Incendio is well enough established in world-guitar-fusion that other musicians cite the band as an influence. Throughout the late 1990s, Liza Carbé, J.P. Durand and particularly Jim Stubblefield were in the vanguard of Southern California’s burgeoning nuevo flamenco movement. They started working together as Incendio in 1999; the band’s name means “fire” in Italian, a nod to Carbé’s Sicilian-American upbringing. But now that nuevo flamenco’s presence has been minimized in the smooth jazz field and genre stars like Ottmar Leibert and Jesse Cook are competing with Chris Botti and Anita Baker for airtime on ever-shrinking radio playlists, Incendio’s members are grateful they chose to expand into other arenas. Their meatier sound is a primary reason why they’re still on the scene, supported by a multigenerational following of fans whose tastes range from jambands and jazz to fado and folk.

Incendio’s richly textured music is rooted in myriad sources: Carbé’s flamenco and classical training, Durand’s Peruvian heritage, Stubblefield’s European travels and musical collaborations with Kuwaiti oud maestro Waleed Hamad, not to mention Durand’s penchant for rock-style dramatics and Stubblefield’s lightning-fingered jazz-fusion mastery. Carbé’s deceptively graceful bass playing grounds Durand and Stubblefield’s dazzling twin-guitar attack, resulting in adrenalizing sonic explorations that take on greater dimension when they call in pals like longtime drummer Joe Shotwell (now residing in Napa), powerhouse tour drummer Tom Brechtlein (Chick Corea, Robben Ford, and Eric Johnson) and percussionist Scott Breadman (from the Rippingtons).

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