By Omar Perez
Originally published in Miami New Times: July 18, 2002
For a long time, Ed Hale’s sense of geography depended on rock and roll. “I knew about England, of course, because of the Beatles and the Stones, and I knew about Ireland because of Sinead O’Connor and U2,” Hale says matter-of-factly. “That was the way I related to the rest of the world.”
Ed Hale transcends musical borders
So it makes sense that it was FM radio, not CNN, that turned Hale on to the globe. More specifically, it was the sad state of music spewing out of the mid-Nineties. Grunge had just blown its brains out, and headless, flannel-wearing chickens rode the momentum over the airwaves, waiting for an inevitable death. Hale’s interest in music almost died with it. Then he opened up to new sounds from other countries, plunging into everything from Brazilian to West African to Italian songwriters and artists. “It started to inspire me,” he says. “You can hear in their music the joy and the passion that they have for making the music, as opposed to here in America. [Here] it’s like they’re making music just to be famous.”
In Dungeon Studios in North Miami, Ed Hale and the Transcendence (drummer Ricardo Mazzi, keyboardist Jon Rose, and newest members Roger Houdaille on bass and guitarist Fernando Perdomo, who’s known for playing in seemingly every South Florida band) are making music too. When high-fives fly around the room after Perdomo lays down a guitar track — a squealing, feedback-driven intro to one of the band’s newer songs — it’s obvious that the members of the group see music notes instead of dollar signs.
One more reason for the band to celebrate is its Rise and Shine debut, which thrives on a mélange of musical influences without paying homage to any one in particular. The opening “Better Luck Next Time” draws from early Bowie elements, with Hale’s English enunciations sprinkled over classic-rock-honed guitars and frolicking pianos, which keep their momentum on tracks like “Do You Know Who You Are?” and “Mother,” where a dreamy haze of guitars gives way to a rising chorus. A rumbling funk bass line starts “The Journey (A Call to Arms),” while a more international flavor makes its mark on songs like the franglais (French/English) “Ma Petit Naomi,” where mariachi horns serenade as electric guitars toast to Americana and beer-and-chicken-wing rock. The upbeat, tribal backbone of “Trés Cool” sees Hale spit out a list of pop culture references and figures.
Considering his rhymes, Hale wonders out loud, “I love rap, but I don’t know if I can rap.”
“He raps like a white boy,” Mazzi jokes.
A military brat, Hale moved from city to city while growing up. While in Atlanta he met Murray Silver, a music critic who co-wrote Great Balls of Fire: The Uncensored Story of Jerry Lee Lewis and taught a music class at an arts college that Hale pursued in lieu of high school. The professor took the young Hale under his wing and signed him to his small label, releasing Eddie in 1987. (The album has since been re-released by Hale’s current Miami-based TMG Records label.) Hale landed opening spots for area acts including the Georgia Satellites and the Alarm, but the musician lifestyle demanded too much of the teen. On his parents’ advice, Hale returned to South Florida, where he once lived in West Palm Beach. “I think I was too young to take care of myself very well,” he remembers. He enrolled at FAU and started taking courses in philosophy.
One day while listening to the radio, Hale heard a woman win a contest who had the same last name as an old friend of Hale’s from junior high: Sabatella. Hale got in touch with her brother, musician Matthew Sabatella, and the two formed Broken Spectacles, a band that made a name for itself in South Florida during the early Nineties. Despite modest success, the relationship among the musicians grew tense. “The only time we would talk was during rehearsal, and when rehearsal was over, we would all go our separate ways,” he remembers. Finally the Spectacles called it quits in 1994. “Years later I get a call from Matt, and we asked, ‘Why did we stop speaking?’ And we both couldn’t figure it out.” Today the two are friends once again.
Broken off from the Broken Spectacles, Hale picked up his guitar and traveled the East Coast as a solo artist for about a year, landing in New York City and releasing the appropriately titled Acoustic in New York. “I was very excited about the music I was making, and the things I had discovered that I couldn’t do in a band,” he says.
Unfortunately he also encountered financial hardship. “I was sleeping on couches and I was really, really broke, and it was becoming unbearable,” Hale says. “I remember standing in front of this McDonald’s on Broadway hoping that I’d get a dollar or two for playing just so I could go in there and get a cheeseburger. As an artist, every day you just wait for that phone call.” Finally around Christmas of 1996, Hale headed to Miami.
The post-NYC period was tough. “I was associating so much negativity with music-making,” he explains. “When I picked up a guitar to write a song, I would feel bad instead of good.” He put away his guitar for about a year and traveled the world for two, immersing himself in every type of music he could find. For a while Hale was hooked on country. “I’d set the nightstand radio to a country station and I really started falling in love with it,” he says. “I liked the way they can fit a thirty-year story in two-and-a-half minutes. And the musicianship is great.
“Who knows, maybe in ten years we’ll be doing country,” Hale quips.
Perdomo counters: “I’d like to try gangsta country: drive-by-on-a-horse kind of thing. Yo yo yo with a cowpoke.”
