In January 2024, Stefan Gonzalez, alongside eight other musicians, stepped inside the Texas Theatre and paid tribute to their father, the late avant-garde jazz legend Dennis Gonzalez.
It was a farewell, but also a way forward. Gonzalez died at the age of 68, in 2022. But music, which animated so much of his life and accomplishments, would endure.
Now, a wider audience can relive the evening, and the Dennis Gonzalez Legacy Band performance, via the Nov. 29 release of Live at the Texas Theatre. Austin-based label Astral Spirits will oversee the digital and physical release of the four, Dennis Gonzalez-penned tracks.
“It was really important to get a live version, because this music works very well live,” said Stefan Gonzalez, who uses they/them pronouns, in a recent conversation. “We’re going to have this first volume — I can’t say how much time it’ll take for the other one to come out, but there’s supposed to be a second volume, coming out later. This is just the beginning.”
To mark the release of Live at the Texas Theatre, the Dennis Gonzalez Legacy Band, featuring nearly all of the musicians who’ll appear on record, will perform on Nov. 29 at Bath House Cultural Center, as part of a miniature Texas tour. (The Legacy Band is also playing Austin’s Museum of Human Achievement on Nov. 30, and Houston’s Lawndale Art Center on Dec. 2.)
“The repertoire will change eventually, but we got stuck on this repertoire that’s kind of a mixture of my dad’s mid-to-late ‘80s material mixed with Yells at Eels material and stuff that we played,” Gonzalez said. “If people want to, they can take a record home with them and listen to it over time. It has that live energy — you hear the crowd, you hear the band hooting and hollering and yelling … all this excitement, I think it’ll just reinforce that legacy that he left behind. It has a real sense of community and celebration, for sure.”
Beyond Live at the Texas Theatre, Gonazlez said the Legacy Band will continue to exist, albeit perhaps in scaled down form: “We decided to start off with a bigger, more celebratory band,” Gonzalez said, “maybe against better judgment, considering the money it takes to make these kinds of things happen.”
There’s also the matter of attending to the expansive archive Dennis Gonzalez left behind, when Stefan and their family have only just begun to sift through. In time, more material may come to light, and be shared with the public, but for now, these Legacy Band performances serve as the closing of a chapter — of sorts — even as every possibility for the future remains open.
“There are just a lot of things waiting to be unearthed, but I feel a lot more hopeful about that,” Gonzalez said. “We’ve all come to peace with [his death]. We have difficult times, but we’re moving on with our lives. … We’re doing this Dallas show, we’re doing an Austin show and a Houston show all coming up.
“I think once we do that, I’ll feel … more at peace with it, and then maybe we can start working on these life projects of documenting or archiving a lot of the things that have been left in the vaults gathering dust that we absolutely need to do something about.”
The Dennis Gonzalez Legacy Band at Bath House Cultural Center, Dallas. 7 p.m. Nov. 29. Tickets are $20.
Preston Jones is a North Texas freelance writer and regular contributor to KXT. Email him at [email protected] or find him on X (@prestonjones). Our work is made possible by our generous, music-loving members. If you like how we lift up local music, consider becoming a KXT sustaining member right here.
