El Cantarita joins eateries offering Mexican fare in Fuquay-Varina

Somewhat new to the Fuquay-Varina community is El Cantarita Bar & Grill, a restaurant serving Mexican fare beginning at 11 a.m. daily at 155 S. Main St. in the town's downtown business district.

I had not been to downtown Fuquay-Varina in several years before stopping in on Monday, and I could see on the drive along U.S. 401 (which locally is Main Street) that the town government's new municipal building, which was under construction for my 2019 photo walk-through, was now in operation. And there was a large open field a block or two north of El Cantarita displaying a sign indicating future development is coming. 

I'm pretty sure the multi-story building in which El Cantarita is located is even newer. As one of the pictures in this post attests, the building has four stories, which is a skycraper for towns the size of Fuquay-Varina, and I don't recall there being a building that size with the possible exception of one or two banks.

El Cantarita is a quaint eatery decorated judiciously, and I mean that in a good way. This place had been recommended to us by an employee at the town’s ABC liquor store when we asked her where we could find a good margarita in town. And she was not mistaken. 

Lee Ann and I found the house margarita (see photo above) to be superb, and I think it's one of the seemingly few bars that uses an appropriate amount of the liqueur Grand Marnier Cordon Rouge or triple sec in their cocktail. I applaud El Cantarita for doing so.  

Interestingly, the menu suggests that the bar serves an even better margarita; it offers a premium margarita — for almost twice the cost — using 1880 tequila.

For the main dishes, Lee Ann chose Cantarita’s fajita quesadilla shown in the first photo below. I picked Cantarita’s enchilada with ground beef (second photo below). We both enjoyed our meals. My only qualm was that I wished they had used a cream (instead of dried) cheese topping on my enchiladas and that there might have been a red sauce included. I ended up putting some of the salsa served with the tortilla chips appetizer onto my enchiladas. 

Speaking of the tortilla chips ... I liked the salsa, but Lee Ann felt it was on the spicy side. I like spicy, so a server brought us some jalapeno chips to add to our dipped chips. Ordinarily I'm not a jalapeno fan, but I got bold and tried a light treatment of them, and although I seemed fine at the time, my stomach would tell me a few hours later that it probably was not a good idea. 

There is very modest municipal parking along the north side of the building, and there is some free street parking as well. The restaurant closes at 10 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays and on Saturdays. Closing is 9 p.m. Sundays and 10:30 p.m. Fridays. Pickup/carryout service is available after 1:45 p.m. most days.  

 

Soren Bebe Trio delivers a mix of judicious jazz with melodious New Age-like piano

This post represents another first for me: content that is entirely about music. 

In my profile narrative on the right side of the main blog page, I explain how I usually use the blog to chronicle my periodic photo shoots. And for the longest time, I also used to mention how the blog could change directions in the future.

In the past year, I’ve made a few direction changes from the usual photo-shoot-chronicling, and today’s post is yet another deviation.

There have been so many bad things I’ve encountered using social media in recent years, so a fortuitous turn four months ago or thereabouts has had me wanting to share a story about how the discovery of contemporary musicians who are new to me has been a delight and comfort. And the process of how these artists, in turn, “found” me, might be the start of a social media trend.

An increasing number of fledgling artists or musicians who have tired of record labels who don't support them enthusiastically are using Facebook and Instagram (and perhaps other social media) to promote their work through self-produced ads usually containing sample clips of their music.

That’s how I learned about the Søren Bebe Trio, a Danish combo that features Bebe on piano and various musicians on drums and bass. I guess I can best describe their music as a melding of judicious light jazz with melodious New Age piano. My love of New Age piano — which goes back to the early 1990s — no doubt explains why I even elected to check out the trio’s ad when I first came upon it on Facebook in June. 

The ad was sampling the title track of the trio’s 2019 album Echoes.

If you are on social media and have seen or heard these ads, you know the musicians try to entice viewers/listeners by offering a free CD (of the artist’s choosing) if the buyer pays only a $5 shipping cost. When a customer pursues the offer and clicks on the link taking them to the purchase page, the artist further entices the buyer by offering them additional albums of their music at considerable discounts or in discounted packages. And the artist offers to sign the discs, for an extra couple bucks. 

I was suspicious at first, but the Søren Bebe Trio music was so appealing to me, I didn’t run away. The artists explain that their motivation to offer free and discounted CDs is to get more people to hear their music and to enable them to have a personal connection with those people.

In all honesty, the trio wasn’t the first artist I purchased from after coming across a teaser ad like this. That distinction goes to singer, songwriter and folk rocker Beth Bombara, from whom I bought the sampler CD and two others, and I liked them all.

That’s why I decided to trust what I heard in the sampler for the Søren Bebe Trio. I loved the Echoes snippet that Bebe put on his social media ad. The trio’s jazz elements most often are light, and the New Age elements give the tracks appealing melodies that are easy on the ear.

  

I took a big leap and ordered five of the trio’s discs, and I was not disappointed. So I ordered a sixth, seventh and eighth, and I hit pay dirt in that I liked them all! I'm listening to the trio as I compose this post. That’s Søren you see in the lead-off photo and above, which he provided and granted me permission to use.

