Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Garcia have delivered their first album No Requests. The New York City-bred radio legends both curated and executive produced the project for 10x-Grammy Award winning pianist Eddie Palmeiri and his label Uprising Music.
Comprised of 10 tracks, the multi-dimensional project fuses jazz, Latin, Go Go, instrumental Hip Hop and other various flavors into one cohesive gumbo with the help of The M19s Band. Guest features include vocalists Mireya Ramos, Maimouna Youssef, José Parlá and Rich Medina.
Stretch and Bobbito spoke about where the The M19 Band name came from and the concept of the album in a recent interview with RealStreetRadio.
“Bob grew up on the Upper West Side of 97 Street and I grew up on the Upper East Side of East 96th Street, and the M19 was the name of the bus that linked those two neighborhoods together, 96th street through Central Park,” Stretch said. “Metaphorically, the M19, like our album, is our desire to have it build bridges and bring people together, just like that bus did.”
Bobbito added, “It’s not just like, ‘OK, here’s the Jamaican song or here’s the Latin song. It’s like within the Jamaican song, there’s Latin music and within the jazz song, there’s African music and within the rock song … we assume our audience has sophisticated musical ears. We’re down to challenge them.”
Check out the No Requests album stream, cover art and tracklist below.
- Anna From Woohside (Beat Suite)
- Voices Inside My Head
- Could Heaven Ever Be Like This
- Festival Song (Bam Bam)
- Magnificent Dance f. Rich Medina
- Que Se Sepa f. José Parlá & Mireya Ramos
- The Mexican f. Mireya Ramos
- I Know You, I Live You f. Maimouna Youssef
- If You Really Love Me f. Maimouna Youssef
- Baby I’m Scared Of You