SouthFlorida.com | City Link Magazine

Marcel "The Funk Pusher" Lecours, the manager of Suénalo Sound System, is watching all 10 members of the Little Havana-based band stare into the lens of a single TV camera. "I don't even know who we're doing this for," Lecours admits. "Some TV station in Colombia, I think. But I don't care who they are. I'm in ass-kissing mode. We'll smile for anybody."

And that's exactly what the band members do, as the camera scans from grinning musician to grinning musician. It's difficult not to envision this ever-evolving group as some PR madman's idea of the international boy band of jam bands. The musicians' hometowns range from Paris to Caracas, Venezuela, and the personalities include an angel-faced hip-hop guy, a scruffy trucker-hat wearer, a Rasta man, a Johnny Knoxville Jr. in dark shades, a cartoon-Afro boy … "And a half-Jew," guitarist Phil Maranges adds with a laugh.

As the women in the audience here at Bricks Nightclub and Sunset Lounge in Miami quickly find, simply kissing each member of the band in congratulations of its new CD, ¡Suénalo!, can be exhausting. They must reapply their makeup and adjust their skirts midway through kissing the band, and then go back for seconds to make sure they didn't miss the trombone player.

Suénalo Sound System is so large a band that even traveling from gig to gig can be a problem. Rather than riding together in a single van, the musicians often arrive at a club in 10 separate cars. "We can't travel out of town," saxophonist Juan Turros complains. "We just can't."

The band is simply a monster. But put that monster on a stage as small as the one at Jazid in Miami Beach, and the result is more mesmerizing than terrifying. Half the group has to perform on the floor, where the congas go off like grenades, horns blast like freight-train whistles and guitars sound like wailing women.

At Respectable Street's anniversary party in West Palm Beach July 30, Suénalo played early, when the turnout was meager at best. No one was ready even to start drinking watered-down Malibu bay breezes, let alone dance in the street. Vocalist El Chino was still digesting a brownie sundae from O'Shea's on Clematis Street, taking his time getting into a rhythm onstage. "I wasn't even quite there yet," he recalls. "But the crowd was." Two songs into the set, the band erupted.

"It's infectious," Turros describes. Turros holds a master's degree in music and has worked with everyone from David Lee Roth to Audioslave, but he can't stay away from Suénalo. "I would get together with them on and off," he explains of his joining the group. "But I was finally like, 'Please, let me play with you.' "

Chad Bernstein, the Chicago gringo who plays trombone and conch shells, also refused to be denied by the band. "I felt I had to be part of it," he says. "I tried to sit in a couple of times, and they were kind of assholes about it, kept blowing me off. Then one night, I stopped at Jazid, and they're like, 'Oh, sorry. This is our last song.' But that was it. I said, 'Fuck you guys,' and got my horn out. They couldn't stop me."

The contagiousness borders on the ridiculous, as if Suénalo is cooking up some kind of musical meth onstage. "I don't even play an instrument," fan Karla Ruiz says as she reaches for one of the free rum-and-passion-fruit cocktails Bricks is serving. "But every time I see these guys, they look like they're having so much fun up there I want to jump up onstage, too."

Ruiz isn't crazy or alone in her craving. The energy Suénalo creates is so alluring, everyone wants to leap onstage and play with them -- and not just in the musical sense. The band's performances make listeners want to run up there and dodge the trombone's slide, trip over conch shells, fly over an amp, bonk off a conga and keep going full-tilt until someone slices his foot open on a guitar pedal and has to get stitches.

So it's only fitting that ground zero for the band is a place called Monkey Village, an artists' colony in Miami. A few days before the CD-release party at Bricks, Maranges is sitting at El Pub in Little Havana and trying to explain Suénalo's history, which began in 2002. The band was his brainchild, or orphan, if you will.

"I saw all these disenfranchised and disconnected artists, photographers and musicians in the community," the guitarist remembers, "and I wanted to try and pull them together."

Maranges organized a small festival at the since-closed Absinthe House theater in Coral Gables. "We charged 15 bucks, and people came," he says, still sounding amazed.

Suénalo Sound System spent the next two years playing Saturday nights at the now-defunct Paco's Tavern in Miami Beach. "It became a social scene," Maranges explains. "Our organic sound mirrors that underground movement. My big vision was to have a jam band with Latin and hip-hop elements."

Today, that vision seems small. Beyond representing Hispanic rock and hip-hop, the band generates a crashing wave of African beats, reggae, dancehall, samba … Truth is, Suénalo's members can't even pinpoint their own sound. Their former bandmates have included musicians from the Dominican Republic, Mexico and Haiti, whose influences on the group's music remain.

Trying to categorize the current sound, Maranges says, "We're an Afro-Latin-funk-jam band. Yeah, I'm sticking with that right now."

Turros won't leave it at that. "There's folk in there, electronica," he says. "Yeah, each person -- like each country -- delivers their own vibe. Everybody arranges. Everybody leads. We're the perfect garage-band jam band. We're built on the urban element. Wait -- We are the sound of Miami. Right now! Today. We are what this city has become."

The sound of Miami coming to life in the middle of the night in a complete frenzy after 14 cups of Cuban coffee is more like it. "Sometimes, chaos is a good thing," Maranges admits.

MC Amin De Jesus is the king of that chaos. Turned on to the band by fellow rapper and producer Dap2, he took the stage the first time he caught Suénalo live. "They just let me go, and the feeling was immediate," he says. "This is where I belong."

De Jesus rarely repeats a verse. "If I see an old high-school friend in the audience, my rhymes will take off on that. A beautiful girl, there I go," he describes. "I'm all over the place, and a lot of times, I'll miss my cue. I get lost in the music myself. I'm just being carried along." Lost inside a conch-shell solo.

"Listen, 12 years of [playing the] trombone, and now, all anybody wants to hear me play is the conch shells," Bernstein says. "I bought them in Key West as a joke. That gives you an idea of how things happen around here."

Having reached the saturation point in Miami-Dade County, the band is now putting a chunk of its performance fees away so it can afford to travel. Most of the musicians, whose average age is 27, work day jobs that include everything from creating graphic art to selling empanadas. "We think we could have a Phish-like following, but we never go anywhere," Bernstein admits. "We have to get out there and test 'em."

Suénalo has ventured outside Miami-Dade to play the Latin Funk Festival in New York and the Langerado Music Festival at Markham Park in Sunrise. Because the Flaming Lips, Ben Harper and The Black Crowes were performing on other stages at the latter festival, Suénalo's members at first outnumbered the audience that had wandered over to catch its set.

"Five people," Maranges recalls, holding up his fingers. "Until we started playing, and then it really took off. [It was] a great sign that we're capable of drawing a crowd outside of Miami-Dade."

Fan Ray O'Roca, who heads up the Moshka Family art collective in Miami, wants the band to explode nationally so the world can see another side of the city. "They can put an end to Miami's superficial vibe," he argues. "This is the real sound of Miami."

"We must be doing something right," Maranges says. "We started off with this disconnected community, and now, you can see a center forming. Sometimes, there seems to be no stopping us."

El Chino pulls at the lapels of his pink sport coat and points at Bricks' stage. "Watch," he says. "Look at us all going the same direction."

Suénalo Sound System will perform 10:30 p.m. Friday at Tobacco Road, 626 S. Miami Ave., in Miami (305/374-1198 or Tobacco-road.com); 11 p.m. Saturday at Jazid, 1342 Washington Ave., in Miami Beach (305/673-9372 or Jazid.net); and 11 p.m. Sept. 30 at Transit Lounge, 729 S.W. First Ave., in Miami (305/377-4628 or Transitlounge.us).