The trio has now released eight CDs: Searching (January 2008), From Out Here (January 2010), A Song for You (August 2012), Eva, featuring Marc Johnson (August 2013), Home (November 2016), Echoes (May 2019), Here Now (November 2023) and First Song (May 2024). I’ve listened to them all multiple times now, thinking I ought to find something I could criticize. But I can’t.

It should be noted that Bebe didn’t always use the same accompanying musicians on his early albums. If he did, I’d mention them by name here, too. But his four most recent discs have settled into a combo featuring Kasper Tagel on bass and either Anders Mogensen or Knut Finsrud on drums/brushes. 

Bebe has a wonderful handle on putting melodious piano in front of his bass and drums/brushes background. And sometimes, the bass and drums remain silent, and I’m perfectly fine with that. At times when I’m listening to those solo piano tunes, I feel like I’m back in the 1990s when I “discovered” New Age piano on the Windham Hill and Narada record labels. 

When I use the New Age comparison to Bebe’s work I mean that in a highly complimentary way. And I took the trouble to say that right here because I know New Age often gets a bad rap from music snobs. But for me, New Age piano rarely disappoints. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking George Winston, Wayne Gratz, Michael Jones, David Lanz, Liz Story, Kevin Kern, Eric Tingstad, Joe Yamada and Jim Brinkman. 

Søren Bebe’s melodious compositions on piano are right up there in quality and appeal, but with a delightful addition of tasteful jazz elements.

I was so bowled over by the trio’s catalog of albums that I dropped Søren a note telling him so, and after a few days, he answered my email to thank me and added a personal note. So there you are: I went through the whole process that buyers go through when reaching out to artists through their teaser ads, and I can attest that at least in Søren’s case, the artist is true to his/her word about establishing a personal rapport with the listening public.

At the beginning, my favorite track in the catalog was Free, Free, Set Them Free from the A Song for You album. Its unusual offbeat syncopation piqued my interest, and I came back to it often. But lately, my favorites have been the title track of A Song for You and an entrancing cover of Sospiri, Op. 70, Sir Edward Elgar's World War I adagio for string orchestra. Sospiri is the last track on Echoes.

On Thursday — just yesterday — an excited Bebe sent an email to people on his group list to inform us that he had just learned that he had been nominated for his first Danish Music Awards in the category of Jazz Composer of the Year for the 2023 album Here Now. A winner will be announced Dec. 9.

“Regardless of the outcome,” he said, “I am extremely happy, proud and honored to be nominated. And then together with such insanely talented colleagues, for whom I have the greatest respect.

“But composing the music is one thing. Another and even more important thing is bringing it to life. And I owe everything to my two amazing band members, bassist Kasper Tagel and drummer Knut Finsrud, who do an incredibly amazing job, both on the album and at concerts.”

For some years, Bebe had composed music for ballet performers, but he said recently in a separate email just to me that he has stopped doing that for all practical purposes.

“I haven’t played for classes in eight years and have no intention of going back,” he said. “I occasionally compose and release a new song or two for ballet but don’t intend to do more full length albums as I want to focus on the trio and other solo projects. However I have released a substantial amount of records for ballet classes. More than 20 I would say, including sheet music. That’s all I did for quite some years to make a living before the trio music really took over.”

Bebe recently made available to people on his email list a CD from a recording he made 12 years ago with a five-member combo, and I also purchased it. The album, Gone, released in 2014, features Bebe and Tagel along with Jakob Buchanan on trumpet and flugelhorn, Julian Arguilles on saxophones and Helge Andreas Norbakken on percussion. 

Gone is another very fine work. It includes two tracks  — Maria and Again and Again from the Søren Bebe Trio’s A Song for You album — that I found interesting to hear with Buchanan and Arguilles’ horns in play. But I’ve had Gone only a short while — not nearly enough to grow completely familiar with all the tracks — and so far I prefer Bebe’s sound with the trio. Who knows, the horn-infused sound might grow stronger with me. 

I went through the same process with the next artist I fell for after checking out a social media teaser ad, Nicholas Krolak, an American, a stand-up bassist from Philadelphia. And I initially had the same experience as I had with Soren, although something about Krolak told me not go beyond the first disc. But I loved the music on that disc (except for three tunes that had vocals), and I dropped him a personal note with my compliments. He responded.

Krolak’s compositions on that CD are more traditional jazz, but not overbearing. It’s stuff I can enjoy. So I took a gamble and ordered three other discounted discs by him. Alas, when I listened to those three, I quickly understood why he had been referring to his repertoire in previous emails as “a sonic experience.” The second batch of discs were not nearly as appealing. Kind of hard to describe. They were approaching abstract because of their absence of structure and continuity.

I did the same thing with yet another artist named Andrew Colyer, whose Facebook teaser ad screamed New Age piano all over the place. I liked the tune he used for his teaser ad, and the disc it was on (I ordered just that one) was fine. But when I took a gamble and ordered two others, including a Christmas album, I didn’t care for either one. Like the second batch of Krolak CDs, Colyer’s two other CDs I ordered were “sonic experiences.”

If you’re inferring that “sonic experience(s),” at least in my case, means it’s not a good thing, you are correct. At least for my personal taste.

And so because of the experience with Krolak and Colyer, I’ve backed away from those teaser ads for the time being.

But I’m still thrilled I found Søren Bebe Trio. Play on, Søren!