How a Cello and a Brass Band Bridge Get Captured on Runaway by León Chiprout
A Wayne Shorter Record Becomes a 1960s Chase, with Caifanes Bassist Sabo Romo on Board
A cello starts Runaway by León Chiprout alone, playing a simple melody. Then a rhythmic string section joins it, and the piece begins to move. The nu-jazz single came out on 9 October 2026, with Sabo Romo, the founding bassist of Caifanes, on bass.
León Chiprout’s Runaway is in the playlist below. All of our coverage of León Chiprout lives on the León Chiprout artist profile. It came here through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news desks. Give it a full listen, then read on for how it was put together.
León Chiprout Built Runaway on a Lone Cello Melody, Written Straight After Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil
The piece began with a record. León Chiprout wrote Runaway right after listening to Wayne Shorter’s Speak No Evil. Then, once the strings arrive, the mood turns from stillness to pursuit. Chiprout pictures a 1960s chase on a mountain road, with sharp curves, the sea in the distance and the sun going down. It is also the kind of scene a Jean-Luc Godard film might hold. The strings carry that picture, mysterious in colour but always pushing forward.
Chiprout, a guitarist, composer and cinematographer from Mexico City, Mexico, plays the guitars, piano and Rhodes himself. Jonathan Lewis plays violin and viola, and Ricardo Erdos plays drums. Alan Fajardo also adds trumpet, while François Michaud mixed the recording.
A Brass Band Bridge Breaks the Chase in León Chiprout’s Runaway, and Sabo Romo’s Bass Holds It Together
The piece was hard to finish. But what finally closed it was a bridge that appeared midway. Its brass band feel recalls Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It is irreverent and surprising, and for a stretch the pursuit simply stops.
The bass came last. Chiprout had already recorded a bass part himself, but something was missing. So he called Romo, his musical partner of three decades. Romo started out in jazz: at eighteen he took up the bass and formed Manhattan, a light jazz band. That was long before he co-founded Caifanes.
The partnership goes back at least to 1993. That year Romo directed and played bass on Más Fuerte de lo que Pensaba, an EMI album by Aleks Syntek y la Gente Normal, with Chiprout on guitar. Chiprout then spent more than two decades away from music, working in photography and cinema. Superficially Profound, the album Runaway comes from, marks his return. It is coming out single by single, and Runaway is its second single. Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera, Luis Conte and Tim Armacost are also among its guests.
Three Records That Sit Behind the Shape of a Mexican Nu-Jazz Chase
Wayne Shorter recorded Speak No Evil in 1964, his first year in Miles Davis’s quintet. Blue Note then released it in June 1966. Shorter’s band on it was Freddie Hubbard, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Elvin Jones, with Carter on bass. The writing mixes hard bop and modal jazz. Runaway borrows the spark rather than the line-up: a cello and strings instead of a quintet, with a bass player still close to the centre.
The Beatles built Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band around Paul McCartney’s idea of an Edwardian military band. That fictional group freed them to experiment, and the album came out in the UK on 26 May 1967. On the Beatles’ title song, a French horn quartet fills the five-bar bridge. In 1968 the album also won four Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year. Runaway uses its own brass band bridge for the same kind of break from the main idea.
The Cinematic Orchestra are the British nu-jazz group Jason Swinscoe formed in 1999. In 2001 the Porto European City of Culture festival asked them for a new score to Dziga Vertov’s 1929 silent film Man with a Movie Camera. They played it live under the film, then released it as an album in 2003. Chiprout comes at the same meeting of film and jazz from the camera’s side, as a working cinematographer.
Where to Hear the Single and Follow the Rest of Superficially Profound
Which brings it back to that lone cello. It sets the chase going, the strings keep it running, and the brass bridge interrupts it. Meanwhile, Romo’s bass sits under all of it. On Runaway, León Chiprout lets a whole film play out with no picture at all.
AcousticMusic.News’s curator team: “A cinematographer hears music in scenes, and Runaway proves it. We put it in our contemporary jazz playlist because the cello, the strings and that brass interruption tell a whole story without a single word. It is the rare jazz single we would happily play to someone who thinks they do not like jazz.”
Stream Runaway on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, Tidal or Amazon Music. The smartlink has every other platform. Follow León Chiprout on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook for the next single from the album. His official site has the full list of musicians.
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