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

By 1 a.m. early Sunday morning, there’s been a lot of hearing damage. The Snug Harbor rock club in Plaza Midwood has been hosting the four-day psychedelic music festival called Springadelia; the guitar solos have been consciousness-expanding, and the amplifiers have been loud. Lee Herrera, who plays in the trio Bravo Pueblo, stands near the main stage and gets ready for his set. “All the bands are really rocking, and we’re really not 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, plugging in pedals and syncing up electronic drum pads. Herrera, wiry and intense, is on guitar and synthesizer. Claudio Ortiz, shaggy and genial, is on bass and synthesizer. His younger sister, Liza Ortiz, cheerful and energetic, is on vocals and synthesizer. She’s wearing a jumpsuit adorned with a pattern of large, colorful mushrooms.

At first, the music is a subdued groove of bleeps and bloops. But then Liza starts singing, in Spanish, backed with effects that makes her sound like a choir of Latina 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 kick of Caribbean rhythms.

The crowd steadily grows, and what started off as rhythmic head-nodding becomes actual dancing. By the last song, “Y Te Dicen,” in which the chorus repeats and then doubles back on itself, the crowd cheers when the song hits a climax. Liza looks ecstatic, like she’s landed somewhere in the mental space between a woman hoisting a championship trophy over her head and a woman who just heard the funniest joke in the world.

Before the set ends, Claudio tells the crowd, “You could be anywhere else, but you’re here.”

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

The Charlotte music scene still has systemic problems—not enough venues, too many unadventurous bookers, a force field that seems to repel most national touring acts—but in the last couple of years, a groundswell of local groups have played as if their lives depended on it. All 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 they cared about.

Claudio says, “The sounds and textures and everything that we’re creating is probably the closest representation to what’s happening inside of our heads and the closest I’ve ever gotten to in my lifetime of playing music. And that’s exciting.

Claudio is 37; Liza is 35. (They share a 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 grew tumultuous.

Liza’s lyrics for the Bravo Pueblo song “Cambural” were inspired by her experience on a banana-tree farm in Venezuela. “It was the most precarious space ever,” she remembers. “We could go sledding down the muddy hill on banana leaves. It was full of beauty and chaos—the jungle is beautiful, but there’s so many things that can kill you.”

The Ortizes’ mother taught them to sing and harmonize with each other as they learned how to talk. “A huge part of our family is singing, like a Caribbean von Trapp family,” Claudio explains. He grew up playing violin while Liza took piano lessons, so they didn’t really collaborate musically until they were college-age. “Most of the bands that I’ve ever been in, I’ve invited Liza to come along,” he says. (She immediately points out a notable exception: his old hardcore group, Lost in a World of Color.)

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

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

“Lots of vests,” cracks Herrera.

“It’s all rhythm,” says Herrera (at left), who plays guitar and synthesizer but grew up wanting to play drums. He basically invited himself into the band.

Claudio, who served in the Army Reserve for nine years, jumping out of planes and rigging pallets of supplies with cargo parachutes, unexpectedly immersed himself in his Latin musical heritage when he served for a year on an Army base in Southwest Asia in 2010. Members of the Sea gave him a ukulele that he took to the desert with him, but once he was in the Middle East, he started checking out classic salsa records from the base library. “Up until then, it was background noise for me,” he confesses. “Stuff that I would hear at family reunions.”

After he returned, Claudio and Liza collaborated in the Latin-inflected indie-rock band Patabamba, which mutated into the long-running local favorite Chocala (the Spanish term for a high-five), where the Ortizes cranked up the polyrhythms. But by 2019, Chocala was drifting apart.

Herrera, meanwhile, played a variety of instruments in numerous 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 in Massachusetts), and guitar and synth in HRVRD’s successful spinoff, 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 amazing at any instrument, but I play every instrument like they’re drums,” Herrera explains. “It’s all rhythm. The guitar, your right hand is playing a rhythm, your left hand is doing something rhythmic. Same with the keys. How do they interact with the beat that’s happening?”

“I knew who Lee was, but we’d never hung out until we went to a friend’s wedding together,” Claudio says. “He rode with me in the car and said that—I’d never thought about playing music that way, focusing on the rhythmic element. And that was one of my first music epiphanies by Lee.”

“That sounds like a cologne!” Herrera interrupts.

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

Herrera, 40, basically invited himself into Bravo Pueblo and became fast friends with the Ortiz siblings; they’ve all gone on long bike rides and camping trips together. Herrera also grew up in Venezuela, so they found themselves simpatico 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.” Which makes me a little embarrassed to admit that, with my kindergarten-level Spanish, I thought it translated as “Hooray town!”

“That’s what it means, technically,” Claudio concedes, laughing.

Liza’s favorite musicians are cinematic in their ambition, making what she calls “all-the-feels music”: Sigur Ros, Sufjan Stevens, Son Lux. Bravo Pueblo’s debut single, “Cambural,” released in March, captures a slice of that emotional wide-screen: It’s a midtempo bop that feels like music to pregame to before an epic night out. The trio are hoping that if they release more music later this year, they can give listeners a sense of their full, 70 mm sonic scope. One step at a time: They’ve played a lot of shows in Plaza Midwood, and while they’re not looking to tour nationally just yet, they think it might be time to see how they go over in clubs on the other side of town.

On a Wednesday evening, the members of Bravo Pueblo gather for a rehearsal at Liza’s house in the Shannon Park neighborhood. They set up in a back room, roughly 200 square feet, almost entirely taken up by music equipment. They’re all facing each other. On some songs, they play along with recorded tracks (constructed with help from producer Jesse Clasen of Foreign Air), but historically, they’ve synchronized their various electronic rhythms by nodding to the beat in unison.

Everyone’s wearing headphones, to keep the volume low out of consideration for the neighbors and because they like how the headphones create sonic intimacy among the three of them. There’s a purple light in the corner of the room, and the windows are tinted green, so although we’re tucked away on a tree-lined street, the vibe is “crowded nightclub on the moon.” On the mellow “Conquesto,” Herrera plays shimmering guitar that washes over the song like waves gently lapping on the beach. Then something goes wrong, and Liza pulls a face.

“What just happened?” Herrera asks.

“I just happened,” she admits cheerfully. “I forgot the cue. Sorry!” They all laugh because they’re not stressed about it. And then, when they start up the song again, bobbing their heads together, they all hit the cue perfectly—and they laugh again, because they can’t believe how good it sounds.

GAVIN EDWARDS, a contributing editor, is the author of 14 books, including the bestselling MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios.