The Soto Six: A Jazz Staple in North County

Band leader Dylan Soto.

A ridiculously early gig at a rummage sale in a downtown Oceanside parking lot led to the formation of a jazz combo that has become a pillar of the coastal North County music scene: the Soto Six.

About a half-dozen years ago, the organizer of a rummage sale had asked then 18-year-old Dylan Soto to get a band together to play the 7am event. Soto called drummer Joannah Sy, whom he had just met at a jam session. She agreed to play, as did veteran pianist Tim Luey, whom Soto knew from playing in a Palomar College band while he was still in high school.

“It was the strangest thing ever,” said the Oceanside resident of the parking lot appearance. “But everybody had so much fun, I just realized in that moment, ‘There’s something here.’

“Basically from that day on, virtually all of the gigs that Joannah or I have ever played have been together… that’s the heart of the group. That’s what built the group—the two of us doing that together. It’s as much hers as it is mine.”

Says Sy of her first meeting with Soto: “We had this one-off jam session at Indian Joe’s Brewing in Vista. It never happened again but that’s where I met Dylan and then it was history from then on. We hit it off.

“We exchanged numbers, and he called me for some random gig by a brick wall and it was super early in the morning; then he just started calling me for more gigs.”

A Musical Fixture
A half-dozen years later, the Soto Six has become a fixture at several Oceanside and Carlsbad venues, while sometimes venturing to spaces in other communities.

While the name of the group is its brand, the actual configuration could range from a trio (The Soto Six Minus Three) to a sextet or larger depending on the circumstances.

The dates include regularly bimonthly gigs (first and third Sundays) at the Aztec Brewing Company in Vista; trio appearances at Baba Coffeehouse in Carlsbad on Friday evenings; and a quartet lineup for Sunday brunches in the Succulent Cafe at the Brick Hotel in downtown Oceanside. (The band’s schedule can be found at thesotosix.com.)

The cafe and hotel are located within a historic brick building that was resuscitated as a boutique lodging, also including a bar and restaurant.

“Since I grew up here in Oceanside, I’ve seen it change a lot even in the last couple of years, and admittedly some of those changes have benefited us directly, giving us places to play,” Soto said.

“What I like about that space is it was (rebuilt) while preserving the history. That’s one of the oldest buildings in Oceanside, so It feels really cool to me as somebody who loves Oceanside so much to play music there.”

Occasional shows occur at venues such as Hangar 76 and the Jazzy Wishbone in Oceanside, as well as local libraries.

“We’re super stoked about that,” said Sy, also an Oceanside resident.

Soto is a multi-instrumentalist whose main axes are tenor sax and piano, the latter of which he plays with the trio.

On the sax, Soto is an adventurous, explosive improviser in bebop, hard bop, and post-John Coltrane territory. Sy is a dynamic drummer who lights fires among the musicians she backs and delights fans with her swinging accompaniment and ebullient solos.

Turning Point

Drummer, Joannah Sy.

The Soto Six in its various incarnations may not have happened at all if Dylan, freshly graduated from Vista High, had not been let down in his quest to attend Columbia University in New York City. He was so crushed by this rejection he contemplated quitting music.

”When I got back from New York, I was intensely depressed,” Soto said. “I felt like a failure… I didn’t want to play music at all. I was considering giving it up and just pursuing a degree in something like English or political science. I just was considering throwing it all away.”

A friend invited him to the jam session mentioned by Sy as their first contact at the now-defunct Indian Joe’s. Soto said he brought his tenor but was so distraught he balked at the idea of playing and drove away several times before returning.

A trumpet player saw Soto carrying his sax case and suggested they take to the stage to play Paul Desmond’s “Take Five” together and Soto went for it, sitting for other tunes as well.

“The first person I saw playing there was Joannah, but I didn’t know her at the time,” Soto said. “I played so lousy. I was really terrible, but I kept at it. …

“At the end of it, Joannah told me ‘You sounded really great. My name is Joannah. Let’s exchange numbers.’ I said okay. I got into my car and I was thinking, ‘What just happened? Nobody should be asking me for my number with how bad I played.”

