A "Beautiful Little Thing"

"We just had three or four days of swimming through the pond of ideas and stuff that stuck ended up on the shore,” singer and guitarist Nicky Bomba begins, waxing metaphoric on the genesis of Bustamento’s second album, Intercontinental Journal 7. “Musically, what we found was that, because of our real world travels – we’d just recently been to Malta, Canada and the UK, obviously with the (Melbourne Ska) Orchestra as well, but we also performed as Bustamento, and I went down to Mexico for a while. So there was this melting pot of ideas and sounds, things we’d all touched on in the past in jams.

“So this album was specifically more about the journey, of finding the roots and playing with the hybrids of the roots of the Caribbean style and this album is more like this international trip we’d been on and we’d picked up these little influences here and there – there’s a bit of New Orleans, a bit of Middle Eastern, there’s this whole mariachi thing, the Afro-Cuban thing; there’s obviously the reggae thing, so it’s really like an international postcard.”

The Bustamento journey began in 2012 when Bomba and four members of his previous eponymous band, with steel pan player Lennox Jordan, decided to explore a style of Jamaican folk music, mento, which predated ska and reggae. That resulted in an ARIA-nominated debut album, Intrepid Adventures To The Lost Riddim Islands.

“Bustamento is a beautiful little thing, you know,” he assures. “It was only really started as a tribute, as a labour of love, because I just wanted to start a little mento band from what I’d seen, from going to Jamaica and Seaford Town and all the mento bands that used to play around the swimming pool of the Hilton and all those big hotels. I’ve researched it a lot and it really was, mento was the voice of the people and was very much the newspaper of the time because there were things you couldn’t say in public and in the paper but you could certainly say in a song and totally get away with it, and I like that, I like the spontaneous value of it, and we’re very much a spontaneous band. We will fly off on any tangent at any given moment for any particular reason, first of all ‘cause we can, and then when we do, it’s not like a train wreck – the musicians that are in Bustamento, it’s really like a well-oiled soccer team, we can change players, and I love that, I love the spontaneity of it. It’s a challenge and very exciting.