Larry & Joe to share fusion of bluegrass and musica llanera…
Written by Fran Daniel for the Winston-Salem Journal
8.13.22
Last December, Joe Troop and Larry Bellorín found each other at a residency that Troop was producing at The Fruit in Durham and became the duo Larry & Joe.
“When he walked in and we started playing music, we both realized that this is what we’re going to do,” Troop said. “‘We’re going to play music together.’”
They are both multi-instrumentalists and singer/songwriters.
“Larry plays the harp and the cuatro,” Troop said. “He plays maracas and upright bass. And I play the banjo, the violin and the guitar.”
Troop, a native of Winston-Salem, is a Grammy-nominated bluegrass and old-time musician, who founded the acclaimed “latingrass” band Che Apalache that was forced into hiatus because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Bellorín hails from Monagas, Venezuela, and is a legend of Llanera music. He is an asylum seeker in North Carolina who works in the construction industry to make ends meet.
duo will perform in the Gas Hill Drinking Room at The Ramkat on West Ninth Street in Winston-Salem. The show is bilingual.
Joe
As a child, Troop grew up playing music in Winston-Salem and studied at the Community Music School. He got into string brand music while at Reynolds High School.
At UNC-Chapel Hill, he studied Spanish and did two years of his undergraduate work in Spain.
But music was what he was most serious about.
“Language was a good parallel study,” he said.
After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2005, he taught English in Japan for a couple of years then returned to the United States and worked as a touring musician.
In 2010, Troop moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and lived there for 10 years, working primarily as a musician and private music teacher. He started Che Apalache with three of his students in Argentina.
“Our band was having a lot of success in the United States in the music industry,” Troop said.
The band’s second album, “Rearrange My Heart,” which was produced by Béla Fleck, was nominated for a Grammy in 2019.
“There was a lot of momentum, and things were going really well,” Troop said. “Then the pandemic devastated our operation because it’s just not sustainable to have an international band in the new world. We would like to re-band, but it’s a very slow process with how unpredictable international travel is these days.”
Che Apalache calls its music “latingrass.”
“It’s a mixture of Appalachian folk music and Latin American folk music,” Troop said. “That’s kind of my musical signature in the world, and I get to continue that with my musical soul brother (Bellorín) that I met — thank God — last year.”
During the first year of the pandemic, Troop found a little cabin on Piney Grove Church Road in Danbury in Stokes County.
“It was a good place to be in the pandemic, but I was supposed to go back to Buenos Aires,” he said. “The pandemic just stranded me while on tour in the U.S.”
His band members got on one of the last commercial flights to South America on March 17, 2020, before the shutdown.
For a few months, before finding the cabin, Troop lived out of his van.
He said he wasn’t homeless because some friends allowed him to stay in their guest houses or camp outside their homes.
“A lot of people were so scared they turned you away,” he said. “It was very illuminating to wind up in that position. It really showed me who has your back in hard times.”
He lived in the cabin in Danbury from July 2020 to mid-May 2021. Then he practically became a nomad through December 2021. His travels took him to Mexico, where he lived for a month at a migrant shelter, to California where he took care of someone’s property. He also went to Washington State and Louisiana.
He also did some solo touring and was in a production of “Freedom Riders” through a company in Ohio this past winter.
“I was just trying to figure it out still, trying to figure out where I fit into the world,” he said.
Then he met Bellorín in Durham and moved there in March.
Larry
Bellorín grew up in Punta de Mata in the state of Monagas, Venezuela, and was raised by his mother, a poor farmworker.
His bio states that by age 6, “He became a shoe shiner and built a faithful clientele by singing as he polished, taking requests for the popular Vallenatos of the day. He eventually caught the attention of a local music educator who invited him to study at the city’s premiere music school.”
His first instrument was the cuatro, a 4-string guitar. At age 11, he was supporting himself through music alone. He soon became proficient on guitar, electric bass, mandolin and maracas.
While still a teenager, he became well-versed in the folk music of his region — valse, pasaje, joropo, música oriental — and was honored as first cuatrista for the local Casa de Cultura.
Then he became an apprentice under an authentic llanera harpist named Urbano Ruiz and soon had a repertoire of 40 songs.
He performed at Punta de Mata’s Parque Ferial in 1999 with Urbano and Renaldo Armas, a Grammy winner and Venezuela’s most well-known champion of llanera music. Armas introduced Bellorín to a crowd of more than 8,000 people as “el maestro Larry Bellorín.” And he was respected as such from that point forward, his bio states.
He and his wife opened Casa Vieja, a school dedicated to teaching musica llanera, but it became impossible to run a music school when Venezuela began to collapse in 2012. That’s when he decided to go to the United States in search of work and asylum for his family.
Bellorín now lives in Raleigh with his wife and two daughters — ages 9 and 1½. His son, who is about to turn 17, still lives in Venezuela.
“He’ll go work 12-hour days, come home, shower and eat and then we’re practicing again,” Troop said of Bellorín. “This guy is really putting in a lot of effort in this project.”
Troop said that Bellorín has had a lot of hardship in his life and had to leave Venezuela “because it was an unsafe place for him and his family.”
“He had to leave a 24-year musical career behind in Venezuela,” Troop said. “In North Carolina, he is very thankful to have found work, but he never imagined working in construction. He has to work for his family.”
Troop said he was blown away the first time he heard Bellorín play.
“I have always loved Venezuelan music,” he said. “Joropo and musica llanera are the styles he plays.”
He said Larry was in high demand and would come back every gig of the residency at The Fruit.
“I would have other bands, but he would be a special invite — a special teacher,” Troop said.
He said Bellorín is brilliant at what he does.
“He got a standing ovation playing the harp,” Troop said.
Bellorín then started teaching Troop.
“In December, I learned several songs, and we would perform those in the series,” Troop said.
Bellorín, who is monolingual, spoke in his native language of how thankful he is for the folk traditions in the United States.
“I would first and foremost like to express my gratitude for the folk traditions of this country, because very recently I learned that they existed and understood for the first time the actual name of the genres of music bluegrass and old-time,” Bellorín said as Troop translated. “It provoked in me feelings of happiness and satisfaction.”
Troop explained that Bellorín has been here for six years, but this is the first time he has had extensive contact with folk traditions in the United States.
The duo
Troop and Bellorín will go into a studio in a couple of weeks to record Larry & Joe’s debut album. It will be produced by legendary jazz guitarist Charlie Hunter.
“There are all kinds of interesting fusions that we’re exploring,” Troop said. “Part of our music is respectfully rooted in our musical traditions — both Appalachian music and Southern United States music then music from Venezuela — but there are some compositions that begin to fuse these different things.”
Bellorín said, translated by Troop: “Working with Joe is a very unique experience — full of magic and musicality. The most important thing is that Joe’s music and Venezuelan music are being fused, but not forcibly. We can foresee in the future having our very own unique style of music through which future generations can identify themselves in this fusion of bluegrass and musica llanera.”
Troop said he is thankful to have met Bellorín at a time when he was trying to figure out his next step in life.
“It’s interesting that after having worked with asylum-seeking migrants so extensively, I ended up forming a musical duo with one,” Troop said.
He said that he believes in energy.
“If you put your energy into something, somehow as a result of that sacrifice, and of that path, you are brought into communion with related people and entities,” Troop said. “It seems like a continuation of the work I’ve been doing.”
