music that resonates with every emotion”: Sigur Ros, Sufjan Stevens, Son Lux. Bravo Pueblo’s first single, “Cambural,” released in March, captures some of that emotional music: It’s a midtempo bop that feels like pregame music before an epic night out. The trio hopes that if they release more music later this year, they can give listeners a sense of their full sonic scope in 70mm. One step at a time: They’ve played plenty of shows at Plaza Midwood, and while they’re not looking to tour nationally just yet, they think it might be time to see how they fare in clubs across town.

A Wednesday eveningBravo Pueblo members gather for a rehearsal at Liza’s in the Shannon Park neighborhood. They set up in a back room, about 200 square feet, almost entirely filled with music equipment. They face each other. On some songs, they play along to recorded tracks (built with the help of Foreign Air producer Jesse Clasen), but historically, they’ve synchronized their various electronic beats by nodding along to the rhythm in unison.

Everyone wears headphones, to keep the volume down for the sake of the neighbors and because they like the way the headphones create a sonic intimacy between the three of them. There’s a purple light in the corner of the room and the windows are tinted green, so even though we’re hidden on a tree-lined street, the mood is “a crowded nightclub on the moon.” On the lilting “Conquesto,” Herrera plays a shimmering guitar that washes over the song like waves gently lapping on the beach. Then something goes wrong, and Liza grimaces.

“What happened?” Herrera asks.

“It just happened,” she admits happily. “I forgot the cue. Sorry!” They all laugh because they’re not stressed about it. And then, when they start the song again, nodding together, they’ve all nailed the cue perfectly and they’re laughing again, because they can’t believe how good it sounds.

GAVIN EDWARDS, contributing editor, is the author of 14 books, including the best-selling MCU: Reign of Marvel Studios.