A Culture as Wide as the Sky
Sones de México's most recent album, Esta Tierra Es Tuya (This Land is Your Land), demonstrates how immigrant musicians outside of their home country can not only preserve traditions but push them in new directions. The group dips into Mexico's vast and underexposed son repertoire and integrates everything from rock and folk, to Western classical, providing a musical antidote to limited perspectives on Mexican culture.
"We tell the story of how deep Mexican culture can go," explains Juan Díes, who co-founded the group and now serves as the group's producer and CEO, as well as a multi-instrumental performer. "Beyond the party culture of spring break and margaritas, there is a cultural tapestry in Mexico that is deep and fun, and as intellectually as complex and fulfilling as anything else." Read more...
Sones de México: From Tradition to a New Community
In the early 1980s, Victor Pichardo, the ensemble's music director, spent several years touring Mexico as a musician with a folkloric dance company and forming his first band, Zazhil. In his off time, he would go looking for local musicians, documenting what he heard, learning specific regional techniques and styles, and trading instruments and tapes. After moving to Chicago in the early 1990s, Pichardo met Juan Dies (an ethnomusicologist who worked at the well-respected Old Town School of Folk Music for over a decade) and together formed Sones de México Ensemble in 1994. Read more...
The Musicians
Victor Pichardo (violin, clarinet, jarana, guitar, huapanguera)
Juan Díes (guitarron, guitar)
Lorena Iniguez (dance, vihuela, jarana, small percussion)
Juan Rivera (violin, requinto, jarana)
Zacbe Pichardo (marimba, harp, vihuela, percussion)
Javier Saume (drums, maracas, percussion)
The group plays more than 70 instruments to create the variety of styles of Mexican son: a dozen regional guitars in a variety of sizes; percussion made from donkey jaw bones, tortoise shells, and deer antlers; and a compelling rhythmic wooden box called the tarima played with hard heeled dancing shoes. The familiar sounds of brass instruments, woodwinds, accordions, violins, and two types of harp made their way into various regional styles.
Listen to Juan Díes talk about instruments and gear in a series of interviews with GearWire posted to YouTube.
See Sones in Action
Click here to watch performances on the Sones de México YouTube channel.
Articles from All Over
More than mariachi: Sones de México aims to change American perceptions of Mexican music
By GAYLE WORLAND
The Wisconsin State Journal
Review of Esta Tierra Es Tuya
By STEVE HOCHMAN
Spinner.com
A chat with Sones de México's Juan Díes
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