Yet, immediately afterward, Soto discovered he had received a call asking him if he could pull together a band for the rummage sale date and he enlisted Sy as his drummer.

They’ve been together ever since, both on and off the bandstand. Regardless of the group’s configuration, Sy and Soto appear together, that is unless Sy gets a call from another horn player desperate for a percussionist, such as happened recently when trumpeter Gilbert Castellanos called upon her services in San Diego.

Brown Cup
The couple concur that the full-on sextet jelled when late in the last decade they got a regular monthly concert series at the Brown Cup, a downtown Oceanside coffee shop, run by an amiable couple sympathetic to young musicians looking for a place to play.

Soto landed a regular monthly session there with Sy’s backing and a band featuring such veteran stalwarts as Luey on piano, Bruce Gafrath on bass and, Paul Seaforth on trumpet, as well as other Soto cohorts filling out the ensemble depending on who was available and on what instrument.

Other musicians who appear with the Soto Six include bassists Max McKellar, Sean Park, and Frantz Bien-Aime; pianists Bob Weller, Pete Weis and Tanner Bowls; guitarists Rudy Marquez, Tate McKay and the aforementioned Park; trumpeter Scott Hecker; trombonists Gaby Aldaz and Ryan Kupsh; and alto saxophonists Josias Miguel and Rafael Perez.

That veterans such as Luey, Gafrath, and Weller were willing collaborators is testimony to the young bandleader’s prowess.

Like Castellanos had done when he first arrived in San Diego and began hosting jam sessions in the Gaslamp, Soto organized Brown Cup dates around compositions and well-known numbers by legends such as Miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, Horace Silver, the Crusaders, and John Coltrane.

Chasin’ the Trane
The latter in particular was a seminal force in Soto’s arc in mastering reeds, especially tenor.

“My teacher introduced me to John Coltrane,” he said. “I went home and searched him on YouTube and I found ‘My Favorite Things.’ I consider that the turning point in my life really—that moment of listening to ‘My Favorite Things.’

“It’s just like a portal opened…. It completely opened my mind in an amazing way. There’s something about that recording that’s magic.”

While he cites that as pivotal, he as well as Sy had already been on a path toward a life in music, largely through the influence of their families.

The Soto Six in Oceanside.

Dylan grew up hearing his father, Herman, a bassist, guitarist ,and recording engineer, plus extended family members playing rock, especially Carlos Santana and traditional Mexican forms in the Norteño and mariachi traditions.

The boy was especially influenced by his Uncle Gabriel, who would play recordings of cherished standards by Frank Sinatra, Louis Prima, and other greats from the Big Band Era.

His parents resisted the impulse to nudge their son toward playing an instrument. Dylan said that when he told his dad he wanted to play guitar, Herman insisted his son should learn piano first.

So he began taking lessons when he was eight years old, learning to read music and play European classical pieces. That background undoubtedly contributed to his all-around musicianship and his present-day prowess on the keyboard.

Around the age of 12, when he wanted to join the band at Roosevelt Middle School in Vista (the Vista School District overlaps parts of eastern Oceanside), Dylan decided to go for alto sax after hearing the Average White Band’s “Pick Up the Pieces,” with its funky sax solo, on the radio.

Not surprisingly given his adulation of Trane, Soto learned soprano sax, then grew into tenor as his main voice. While still attending Vista High, Soto began playing with Palomar Community College’s jazz band, where he was exposed to veteran players such as Luey and Seaforth.

Despite his relative youth, Soto has developed a mature timbre and vocabulary on the tenor through which a listener can discern a number of threads not just of Trane, but of other greats like Coleman Hawkins, Dexter Gordon, Joe Henderson, and Hank Mobley. He is capable of mesmerizing solos both on fast-paced numbers and tender ballads.

Joannah’s Journey
Sy was born in the Philippines to musician parents who at one time made a living playing on cruise ships. Her father, Jervin, is a keyboard player and vocalist, while her mother, Teah, is lead singer on most of the tunes. Her brother Josh also plays bass and guitar.

