One album was born out of pain, and one out of pleasure. Both are pure expressions of soul from Wayne Wallace, an artist who has been at the center of the Bay Area music scene for more than a quarter century.

The trombonist didn't set out to release two albums on his new Patois label in the same month. "Dedication," a steaming straight-ahead session, came together when Ray Lucas approached Wallace after the death of his wife Patricia. Ray had been the force behind the Spirit Nectar label, which released a handful of excellent albums by Wallace, pianist Mark Levine and Peck Allmond, sessions that often featured drum master Paul Van Wageningen, who had also recently lost his wife, Carmen Theriault.

"Ray called and said he wanted to do an album celebrating the lives of Patricia and Carmen," said Wallace, 54. "His only specific request for it was that we do Coltrane's 'Mr. Day' and 'Spiritual' and McCoy Tyner's 'Some Day,'" from the 'Song of the New World' album. "The rest was up to me."

Wallace gathered up a cast of top shelf Bay Area improvisers, including pianists Murray Low and Frank Martin, trumpeters Louis Fasman and John Worley, saxophonists Mary Fettig, Ron Stallings and Hafez Modirzedeh, and bassist David Belove. While it's an eminently versatile group of musicians, most spend the majority of their time playing in Latin jazz contexts, and Wallace was pleased to feature them on burning post-bop material. Wallace supplied the arrangements and the bulk of the compositions, which range from the jaunty modal work out "R.S.V.P" to the altered blues "Yours Truly."

"I'm really proud that 'Dedications' showcases some of the musicians here playing in a jazz context who are known for Latin jazz players," Wallace said. "I mean, David Belove is a fine jazz player, and you can really hear that on the album."

Many of the same players are featured on Wallace's second album, released last fall. But where "Dedications" is a loving tribute to late spouses, "The Reckless Search for Beauty" is a conceptual project inspired by the writing of Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca. Since Wallace has spent the last two decades immersing himself in Afro-Cuban music and culture, perhaps it's not surprising that he found the unifying theme for his latest album in a famous essay written in Havana.

Capturing the Essence of Duende

Lorca had stopped in Cuba after a trip to the United States in 1930 when he wrote his impressionistic treatise on duende, an untranslatable Spanish word that's inadequately rendered as feeling, or soul. It was a term that many in the jazz world first encountered in the early 1960s with the release of the classic Miles Davis/Gil Evans collaboration "Sketches of Spain." Lorca describes duende as the essential element in artistic expression, one valued above all others in the Gypsy-influenced culture of Andalusia, where he was born and set many of his plays and poems.

"The duende, then, is a power and not a construct, is a struggle and not a concept," Lorca wrote. " I have heard an old guitarist, a true virtuoso, remark, 'The duende is not in the throat, the duende comes up from inside, up from the very soles of the feet.'"

"When I read that essay it was a perfect description of soul, what we love about Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles," Wallace said. "Lorca says, almost everything African has duende. It comes up from the earth through your feet."

One can hear the power of duende throughout Wallace's music, but nowhere more so than on "Reckless Search," which opens with "El Duende Africano," a piece by Wallace and Julio Mantalvo fusing two vital strains of African diaspora culture, American R&B and Latin jazz.

A Synthesis of Musical Styles and Influences

Wallace made his reputation as a player and arranger in the region's most respected Latin music outfits, such as Pete Escovedo, Conjunto Cespedes, Jesus Diaz y su QBA, and particularly John Santos' Machete Ensemble. But he started his career in the late 1960s as a mainstay in funk horn sections, sharing stages with Parliament and the Brothers Johnson and recording with Earth, Wind and Fire and Con Funk Shun. In creating a program of music that seamlessly blends Cuban clave and funk, he cites the legendary Cuban band Los Van Van as one precedent for "Reckless Search." But Wallace and his comrades are approaching the same synthesis from the other direction.

