12 November 2009
By Jonathan Jackson.
“Where the hell are we?”
Piled in a truck we are following Milly Majuc’s tour van as it winds through the hillside streets of Matagalpa. It’s close to one o’clock in the morning and almost 5,000 people have just watched Milly play their first show in the city, along with Malos Habitos and Division Urbana.
As we follow closely, the Milly van keeps taking seemingly random turns and stops indecisively several times before continuing on. We swear they have us going around in circles.
Finally, the van pulls to the curb and we realize we have made it to our destination, the after party at Bar Artesana. As everyone climbs out of the cars, one of our passengers exclaims “Geeez, never follow Milly Majuc.” Carlos Caldera, the lead singer for the band, walks up to the guy, looks him straight in the face and deadpans, “You ALWAYS follow Milly Majuc,” before spinning around and walking into the bar.
We all laugh, but once we realize that we are the first group from the tour to actually find the place, we agree, following Milly Majuc is not a bad idea. And it is also something a lot of people in Nicaragua have been doing lately. Far and away one of the most popular groups in Managua, the band has come a long way from their early days of playing Pink Floyd, Bob Marley and Santana covers in small bars around their hometown of Masaya.
These days Milly is known for their shows full of raucous fans, jumping and dancing to songs they know word-for-word. Their 70’s vibe is still apparent, but the covers have been replaced by an original tripped-out orgy of classic rock, reggae and funk. Live, they have an energy about them that can’t currently be matched by any other band performing original music in Nicaragua, and they’ve managed to do all this without ever releasing an album.
You have to relax and give yourself up in body and soul when it’s time to play.” – Carlos Caldera
Away from the stages and lights, the five bandmates are some of the most tranquil people you could meet. They are true musicians who make up for their lack of formal musical training with a natural ability and passion to play.
But the laid back, carefree vibe of the band can be a gift and a curse. Sometimes they look a little too relaxed on stage and one of the things you sometimes find yourself wishing that they had a little more of, but are probably actually glad they don’t, is that “rockstar” mentality.
Lead singer Carlos Caldera lacks the visible enthusiasm of someone like Monroy or Perrozompopo, and Milly doesn’t have the stage presence of a band like Division Urbana; yet whatever the group may lack in presence, they more than make up for with music, and you can see it in how the crowd responds.
“If there is a good connection with the audience, you’ll feel that ecstasy that makes everything go right.” – Leslie Sanchez
In Matagalpa, where Milly had never played, the fans that had been slam dancing and nodding their heads to the other, more established acts, took everything down a level when Milly hit the stage. A sense of “who are these guys?” seemed to come over the crowd. The dancing came to a halt.
Milly kept on jamming the only way they know how, slowly working their Milly magic. First the heads started to nod, then a small group began dancing. A circle began to form in front of the stage. A few people started jumping, the circle got bigger and slowly it grew and grew as more joined in, unable to resist the groove. By the end of the set, the sea of thousands were jumping and shouting “Otra! Otra!”
“I was in every single practice, I wasn’t even a part of the band, but they let me play.” – Mario Ruiz
Playing music by ear has always come naturally for brothers Carlos and Emilio Caldera. At the age of 16, lead vocalist Carlos (27) got his first guitar and taught himself to play Santana’s “Oye Como Va.” As for his brother Emilio (26), simply touching a drum set as a boy made him happy and he learned to play by studying the drummer at mass and watching music videos.
One day, Carlos approached the priest of his high school, El Salesiano, in Masaya and asked him to let his band, which consisted of a friend with a bass and his brother on the drums, play at a school event. “Two days later, the Priest came back with a ‘tadpole’ and asked us to let him play with us… it was Leslie,” says Carlos with a laugh.
Leslie Sánchez (25) joined their band as a keyboard player. With an interest in music since he was a kid, Leslie received a tiny keyboard when he was 8 and started ‘composing’ his own songs right away.
The chemistry between Leslie and the Caldera brothers was evident from the beginning and it became even stronger when Leslie brought his own brother, Carlos Sánchez (29) into the group as a rhythm guitar player.
Like his younger brother, Carlos Sánchez’s first instrument was the keyboard, however he quickly found he preferred the guitar, gravitating toward an electric one his mother had received as a gift.
Bassist and vocalist Mario Ruiz (28) would join the band a couple years later when he met the others at the UNICA (Catholic University of Nicaragua) in his hometown of Managua. The band member with the most formal musical training, Mario got into music hanging out with an older cousin who was part of a group named Osiris. He soon began composing songs and attended music school for three years before going to college and joining the University band as a bass player (because, he explains, there were already 7 guitar players).
“I would be a lawyer if they had told me to study music.” – Carlos Caldera
Carlos Caldera never went music school, but he believes in the philosophy that everything you go through brings you to where you are supposed to be. To hear him tell it, his decision to attend Law School was the best thing he could have done for his music education and career. “If I hadn’t studied Law, even though I didn’t want to, we wouldn’t have all met and formed the band,” he says.
