Charlotte couple makes community connections through Spanish, faith and smooth jazz

When Tommy and Nancy Lopez speak about their nearly five decades of married life and music-making, it sounds a lot like a duet. One takes the melody line and the other adds some syncopation. Then they switch it around.

But one thing is certain, this south Charlotte couple is always in harmony.

Music flows throughout their story. It brought them together and continues to connect them to the community.

The couple with Puerto Rican roots perform together as Flutepraise, a group specializing in smooth jazz, Latin music, and the Great American Songbook. Tommy Lopez, 69, plays flute and Nancy Lopez, 67, sings.

They perform frequently at community events around the region, including at the recent Charlotte International Arts Festival from Blumenthal Performing Arts.

High school sweethearts

Both saw music as a ticket to a better future.

Long before coming to Charlotte, they were high school sweethearts at New York’s High School of Music & Art. (It’s the same school later immortalized by the film and TV series “Fame.”)

Nancy Lopez, who enjoyed singing, grew up in the Bronx, surrounded by a rich cultural diversity she loved. But she worried about attending her neighborhood school. “I didn’t want to go to the local drug-infested high school,” she said. “It was a rough, rough time. The gangs were beginning to come in and I wanted out.”

Tommy Lopez grew up in Harlem, where he said he was subjected to an abusive home life. “Music for me was what God used to save me from the insanity of the streets,” he said.

He started teaching himself the flute in fifth grade, along with several other students in his Intellectually Gifted Class. The teacher allowed them to use a big classroom closet to practice. “There was one flute and five of us that wanted to learn and so we shared that flute,” he said.

Without formal musical instruction, Tommy Lopez learned everything by ear. That included the theme song to the NBC TV spy series “The Man From U.N.C.LE,” as well as R&B and Motown hits on the radio. “That’s what I grew up with… and I still love playing it today.”

In junior high, he joined a dance band, and by then he finally had his own flute. His teacher encouraged him to take the entrance exam for Music & Art.

There was just one problem: to pass, he needed to study the score of a Mozart flute concerto and then perform it. “I had listened to it on record,” Tommy Lopez said. “... and so I learned it by ear.”

He played the piece, passed the exam’s rhythm portion and got into Music & Art. “Once I got in there, that’s when I told them I didn’t know how to read music.”

But sight reading came easier when it came to finding a partner.

Tommy Lopez remembers the first time he met Nancy. “I saw her in the lunchroom and fell madly in love,” he said.

Nancy Lopez’s version is more operatic. “In reality, I wasn’t interested in him,” she said. “… He had a reputation of being a Casanova.”

But her tune soon changed. A girlfriend invited her to join a group after school, and she thought they were going clubbing. It turned out to be a Christian group.

At the get-together, Nancy Lopez met young people from all over the city who were self-motivated, diverse and devout. “And I came to the Lord there, “ she said, “because I was seeking answers.”

She also saw a familiar face in the crowd.

“Lo and behold,” she said, “there was Tommy.” He told her about his own religious awakening six months earlier.

That’s when their story together really began. Nancy appreciated the way he treated her, and fell in love with Tommy’s flute playing.

‘Let the light shine’ wherever you can

At school, music and art permeated everything. Impromptu concerts happened frequently and student groups, including their Christian fellowship, often brought their instruments for jam sessions in Central Park.

“People were very affected by that,” Nancy Lopez said. “...They would stop and listen all the time.”

The Lopezes were married in 1975, the same year Nancy graduated from high school. Tommy studied music education at City College of New York and worked several years as a teacher’s assistant in New York Public Schools, before shifting his career focus to human services.

Meanwhile, Nancy Lopez started as a data entry operator for a Christian nonprofit, and worked her way up to become an IT manager.

Outside of work, they continued to play music together in churches all over New York City. Churches shared talent so the Lopezes would travel around to “minister in music.”

But when they and their then-6-year-old son relocated to Charlotte in 1988, for Nancy’s work, they discovered churches here didn’t function in the same way. Most had their own bands and didn’t seem to make room for other performers.

“So part of that was the reason why we wound up getting out in public, because when you’ve been given something so valuable, you cannot put it on to a bookshelf,” Nancy Lopez said. “You let the light shine wherever you can, as simple as that.”

In perfect harmony

Tommy Lopez met two other musicians at his first job at the Charlotte Housing Authority (now Inlivian) and loved playing with them.

But as schedules got busier, he started sequencing his own background music — recording separate tracks and mixing them so he could play with accompaniment — something he first learned to do with an old keyboard a church friend in Charlotte gave him.

That allowed him to play and perform, even when other musicians weren’t available. Word of mouth grew as he performed at restaurants, weddings and other events.

Nancy meanwhile joined the North Mecklenburg Community Chorus and the Community Singers of Lake Norman.

About 10 years ago, the couple started performing together again at public events. “When she sings, I play her harmony and it’s a oneness in music that comes out together,” Tommy Lopez said.

The power of songs in Spanish

They also have seen their music touch others.

Both of the Lopezes grew up speaking Spanish at home, and they often incorporate that language into their performances.

Part of their repertoire includes folk tunes that Nancy Lopez was reintroduced to when her father relocated from Puerto Rico to North Carolina about six years ago. He had advanced Alzheimer’s Disease late in life, before he died in 2021.

Nancy Lopez is working on a book about her experiences supporting her father, called “My Father is My Little Boy: A Daughter Steps into Her Father’s Alzheimer’s World.” It should be available on Amazon before year’s end.

“The time that I spent with him was so precious,” Nancy Lopez said. “He went back singing, further back, further back in his life and… he sang these old beautiful songs.”

Nancy Lopez recalled some of them from her childhood, filled with beautiful music and poetry. They were able to find complete versions online, and Tommy created sequences so they could perform them for audiences. Those songs included “Son de la Loma“ and “Quizás.”

That led to many memorable moments, like the time a young Hispanic woman in the audience started crying in the middle of a show. Afterward she told Nancy Lopez it was her grandmother’s favorite song.

Another time, a teenage boy working in a restaurant was listening, and he thanked them for singing “our songs.”

These classic songs sung in Spanish seem to affect many people, Nancy Lopez said, across cultures.

“I have found that a lot of these songs that I grew up with weren’t even Puerto Rican in origin. Many of them are from Mexico, many from Cuba,” she said. “But I capture that information and I share it with the audience because I want to make connections.”

The couple also has started performing for seniors in assisted living facilities, at Inlivian, and Mecklenburg County senior centers.

“It’s so good because of my experience with my dad,” Nancy Lopez said. “It really meets a great need for me.”

To his surprise, Tommy Lopez has grown to love it too. He’s been moved, observing senior audiences, especially in memory care facilities.

“I have seen some of the seniors who are scrunched in and… very in their own little world,” he said. “The moment I start to play, they blossom, you know. They tap their foot, they’ll sing along and then when I stop playing they go back into their little shells.

“(Music is) one of the mechanisms that reaches them. And so they love…what we have to give, and we love to give it.”

And for as long as they can, the Lopezes plan to continue making beautiful music together.

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