"I wanted to go back to where I started," Wallace said. "Only in the early 90s did I really start focusing on jazz and the Afro-Caribbean thing. My concept was to bring together the people I've traveled to Cuba with and guys like Melecio Magdaluyo and Frank Martin, who were on that funk scene with me too."

In keeping with Wallace's knack for filling multiple musical roles—he's a prolific arranger, composer, producer, and educator as well as a first-call player — "Reckless Search" and "Dedication" mark the birth of his label and the beginning of a new chapter in his musical life. "I have a lot of music that I haven't gotten out there," Wallace said. "I wanted to really be able to get across these concepts, and the only way I could do it was having my own label."

In many ways, Wallace is simply applying the insights he's gleaned producing albums by other artists to his own projects. Wallace is particularly gifted at collaborating with artists making their first albums, such as singers Alexa Weber-Morales and Kat Parra.

"He was a mentor as well as the arranger," Parra said. "I told him what I wanted to do and he was so amazing in how he guided me. His main theme was, what's going to tie everything together."

Parra's CD "Birds In Flight" comes at Latin jazz from a decidedly South American perspective, with a nod toward her Sephardic heritage. For Parra too, Wallace makes duende the album's unifying theme, which seems apt since Spain's Sephardic Jews were an integral part of Andalusian culture before their expulsion in 1492. Old or new, funk, flamenco or blues, Wallace knows that it's duende that separates merely well played music from the sounds that give you chills.

Emerging as a Leader in his Own Right

For long-time Bay Area music fans, the emergence of Wallace as a force in his own right is no surprise. For years he was the straw that stirred the drink as a primary arranger for the region's most celebrated Latin jazz ensembles. He's also a featured soloist with trumpeter John Worley's Worlview band and the Jon Jang 7, contributing several exquisite solos on the pianist's recent AsianImprov album "Paper Son, Paper Songs."

"Wayne is the best kept secret of the Bay Area music scene," said percussionist Anthony Brown, who regularly employs Wallace's services as trombonist and arranger in the Grammy-nominated Asian American Orchestra. "He's done arrangements for Celine Dion and Santana. He's worked with Stevie Wonder, Count Basie, and Lionel Hampton. And the guy is a phenomenal trombonist."

Wallace is driven by his wide-ranging curiosity. A conversation with him is unlikely to stay focused on music. Whether the topic is literature, movies, politics, gossip, dance or theater, Wallace soaks up information. When he finds himself in a musical situation in which he feels less than totally grounded, he'll seek out more information, which is what led him to make several trips to Cuba in the mid-90s.

"My biggest thing is I don't like to be on the outside of music," Wallace said. "I got tired of the percussionist having a rhythmic language I didn't understand. Studying in Cuba really helped me get a greater affinity for the cultural part of the music and to understand the dynamics of it."

He first applied his new rhythmic insights on his thrilling 2000 Spirit Nectar CD "Three In One," an album showcasing his skills as a composer and arranger. Combining his encyclopedic knowledge of Afro-Caribbean rhythms and his love of funk and jazz, the session features one irrepressible groove after another.

A San Francisco native, Wallace heard a good deal of jazz while growing up, but came of age listening to James Brown and Sly Stone. After majoring in performance at San Francisco State, where he now teaches, Wallace studied with the great trombonist Julian Priester, who was living in San Francisco along with the rest of Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band in the early 70s.

"He really showed a different side to the J.J. Johnson style of trombone," Wallace said. "I was really impressed with the fact that he's one of the few people who ever played with Duke Ellington and Sun Ra. That's staggering. Bobby Hutcherson was also a wonderful teacher. I've always had good role models."

Now, Wallace is a role model himself, a complete musician who has synthesized sounds from across the Americas into a sumptuous, irresistible musical gumbo.

Andrew Gilbert, a writer based in the Berkeley area, covers jazz for several outlets, including the San Jose Mercury News, San Diego Union-Tribune, Boston Globe, JazzTimes, and KQED's California Report.