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Cinco, Reader's Digest Mexican Brass Style
Even more classic than usual rear cover spiele. All odd Capitalisation and use of double dashes '--' is faithfully reproduced for the viewer...
If we ever find
ourselves in a Mexican country-town, fortunate enough to be
staying a block away from a dark eyed beauty with an olive
skin and raven hair, we might well stand a chance of being
roused at a prodigiously early hour by the playing of the
street musicians, financed by a local casanova, presenting his
compliments to a coy se/n/orita with a morning serenade. These
would be the 'mariachis' or 'wedding musicians' with their
fiddles, guitars, drums and passionately strident
voices. If the wooer were particularly affluent, or
desperate, we might even be regaled by a trumpet as well.
On the Gulf of Mexico we are likely to come across a different
kind of minstrel accompanying himself on the guitar. He
strolls around the oyster houses in Vera Cruzon a Sunday,
splendidly fitted out in short jacket and nickel-studded
trousers, offering for a mere six shillings (ten pesos),
<thirty pee - ee was done!> to compose a new song for
each client in turn, inventing the rhymes as he goes along.
The commercial and
social hub of every Mexican town is the central square. Here
in the restaurants the men drink strong coffee and play
dominoes, itinerant vendors offer crusty rolls filled with
chicken and chilli and through the colourful vibrant scene
comes the sound of the marimbas, 'the woods that sing'. The
marimba is a giant xylophone played by three people, usually
knocking out the latest international hit or an old favourite
such as Cielito Lindo or reminders of the Revolutionary War,
Adelita or Valentina. The most famous marimbas are in
the Chiapa region in Mexico's deep south.
These are but three examples of the infinite variety in
popular Mexican music. Now for the brass. <finally!>
In 1962, the name for the northern border-town of Tijuana--a
Spanish adaptation of an Indian word meaning 'city by the
sea'--entered the vocabulary of international popular music.
Herb Alpert, a
young first trumpet with the San Francisco Orchestra and
former bugle player with the US Army, along with his
business-partner, Jerry Moss, and recording engineer, Larry
Levine, were in search of a new brass sound that was Mexican,
without being purely 'Latin'. It was to have jazz and
'leisure-listening' potential as well. So one Sunday
they took the road from Los Angeles, down through San Diego
and across the frontier to the Tijuana bull-ring for the
'corrida'.