Richmond-based bolero group Miramar is as closely knit as any trio you’ll find.
Vocalists Rei Álvarez and Laura Ann Singh harmonize with so much precision and grace that it’s hard to imagine there was ever a day when they didn’t sing together. Álvarez and band-leading keyboardist, Marlysse Rose Simmons-Argandoña, finish each other’s compositional sentences as partners in songwriting and arranging, as well as partners in married life.
Even Miramar’s stylistic focus—the famously romantic bolero with roots in Cuba dating back to the 19th century—exhibits a built-in sense of specificity. Yet this exceptionally tight trio is having an expansive moment. Big, varied arrangements can be found on “Entre Tus Flores,” its new album due out Friday, Jan. 10; with 10 tracks poised to reach a bigger audience than ever thanks to a new partnership with historic Latin music label Ansonia Records.
And the process by which the group arrived at the album’s final mix? Let’s just say it was no small feat. “This was tough,” Simmons-Argandoña says. “It took too long.”
Devoted fans of Miramar, which has toured the United States and Europe—even Russia, thanks to an embassy-sponsored tour—might have been feeling the same way. Previous full-length “Dedication to Sylvia Rexach” arrived in 2016, pairing seven compositions by the under-appreciated, titular Puerto Rican composer with three original selections. “Entre Tus Flores” (“In Between Your Flowers”) flips that ratio, foregrounding the exquisite yearning Álvarez evokes with his lyrics, as well as the lush layering Simmons-Argandoña achieves when building out arrangements.
Unlike “Dedication to Sylvia Rexach,” which was largely made with the help of a single accompanying ensemble at a single recording studio, its follow-up took multiple years and an extended network of all-star instrumentalists representing multiple music scenes. “There [were] a lot of sessions behind this,” Singh recounts. “A lot of them maybe we kept one track from one song. It’s crazy.”
The pandemic played a part. With so few opportunities to perform live, the group turned the studio into a proving ground. “To get people together in a room was hard,” Singh says. “We didn’t have the luxury of working through everything beforehand and then recording. It’s like we had to figure out by recording.”
Searching for the sounds
Initial tracking took place at Spacebomb Studios in Richmond, though the result didn’t hit the mark. Subsequent recording took place as near as Spacebomb and the group’s beloved Minimum Wage Studios in Oregon Hill and as far away as Brooklyn, New York with Colombian guitarist Sebastian Cruz. Cruz was invited to be part of Miramar’s 2017 NPR Tiny Desk Concert, and he was so inspired by performing with the band that he penned “Tú Peine,” the sixth track on “Entre Tus Flores”—though it’s the album’s third song, “Paradero,” that he helped record in Brooklyn.
“‘Paradero’ was probably the song that went through the most changes,” Simmons-Argandoña says. “I really wanted that song to have this Middle Eastern-ish edge… I was determined to have these weird little intervals.” The song’s slow build mimics a song by a Chilean group Simmons-Argandoña loves, Inti-Illimani, and its wordless chorus boasts an unforgettable melodic lilt, one bolstered by guest vocals from accomplished Indonesian singer and recent Richmond fixture, Peni Candra Rini.
That same section of “Paradero”—“resting place” in English—delivered a knockout punch during Miramar’s October 2024 performance with the Richmond Symphony Orchestra. It was the band’s second appearance with the RSO in four years, and it was a moment of musical culmination for Singh.
“This is how [this music] was initially conceptualized. They were all done with beautiful orchestras live in the recording studios originally in the ’50s and ’60s,” she explains. “So to have the new songs that we’re doing with that piece in a live setting… This feels like the best possible version of this type of music.”
“It brings the romance to life,” Álvarez adds.
That October performance happened to coincide with his birthday, and the native of Puerto Rico says the gig was like being in a movie.
“It was magical to hear Marlysse’s arrangements and sing along to them,” he says, adding “everybody’s arrangements are great” — a reference to Mark Messing, who also contributed them to the symphony show. “But for me, there’s something about Marlysse’s arrangements that nobody can touch.”
Partners in song
Simmons-Argandoña says the string parts she writes often grow out of the organ lines she plays when Miramar, whose name translates to “look to the sea,” performs as a smaller ensemble. She paints with bright, decisive strokes as a keyboardist, qualities she applies just as deftly with Bio Ritmo, the long-running and renowned salsa ensemble Álvarez helped found in the early 1990s. In the decades after a fateful gig where Simmons-Argandoña subbed in on keys, she’s taken on a central role with Bio Ritmo in which she leads the band both musically and logistically. She’s just as much of a driving force for Miramar, including during the songwriting process.
Álvarez is often the point of origin on that front, taking stray melodic phrases or chord changes he heard Simmons play and mulling them over until a song takes shape. Other times, Simmons-Argandoña will push Álvarez to provide words for a tune she’s already started working through. In those cases, her tactics for generating momentum—which include sudden projectiles and inciting intra-band fights, Singh notes with a laugh—prove especially beneficial.
“Sometimes I’ll force it to happen when I’m desperate to finish something,” Simmons-Argandoña says. “Then it will be, ‘Okay after dinner tonight, we have to finish this song, because I’m gonna go crazy if we don’t.’”
Such was the case for “Urgencia,” the B-side of the seven-inch single Miramar released via Daptone Records in 2019. “She was after me for a long time to write lyrics for it,” Álvarez says. “One of my complaints is that she’s always in a rush, but I’m the opposite. I’m worse. I’m always way behind… I was like, ‘Okay, fine,’ [and] I wrote the song about being in a rush.”
