Garage bands are one thing. Joe Caragol’s jazz guitar act is quite another: practice takes place in the 8,000-square-foot oceanfront mansion he built south of the Indian River County line.
For the past decade, Caragol has been playing guitar in Vero Beach restaurants and nightspots. Of late, he regularly plays for families grabbing Italian at Dario’s on the beach, dates flirting over sushi in the booths of Sumo House’s clubby new music room on the causeway and hipsters sipping late-night craft beers at The Grove downtown.
He has played in gypsy jazz bands, jazz bands, and rock bands, in quartets, trios and duets. But his obsession these days, what he plays for hours at his house, is solo guitar. For him, it is the most challenging music to make and by far the most difficult to perform.
“I play hours a day,” he says, admitting his obsession with a grand gesture. “I play all night.”
Playing solo means he must simultaneously sustain both melody and accompaniment, picking out the notes of the tune while running a bass line in the background, all of it improvised off a few lines taken from a well-known song. For a three-hour stretch, a typical gig, he relies on no one. At the same time, there is no one else to blame if he finds himself down a musical dark alley with nowhere to go.
“To me, it’s a challenge to play solo guitar. You have to be totally relaxed to do it. You can’t think about the music. If it’s forced, people can hear it. You can hear it, too.”
Music has caused a few detours in Caragol’s life. Now 61, he grew up in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, the son and grandson of importers. His family worked with an eclectic mix of goods – from foodstuffs from Spain (his grandmother’s home) to Zodiak inflatable boats from Germany. Today he works chiefly with Mediterranean products including olives, olive oil and anchovies, though much of his dealings are in Central and South America.
Out and about in Vero, Caragol carries on his day job, doing business on his cell phone, arranging frequent international travel for his food import business; his next trip is the Paris food show. On the side, he also does some real estate investing.
Most recently, he became the latest owner of a tract of oceanfront not far from his home that he hopes to turn into a destination restaurant. It is the former site of P.V. Martin’s and before that, the Red Tail Hawk restaurants; today, it is vacant land with wide stretches of beach on either side, well before the stretch of condos on North Hutchinson Island.
Caragol fell in love with the barrier island on his first visit to Vero in the late 1990s, invited by a musician friend living on the ocean; Caragol would later buy the lot next door.
Caragol designed his home – including the huge beamed guitar outlined on the ceiling — with the help of an architect; it took a little longer than he expected, finally wrapping up in 2008.
“I changed everything while we were building it.”
He had dabbled in architecture and drawing at a technical high school in Brooklyn. But his real passion in those days was music, ever since hearing a cousin in Barcelona play Brazilian jazz on the guitar in the mid-1960s.
“I started learning simple bossa nova,” he says. Soon, he put together a band.
Meanwhile, he worked with his dad in his office on Stone Street in lower Manhattan, commuting over the bridge on his brakeless track bike with two buddies from Park Slope. “No helmets, what, are you out of your mind? No helmets. This was the early ‘70s.”
It wasn’t long, though, before he left the family company, and he and his band moved to California, trying to make it in music. It was a time when LSD was as common as craft beer today. “I was a hippie,” he says, still grateful for the experience.
California was a good fit for him musically, and he started out in the rock of the day. “I liked the San Francisco groups – Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead. I could play every Jerry Garcia song note for note.”
Then Caragol was hired to play jazz guitar with the B.J. Papa Express, a well-known Bay Area group led by the late jazz pianist B.J. Papa, famous for taking rising talent under his wing. The group included Johnny Hodges Jr. on drums, son of the star alto sax player for Duke Ellington’s band.
Caragol made the most of the music scene around Berkeley, listening and learning and honing his own technique. It was in San Francisco that he first heard the music of Django Reinhardt, the French guitarist and composer whose “gypsy” jazz of the 1940s and ‘50s has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity in the past decade.
“I heard it from this small little French beatnik,” he recalls. “His guitar playing blew me away. And I listened to every other guitar player and went to see most of the jazz players that then moved to New York and are now famous.”
Caragol, too, moved back to New York, not to become famous playing music, but to get serious about his career.
He rejoined his father’s firm, and began investing in real estate. He is currently looking for investors “with deep pockets” to join him in the North Hutchinson Island restaurant project, since his current business partner is having second thoughts – “he’s owned restaurants before.”
Meanwhile, one of Caragol’s music fans, Ross Power, has signed on as an idea guy, hoping to pique the interest of some wealthy island investors to believe in the proposed South Orchid Beach Club. Power was a founding investor in Miami’s Design District and Wynwood Arts District. He now lives on Vero’s barrier island.
As Caragol waits for approval from the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, the two are dreaming up ideas, including offering a range of watersports including jetskis and diving rentals. They are even imagining barges on pontoons that would serve as floating dining rooms on calm days and stages for performances at night.
If Caragol ever plays there himself, he’ll likely keep his tip jar out, just as he does now. “Last night, two little girls came up and gave me $5,” he says. He smiles and shrugs; mansion or not, the kick is part of him by now. “Some days I get $40 in tips.”