While Hale was shedding his bad associations, the Bolivian-born Mazzi was looking for a project. “I just wanted to play music,” Mazzi says. “It didn’t matter what it was.” Mazzi, who also was going through a period of musical experimentation, teamed up with Hale in 1998. “His songs are infections,” Mazzi says. “At first you hear them and you think, ‘Why is he doing that?’ and then you go home driving and you realize he has some catchy stuff.”
It was catchy enough for the folks at MTV, which signed a licensing agreement with the band to allow the network use of six of its songs on Road Rules and The Real World. The single “Better Luck Next Time” has been getting airplay in such far-flung burgs as Fairfax, Virginia and Indianapolis, Indiana.
“We all wanted to do something completely different than what we had done in the past with other bands,” Hale says. “We purposely tried not to be a modern-day rock band.”
ED HALE, TRANSCENDENCE RISE TO MUSIC’S SAVING GRACE
South Florida Sun – Sentinel
Broward Metro Edition
Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
Author: JASON KNAPFEL LOCAL SCENE
Date: Jun 28, 2002
Remember when rock ‘n’ roll could save the world. … At least some of us thought so. Today, protest songs virtually are gone from the pop music medium.But, there’s a voice that carries the torch for idealism in South Florida. Not that Ed Hale and Transcendence want to be the patron saints of lost rock ‘n’ roll souls. Hale, however, does bear more than a musical similarity to U2′s benevolent globetrotter Bono. He finds that there is an inevitable responsibility tied to his creative expression.
“I think for a lot of artists, no matter what their medium, social and political activism are inextricably tied to the creative process,” Hale says. “The mission is to entertain and to inspire.”
So what is his cause of choice? The liner notes of the band’s latest release Rise and Shine reveals a variety. Take your pick of Web sites from The Covenant House to alternative “radical” book publisher AK Press.
Hale’s social fervor started as early as his first attempt at songwriting. At age 16 he was writing Dylan-fashioned protest songs. That began a musical journey that took him from influences as diverse as the Kinks, REM and Broken Spectacles (with local luminary Matthew Sabatella) to ’70s glam and electronic pioneers like William Orbit. The culmination is his current work with Transcendence.
But eight years since Broken Spectacles broke up, the childhood friends retain a kinship.
“It was like a marriage,” Hale says. “We were four guys who lived together, played together and spent every waking hour together for six years.”
He and Sabatella have been friends since childhood.
“We played our first show together when we were 18 years old. We had absolutely no money and when a club would give us money after a show we would just look at each other and laugh and say, `I can’t believe we are getting paid for this! This is so cool.’”
What separates the best from the rest is a diverse taste in music. And Hale has an insatiable appetite for all things musical. To reference that aforementioned group of Irishmen that inspire him, he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for. In his CD’s liner notes he says, “I churn and burn through 10-20 albums a week.”
And it wasn’t until he left the confines of Western music that he became the musician he is today. Everything from Brazilian to African sounds renewed his vigor, after becoming indifferent to his culture’s music.
If Hale were in The X-Files, he’d most assuredly be on Fox Mulder’s side. Why? Well, let’s say that he doesn’t find government cover-ups a stretch.
He dedicates an entire verse to it in the dance grooves of The Journey (A Call to Arms). First they killed Kennedy and covered it up/Then they killed the King and they covered it up …”
He’s also quite clear about his view of the current administration.
“The last few years, there has been a lot of talk about the shift that we are all making in consciousness towards a more peaceful, open-minded and spiritual state of humanity, regardless of what the evil powers in Washington and the media would have you believe,” Hale says.
“Speaking of which, isn’t it ironic that we just experienced one of the most peaceful and prosperous eight years in our history and then less than a year into the new Republicans’ administration, the entire world seems at war?”
He then takes a step back: “I’m not a Democrat by the way, just a watchful ally to the human race.”
Not everything is politically motivated. Better Luck Next Time and Love Is You are both nods to David Bowie. The latter could be an outtake from Young Americans; the former is an ode to passing through life with unfulfilled dreams.
Rock musicians aren’t known for longevity. Could it be that the best tune on Rise and Shine is a telling insight into Hale’s missing out on pop stardom?
“It has nothing to do with the stardom, although that’s a great perk,” Hale says. “The joy is in the music, because writing/ discovering a new song is the most orgasmic thing I have ever known.
“But on a deeper level, I think that for an artist it is that constant craving, nagging suspicion that you are on the edge, and that any minute you have the potential to discover some new sacred ground or solving some holy mystery.”
Jason Knapfel’s local scene appears the last Friday of the month in Showtime. Please send news to Local Scene, 5768 Northpoint Lane, Boynton Beach, FL 33437 or e-mail knapfel@ directvinternet.com.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.
EARLY LINE-UP OF TRANSCENDENCE PERFORMING BETTER LUCK NEXT TIME LIVE IN CONCERT 1999
Early line-up of Ed Hale’s then-new band Transcendence performs song Better luck next time from the Rise and Shine CD in 1999 at the Mardi Gras Festival in Hollywood, Florida. This was back when the band was still being called Ed Hale and Transcendence. Ed had been out of the popular Broken Spectacles for five years by then, released a solo album – Â Acoustic in New York -Â in 1996, and toured up and down the east coast as a solo artist several times before moving back to South Florida and forming Transcendence. Only two of the band’s original members seen here are still in the band today, Ed and drummer Ricardo Mazzi.