ARMANDO LOPEZ CREATING SOUND, MAKING A DIFFERENCE Armando Lopez, aka Mondosax, makes music to connect us to the natural world. | Photo by Kyle Awalt ARMANDO LOPEZ does not move through the world in just one lane. By day, he works in lithium-ion JOSHUA ABEYTA CO-FOUNDER OF LOS MOCOCHETES battery research and hazardous materials administration, helping develop technology tied to the transition away from fossil fuels. By night, he is one of Denver’s most recognizable horn players, a longtime member of Brothers of Brass, and a fixture in projects that stretch from jazz fusion to DJdriven “sax trap.” Along the way, he has also become deeply involved in social justice organizing. For Lopez, those worlds are not separate. “I think in the sense that that music is the expression of our humanity,” he said. “I think it is a gear shift [to move between science and music] in the sense of the way using your right and left hand feels different. But at the end of the day, you’re still shaping clay.” As a member of Brothers of Brass, Lopez has been helping cast the band’s joyful chaos over Denver audiences for more than a decade. If music fans have spent time in Downtown Denver over the past 11 years, chances are, they have heard them. The band posts up outside venues such as Ball Arena and the Denver Center for the Performing Arts during let-out, serenading fans as they spill into the streets and parking lots, drawing crowds who bop along to their New Orleans-style renditions of pop songs and traditional second-line numbers. Their latest album, “Street Life, Vol. 2,” recently debuted at a packed release show at Cervantes’ Other Side. Lopez pulled double duty, performing an opening set with his jazz-fusion project, “Something Out Of.” “Street Life, Vol. 2” is a follow-up to the group’s debut, “Street Life, Vol. 1,” which was released in 2021. Lopez provided all of the saxophone parts and contributed further with lyrics and composition. The new album opens with “Teddy’s Jam,” a high-energy banger that evokes Bourbon Street on Fat Tuesday, with tight horn arrangements, an infectious backbeat, and a clear sense of the band’s collective chemistry. Lopez’s sax work is provocative, cutting-edge, and his tone is uniquely his own. Brothers of Brass is an ecstatic experience, and their new album captures the live performance energy that can be difficult to replicate in a studio setting. Lopez’s other projects push further outward. He performs as Mondosax, a DJ and saxophone solo project that he laughingly describes as “a wish.com Big Gigantic.” The project blends live saxophone with dance music and has made him a popular presence on the wedding circuit, even if, as he puts it, the work is “very lucrative, but not very artistically fulfilling in any way.” Most recently, Lopez has been building a new project around an instrument rarely seen on local stages: the contrabass clarinet. “That instrument is so rare, and people just don’t see it,” he said. “No one’s ever gonna call me for a contrabass clarinet gig, so I have to build a band around it, essentially.” The new project, Terra Ohm, reflects the same duality that runs through much of Lopez’s life. The name references both electrical resistance and something more meditative and earthbound. The music, he said, will combine live electronics, samples, trap- and EDM-inspired drums, world percussion, and the Afro-Latin influences that keep finding their way into his work. That blend of technical precision and spiritual searching also shows up in his day job. Lopez spent 5 years as a materials scientist before moving into hazardous materials administration, where he does research and development on lithium-ion batteries. Lopez’s work on power storage places him at the forefront of one of the biggest technical challenges in the shift away from fossil fuels. Science did not pull him away from music. It deepened his commitment to it. “When I started learning chemistry, especially material science, it was so epic,” Lopez said. “The crystal structures, the way waves and physics move through, the way sound and heat are really the same thing. It was very profound.” Lopez, the son of immigrants, said part of his path into science came from a desire to honor the sacrifices his parents made. “There was always kind of this pressure that a lot of firstgeneration immigrants have,” he said, “that you have to be kind of something super epic to make all that sacrifice worth it.” Over time, he came to see music, science, and activism less as competing paths than as different ways of trying to shape the world. “Taking that excitement for the natural world and passion and desire to change the world and kind of honing it into something that’s actually effective,” he said, “music is a huge piece of that.” Lopez cites his education as what pushed him into art and science. “I was fortunate enough to come up in an environment where I got a really amazing public school education in Los Angeles and North Hollywood and in the Valley,” he said. Having music and science in his life has helped Lopez find balance. “If one avenue of my life is taking too much out of me, I have this whole other piece that I can engage with,” he said. That same drive has also led him into organizing. Lopez serves on the board of the Denver Justice Project, an organization that does policy advocacy and community education for criminal justice reform. His social justice work became infused with his music when Brothers of Brass began joining the resurgent protest movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Derek Chauvin in 2020. The band regularly showed up to help usher marches and fill demonstrations with a sense of joy and connection. They also partnered with No Enemies, the community-driven initiative that teaches protest songs and chants and was co-founded by members of Flobots, the Denver-based band that went international with their 2007 hit “Handlebars.” Looking ahead, Lopez said organizing live events remains one of the clearest ways to keep marrying music and movement work. For him, the point is not just to perform or do research. It is to be useful, grow, and change. “You’re still just moving and trying to have an impact on the world,” he said. 6 MUSIC IN DENVER
7 Publizr Home