They immigrated to the United States when Joannah was nine and became music ministers and worship leaders at Old Town Community Church in San Diego, commuting from Oceanside.

Nowadays, they continue to perform mostly as a duo as the Musicstation. They entertain at various senior homes and assisted living communities in North County and play private events as well.

As a girl, Sy said, she gravitated toward the drums and it was only natural that she would soon be backing up her parents at church, while participating in bands at Vista High and MiraCosta Community College.

“When I was in the Philippines my grandma kind of forced me to take piano lessons,” she said. “I actually started on piano and guitar first before I started to take drums seriously.

“When I was in high school and middle school, guitar was actually my main instrument—guitar and piano. And I still played drums in church out of necessity because my parents asked me to.”

In high school she started playing drums for a student group that was playing 1960s and ’70s rock, including material from artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Yes, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Led Zeppelin.

She went to Mira Costa with the intention of studying to be a nurse, but music increasingly took hold of her.

There, she got into jazz drumming and began studying with Duncan Moore, a mainstay of the San Diego music scene since arriving from Iowa in the 1970s.

“He told me at my first lesson, ‘You have good feeling. If you’re serious, you could really go somewhere with this,’” Sy said. “That planted a seed in me.

“The more I listened to jazz and saw live jazz, the more I was sold. I never would have thought that I would ever be a jazz drummer. Jazz is likely a fairly new thing for me, probably in the last 10 years, but once I was in, I was just in completely.”

She spent time listening at a club called Northern Spirits in San Marcos that had a steady weekend jazz policy in the 2010s. There she was able to hear her teacher Moore playing with other jazz pros.

After meeting Soto at the Indian Joe jam and accepting his invite to the rummage sale gig, she eagerly became Soto’s collaborator, leading into the Brown Cup series.

“That was all Dylan,” Sy said. “He’s just a library of music. He loves playing the deep cuts, like the songs you don’t hear other people play…. he makes up all the set lists… he’s just a wealth of knowledge when it comes to music.”

Continuing Education
Unfortunately, like many live musical opportunities at the time, the Brown Cup run was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, noise complaints from a neighboring massage parlor quashed further gigs.

Meanwhile, Joannah and Dylan advanced their musical education by attending classes together at San Diego State University, where they are on the verge of completing master’s degrees this coming spring.

One of the highlights occurred a couple of years ago when they appeared in the university’s jazz orchestra backing renowned guitarist Mike Stern and were also showcased as soloists in the on-campus show.

During the pandemic era, she and Soto followed in their parents’ footsteps of performing at senior homes and assisted living communities. That, Sy said, gave Soto a chance to further refine his jazz chops on keyboards.

That is on full display at the Baba gigs in which the trio swings through standards such as “There is No Greater Love,” “Lil Darlin,” “St. Thomas,” “Take Five,” “Mas Que Nada,” “Freddie the Freeloader,” and “Au Privave.”

Dylan’s fingertips deliver touches of Errol Garner, Ahmad Jamal, Ramsey Lewis, and Chick Corea, punched along by Joannah’s sticks on the skins and cymbals and accompanied by the double bass of Gafrath or six-string electric bass of McKellar.

“As I began learning more jazz on saxophone in my own time, I began to try applying what I was learning on sax to the piano,” Soto said. “This was mainly for my own pleasure for years. It wasn’t until early 2019 that I began to play out on jazz piano for gigs in public.

“It began because Joannah heard me play jazz piano in private and encouraged me to play out in public.”

As the pandemic waned, the trio got offered to play a couple of times at Baba, which then turned into a regularly scheduled weekly appearance.

“I consider myself a saxophonist who plays a little piano and I don’t know whether that will ever change or not,” Soto said.

As for the future, Soto and Sy plan to continue to perform building on the success of The Soto Six while parlaying their education into teaching careers.

“We’re just taking it one step at a time,” Sy said. “Our big aspiration is that we want to encourage the next generation and keep the music alive. My goal, actually, Is to be playing jazz when I’m 90 years old.”

The Soto Six play every Friday at Baba Coffee, 2727 State St., Carlsbad, 5:30-8:30pm.