Visionary Mexican Group Mono Blanco, Who Sparked Son Jarocho Resurgence, Continue Redefining Traditions

Gilberto Gutiérrez Silva's influence on son jarocho music cannot be overstated, and for more than 40 years, he has been one of the prime players upholding the traditions of the genre. Gutiérrez Silva's passion for preserving this authentic grassroots Mexican music led to him form the band Mono Blanco, and together they spearheaded a "back to the future" renaissance that spread throughout Gutiérrez Silva's homeland of Veracruz into the USA and beyond. Most son jarocho groups active in the USA can trace their influence back to Mono Blanco's movement. 

However, Gutiérrez Silva is no mere traditionalist, and on this new album, '¡Fandango! Sones Jarochos from Veracruz' (5.25, Smithsonian Folkways) his virtuosic band, augmented by a new generation of musicians, marries the past with the present, firmly placing the historic sounds of son jarocho in the 21st century. The release is a fitting addition to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings during the label's 70th anniversary.

Listen to this private album stream.

A fusion of indigenous, Spanish and African musical elements, son jarocho can be traced back to regional folk music in the Mexican Gulf state of Veracruz that rose to national acclaim in the 1930s through radio and folkloric shows in Mexico City. The word son, derived from the Latin word sonus ("sound") in Mexico's colonial period (1521-1810), gradually came to mean a kind of local-based music for dancing; the term was used by both mestizo and indigenous peoples. The word jarocho came to refer to the ordinary country people of the Veracruz southern coastal plain. In its earliest days, son jarocho was played on locally made guitar-like instruments such as the jarana jarocha and the requinto jarocho, and performances known as "fandangos" took place at homes, ranches or community celebrations. 

Son jarocho's first wave of popularity occurred throughout the 1940s and ?50s, but ironically, Gilberto Gutiérrez Silva, born in the Tres Zapotes region of Veracruz, had to travel to Mexico City to discover the music of his people - enthused by the international Latin American folk movement of the time. After seeing a Paraguayan duo perform son jarocho, somebody asked Gutiérrez Silva, "Why don't you play the jarana?" Easier said than done, as native Mexican instruments were hard to come by, but Silva eventually tracked one down, and through it he found "a world to study for an entire lifetime."

Fueled by his newfound love of son jarocho, Gutiérrez Silva, along with his brother Ángel and folk music enthusiast Juan Pascoe, began performing the music. Gutiérrez came to understand how the authentic son jarocho had faded from the scene; local fandangos had disappeared, displaced by a shifting pop culture landscape along with other social and cultural changes in Mexico. Mono Blanco set out to bring the music back to its rightful place. "We went backward, toward the inside of that world," Gutiérrez explains.

Mono Blanco's decades-long mission bore plentiful fruit, with Gutiérrez becoming a cultural promoter who helped revitalize the fandango tradition. Touring, recording and learning from elder musicians, Gutiérrez organized son jarocho campamentos for young people to learn the traditions of the fandango. Many became his disciples, and some even became members of Mono Blanco.

The lineup of Mono Blanco on '¡Fandango! Sones Jarochos from Veracruz' combines younger and older generations, and it embodies both traditional and more contemporary approaches. The instrumentation represents a broad range of the son jarocho sound palette, and the poetic lyrics are by turns old-world and au courant.

This approach takes flight in the provocative opening cut, "El cascabel," during which the rotating line of singers forms an intricate tapestry of sound; similarly, the constantly changing array of vocals on the luminous "La soledad" (a Silva original) mixes with Octavio Vega Hernández's 30-string harp to wondrous effect. Mono Blanco explores a wide range of moods and textures on the album - the music is at times urgent and sensual ("La morena") or rollicking and joyful ("La sarna"), and other times it's heartbreakingly wistful ("El fandanguito").

Nearly all of the famous Mono Blanco signatures are here - the hard-driving singing styles, the dizzying blend of strings (requintos, leona, and different-sized janaras) and dynamic lyrics that veer from the cruelties of social injustice to the eccentricities of everyday life and the enduring mysteries of romantic love. 

Both traditional and progressive, Mono Blanco imbues all of the album's 12 tracks with endearing wit and open-hearted humanity. But whatever stylistic approach they follow, and whatever musical permutations they adhere to, it's always in service to the songs' emotions. The son jarocho "people's music" movement they helped to revitalize is alive and well on '¡Fandango!' and will no doubt spark fandangos wherever it is heard.

'¡Fandango! Sones Jarochos from Veracruz' Track List:

1. El cascabel

2. La soledad (Loneliness)

3. La morena (The Dark Woman)

4. El coconito (The Little Turkey)

5. El jarabe loco (The Crazy Jarabe)

6. El camotal (The Yam Field)

7. La sarna (Scabies)

8. El fandanguito (The Little Fandango)

9. Mar de amor (Sea of Love)

10. Toro zacamandú (The Zacamandú)

11. El gallo (The Rooster)

12. El chuchumbé

ABOUT SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS RECORDINGS:

Going into its 70th year, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the "National Museum of Sound," makes available close to 60,000 tracks in physical and digital format as the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian, with a reach of 80 million people per year. A division of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, the non-profit label is dedicated to supporting cultural diversity and increased understanding among people through the documentation, preservation, production and dissemination of sound. Its mission is the legacy of Moses Asch, who founded Folkways Records in 1948 to document "people's music" from around the world. For more information about Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, visit folkways.si.edu.

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