Chicago's award-winning sextet Sones de México Ensemble's showcase at APAP|NYC 2012 came at a seemingly momentous time, what with all the ominous talk relating to the supposed apocalyptic "doomsday" prophecy surrounding the Mayan "Long Count" calendar, which some believe portends the end of the world on Dec. 12.
"I hope it's not true, because we intend to be touring through 2014 with this program!" says the Mexican folk music group's Juan Díes, also its producer and co-founder with fellow member/music director Victor Pichardo. He's referring to 13 B'ak'tun, the name of the group's new program, subtitled "End Of An Era--New Beginning."
B'ak'tun, Díes explains, is a measure of time in the ancient Maya Long Count Calendar equivalent to 144,000 days, or 394 years. While the current 13th b'ak'tun will indeed be completed at the end of 2012, the Maya see it as the end of an era and the beginning of a new b'ak'tun--along with a chance for reflection and renewal.
"Our agent was looking for a new excuse to present us again!" jokes Díes, whose group is booked by The Roots Agency. "But tradition doesn’t change. We're always developing new material--and don't want to repeat ourselves--but we have to brand a program with something that's widely recognizable. So we came up with 13 B'ak'tun: With the movie 2012 and popular culture bringing attention on the Mayans' end-of-the-world predictions, we wanted to set the record straight, that the calendar does end, but it's the same as Y2K, with everything going on but being considered as a new beginning. Just like the Christian calendar, we see an opportunity to lead into the next thousand years with the fourteenth b'ak'tun."
The 13 B'ak'tun symbol of three dots above two horizontal lines represents the Mayan numeral 13, says Díes.
"The Mayans were very good mathematicians," he adds, "the first culture to have a symbol representing zero--where others saw no point in it."
Musically, he notes, 13 B'ak'tun offers "a retrospective of the achievement of Mexican folk music in the last 400 years"--having rounded off the last 394-year b'ak'tun to the nearest hundred.
"In that time the Europeans conquered the New World and brought in European cultures, and the Africans arrived and brought in their culture," says Díes, "so there were a lot of encounters and transformations. In the 19th Century a lot of German brass music arrived and affected music from New Orleans brass bands to Mexican banda, and accordions that were imported into the Southwest gave way to polka. During the Mexican revolution, all the generals had marching bands celebrating victories and intimidating their opponents with horns and snare drums."
The 20th Century brought the movie industry, and new opportunities for exposing Mexican music.
"The U.S. entered World War II and Hollywood was shut down, so all the filmmakers went to Mexico," Díes relates. "Mexico was making great films and putting mariachi bands and Mexican culture into them, and people around the world watched them and heard it. Tequila was popularized as another spirit, and the world started shrinking and taking on more Mexican character. There was Clint Eastwood, burro-riding bandidos, Speedy Gonzales and siestas in our new generation, and it was funny--but some people believed in the stereotypes, and there is so much more in Mexico."
Díes grew up in the traditon of Mexican folk music before coming to the U.S. as an adult and forming Sones de México Ensemble (also including Lorena Iñiguez, Juan Rivera, Zacbé Pichardo, and Javier Saume) in Chicago in 1994.
"As an immigrant I play all kinds of music," he says. "I came to the U.S. and looked for new opportunities, and played in big band jazz and reggae bands and realized that there were all these misconceptions about Mexico. Somebody had to set the record straight, and who better than I? The proof of the pudding is that we've taken this music to Carnegie Hall and A Prairie Home Companion, and have been nominated in both Latin and general Grammy categories for playing what we do and competing against much better known pop artists."
But the recession forced the band to "reinvent" themselves," says Díes.
"We've been developing 13 B'ak'tun over the past year," he says, "and gearing for our 20th anniversary."
Sones de México Ensemble is also working on its next album, perhaps to incorporate the 13 B'ak'tun theme, says Díes, but surely to follow its trademark mix of traditional Mexican folk music from different regions and including huapango, son jarocho, gustos and chilenas.
"We feature a lot of instrument changes from song to song--which is part of the appeal of our live shows," says Díes. "The fiddle [player] goes to guitar and harp goes to marimba and the drummer picks up different instruments. We have hand-carved Aztec drums and regular drums, a Mexican folk harp, all kinds of guitars. We used 89 instruments on our Grammy-nominated Esta Tierra Es Tuya (This Land Is Your Land) [2007] album."
"But we don’t pretend that we've pulled out of a tiny village in Mexico," he concludes. "We live in a metropolitan city where there are many cultures, and we cross over and collaborate with Irish, classical and other folk musicians. And we've done covers of Woody Guthrie during immigration marches: We did 'This Land Is Your Land' as norteño [a Mexican polka style], and didn’t change a single word!"
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