Mario, on the other hand, ended up in Law School practically out of spite. “A professor told me not to go to law school. He said I should do something else. I ended up studying Law because that got me angry, but he was truly right,” he says with a laugh.
Leslie also studied Law, with similar results. It led him to realize that it was through music that he was becoming the man he wanted to be. “I have to follow my dream, to do what I want and complete myself,” he says.
Since he was young, Carlos Sánchez always had a knack for fixing things, like his little brother’s broken remote control cars. “It’s all about logic, just like music,” he says. This skill led him to study System Engineering at the university. There he learned that logical thinking helps him understand music, saying, “In music there are things that you do once that you can do again, or there becomes a variable and you leave a silence. To structure something, you have to have a logical sequence.”
For Emilio, it was always logical that he would get into business. As a boy he was constantly coming up with his own small business ventures as a way to earn money. In college, he studied Business Administration, and he is the one member of Milly Majuc that has directly incorporated his schooling into the band. “I managed to merge my passion for music with business, I’ve had bars and now I have my own company that promotes events,” he says.
“You learn how to build success and the most important thing is to be persistent.” – Emilio Caldera
For close to ten years, Milly Majuc has been putting in work. With no album to their resume, they have nevertheless continued to grow their fame and become one of the premier bands in the country. Persistence has paid off for the group, along with relentless promotion through concerts. Rarely a week goes by without a Milly Majuc show in Managua, and the band has taken advantage of opportunities, such as the Matagalpa concert, to share their music with, and see other cities all around the country. It’s something they don’t take for granted. “This is the career that has given us a chance to really get to know Nicaragua,” says Emilio.
The Milly are throwbacks to a simpler time, a time when the only thing that mattered was that there was an opportunity and an audience. Musically and personally, they offer no gimmicks, no BS; they are natural talents, 100% Nicaragüense, who love music, love to play and have an undeniable knack to make you shake that ass. If that’s not something worth following, I don’t know what is.
¡Muchas felicidades por este artículo! Está muy bien escrito y deja ver al lector la personalidad de cada uno de los miembros de la banda.
Este articulo no me gusto para nada, esta mal desarrollado, no tiene secuencia y no existe un final…no me gusta para nada…ademas que eso de que no tienen el feeling de rockstar, pssss eso esta excelente…esta mal desarrollado, mal hecho…
Debo decir que la version en ingles esta bien desarrollada, la que no me gusto es la que está en español.
el que diga que no le gusto el escrito se nota que no conoce a Milly… excelente, bien descritos los chavales, yo si los conozco bien y es correcta la apreciacion, no tienen esa mentalidad farandulera de otra gente, y eso les ha ayudado a no dejarse llevar por algunos interesados. es mas, a largo plazo Milly tiene mas posibilidades de ser icono que otras bandas actuales, pero en cuestion de feeling ellos son la referencia… shake it shake it shake it…
pues simplemente felicidades a los millys son un orgullo de masaya y nicaragua… buen articulo los describe excelente y como mencionaron el que los conoce comprendera que el articulo 100%…
Creo que no!!!! No me gusta….lo siento….eso de conocer a Milly, los conozco muy bien, y se que muchas cosas que dijeron son verdad, pero fueron expresadas de una mala manera, un articulo mal articulado, sin inicio y sin cola, sin desarrollar las ideas como se debia, creo que si iba a ser como historia por lo menos merecia un final, y no mencionar cosas de escenario en varias partes. Los Milly son la mera bestia, a mi me encatan, y esa sencillez que los caracteriza es lo mejor que pueden tener es una de sus cualidades que los va a llevar lejos, sin embargo dicho de la manera en que lo dijeron en la revista hace sentirlo como critica destructiva y no como una cualidad. Cuando mencionan que no tienen el desarrollo escenico como Division Urbana, considero que esta de muchisimo mas la comparacion, Milly Majuc no es un grupo de ese estilo, y la comparacion con Monroy y Perrozompopo estuvo de más, Milly Majuc es único en su género en Nicaragua, todos los detalles que mencionaron los hacen ellos, y creo que estuvieron de más las comparaciones, y es un articulo pesimamente desarrollado (la versión en español)
La trayectoria de Milly ha sido a paso lento pero ,,,, seguro,,,, excelente,,,, la musica es calidad y se siente….Su musica es Original…..
Estoy totalmente deacuerdo con Maria, desde el inicio cuando empeze a leer este articulo hasta el final me di cuenta de lo mal redactado y falta de secuencia. Tambien entendi perfectamente lo que queria decir, no es algo en contra de los Milly porque soy otro que puedo asegurar los buena onda que son ellos y toda la cosa, pero el que redacto esto no trasmite la misma emocion o “feeling” del que uno esta claro, mas bien aburre leer el articulo por lo mismo que te salta de una cosa a otra.
Bueno espero que el autor lo mire como una critica sana para mejorar los proximos articulos y le sea de ayuda.
Saludos desde Masaya tambien y suerte con la revista q esta muy buena.