Photo via Healing Gems - Instagram
Healing Gems
Healing Gems
Before Healing Gems existed, its members were loosely working on a 1950s sound but mostly just having a good time at the house where drummer Michael Castellanos was staying. This locale, in the L.A. County city of West Covina, had a pool and a basement.
“We started randomly hanging out and getting drunk and getting high,” guitarist and singer Jared Marin said during a recent phone interview. “We started covering Super Mario soundtrack songs and realized they sounded cool.”
Eventually, Healing Gems transfigured various inspirations—Brazilian musician Sérgio Mendes and his band Brasil ’66, American composer and conductor Les Baxter, Mexican bandleader and pianist Esquivel! [sic]—into 21st-century, West Coast, bossa nova, SpaceX-age lounge music. “We really like that whole hanging-out-on-the-boat kind of vibe,” Marin said.
Calypso Exotica
The most recent Healing Gems cruise is In the Mood, a nine-track swim in a warm, foamy sea of varying tides, from the calypso-exotica instrumental of “Swords Dance” and the Serge Gainsbourgian tropicália of “Melody Lounge” to the keyboard-festooned cowboy trot of “Will O’ Wisp.”
While the album might sound as though it breezed into existence, it emerged with difficulty amid COVID-19 isolation, when band members—particularly Marin, keyboardist Edgar J. Mendoza, and singer and lap steel guitarist Patricia Mae Reyes—formulated the music separately. “I was in my room with a little keyboard and listening to a lot of Thai and Indonesian 1960s bands,” Marin said.
Once everyone was able to regather and record together, Healing Gems, rounded out by guitarist Brittany Carranza and bassist Liliana Burgos, still took time easing the music into place.
“We started in 2021 and went until 2024,” Marin said. “I just came up with the chord progressions and the band kind of followed along. We had really gotten into DMT, a lot of weed, kind of chilling and not sure what was going to happen to the world.”
Tiki Festival
The relaxed pacing was not unnatural for Healing Gems, which had begun its live career circa 2015 by throwing its own festival, complete with multiple bands, DJs and vendors, in West Covina.
“We had a secret guest that was actually us,” Marin said. “We waited for about a hundred people to show up, and we played about five songs. People liked it immediately and we knew we had something.”
The festival, Tiki Trash, is now an annual event, and the band that founded it seems to have inspired other musicians in greater Los Angeles. “When we started, we were pretty much the only ones,” Marin said. “We’d be on bills with punk bands and garage-rock bands. Now the sound has shifted more in our direction, and we’re playing with all these tiki bands.”
With a follow-up to In the Mood “about 50 percent complete,” by Marin’s reckoning, and another handful of new songs yet to be recorded, Healing Gems is also traveling well outside of West Covina. “It’s our first tour,” Marin said. “We’re really excited to play. I hope people come out and check out what we have. I think it’s pretty unique.”
Healing Gems perform 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 15 at Cactus Club, 2496 S. Wentworth Ave.