While boleros are known for portraying romantic love, Álvarez’s lyrics draw on a range of experiences—just one way in which Miramar resists being hemmed in by tradition. Álvarez has noticed emotional ebbs and flows in his writing over the years. Bio Ritmo songs have tended to double as uplifting advice: “What I should have done, what I wish I could do… so that somebody else can relate to it and apply it to their life,” he says.
His songwriting for Miramar used to lean into the genre’s built-in weightiness. “What touches me the most about boleros is the sadness,” he says. “I identify with it.” The birth of his son caused a shift, however, and two songs on the new album relate directly to fatherhood: “Un Astro,” which depicts a new life coming into the world, and “Lo Sabras,” which attempts to pass down the lessons a father has learned. “My songs may be going in the way of the Bio Ritmo kind of feel, where I’m trying to find the light in the dark.”
A garden of inspiration
The sonic diversity found on “Entre Tus Flores” mirrors its emotional variety. “Juntos” started as a “Sabor a Mí” soundalike destined for an insurance ad before morphing into a Stereolab-leaning vehicle for Simmons-Argandoña’s enjoyment of the Mellotron. The album’s second track also presented Álvarez and Singh with an opportunity to riff on the pillow talk in the background of a song by Brazilian legend Marcos Valle. “It’s super-corny and hilarious,” Singh notes.
“If anyone ever picks that up, it’ll be amazing,” Simmons-Argandoña adds. “Especially if [Valle] picks it up. I’m gonna tag him once we put that song out.”
She calls “Lo Que Me Das” one of her favorites, in part because it’s more stripped down—just Univox Organizer organ, percussion and vocals—and in part because it incorporates the Puerto Rican danza style, which is said to have been perfected by Álvarez’s mother’s grandfather’s uncle, International Latin Music Hall of Fame inductee Juan Morel Campos. A statue of Morel Campos can be found in Álvarez’s hometown of Ponce.
The spark that ignited opening track “Incertidumbre,” whose title translates to “uncertainty,” was found farther afield. Álvarez got the idea for the song’s instantaneously gripping opening moments from a few chords in the coda of a song recorded by Japanese pop star Goro Noguchi. “I love that romantic pop from the ’70s—total worlds apart from what romantic pop is today,” Álvarez says. “Chord changes speak just as much as lyrics do, as far as setting a tone, [and] where did I hear them? I heard him at the end of this one song, and it’s totally unexpected.”
“Entre Tus Flores” as a whole proved gripping for Liza Richardson, the Grammy-nominated music supervisor and KCRW mainstay who purchased Ansonia Records in 2020 with the aim of reviving the imprint. “We were dazzled by the songwriting, hip arrangements, architecture of the harmonies and thrilling vocals,” Richardson says via email. “I was blown away by the rare consistency of quality throughout the album.”
During the same years Miramar sought to complete its new album, Richardson set about bringing the Ansonia back catalog—which helped shape Latin music history in both the United States and Latin America—into the present day. The label has digitized classic recordings and released a compilation of gems released from 1950s to the 1980s while simultaneously forging into the future with new music from Colombian group Meridian Brothers [who have played several well-received shows in Richmond].
Branching out to Latin America
With the distribution support of Ansonia, Miramar is hoping to forge new ground of its own. Simmons-Argandoña is looking forward to reaching new listeners.
“It’ll be the first time [our music] is pushed in any way in Latin American countries,” she notes. “That’s really exciting, because we haven’t worked with any label that’s tried to push it in Latin America at all… It would be a personal satisfaction to have it presented to people who are familiar with where we’re coming from.”
Shows in Richmond and New York City are already scheduled for early 2025, and gigs in Puerto Rico are assured, thanks to the band’s many connections there. But Simmons would also love to perform in South America and Mexico. “When we play it for people in Richmond and even Europe, it’s great,” the first-generation Chilean-American says. “But I know when Spanish speakers and Spanish natives—Spanish people—hear the lyrics, it’s another level.”
Laura Ann Singh is arguably as well known for singing in Portuguese as she is for her contributions to Miramar. Though the University of Richmond grad hails from Tennessee originally, she founded Quatro Na Bossa with UR music professor and guitarist Kevin Harding in 2003 as an outlet for her love of Brazilian popular music. More recently, she provided studied and deeply soulful vocals for the Doug Richards Orchestra’s 2023 album, “Through a Sonic Prism: The Music of Antônio Carlos Jobim.” Being so well traveled, geographically and musically, affords her a unique perspective on the bolero’s enduring appeal.
“I don’t have any connection to this, historically, in my life — except that I fell in love with it as an adult,” she says. “It’s not like I don’t know what I’m singing about. But it’s not the same as having listened to boleros from when I was a kid, in my house with my parents and grandparents; it’s a different kind of connection. They’re all valid.”
With dazzling duet singing, indelible expressions of longing and expert arranging, “Entre Tus Flores” offers the most complete picture yet of the trio’s true super-power: giving listeners numerous reasons to love the bolero. And while turning such abundant ideas and overflowing instrumental excellence into a final set of mixes may have been challenging, the songs are undeniably Miramar.
“I think the unifying thing is Rei’s songwriting,” Singh says. “That gives it the cohesive sound that makes all these different influences that we threw in make sense.”
“Entre Tus Flores” is out Friday, Jan. 10 via Ansonia Records. To hear and purchase the album, visit miramar.bandcamp.com. Miramar will perform two sets at Révéler Experiences on Friday, Feb. 14, at 7:30 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Tickets range from $20-$30 and can be purchased at revelerexperiences.com.
