root salad Calexico
It’s roots rock sans frontières for the increasingly open-eared collective, reports Tony Montague.
J
oey Burns is proud that the music of Calexico has increasingly strong and diverse world roots. The main writer and guitarist of the Tucson, Arizona band puts it down to the origins and open ears of its members, as well as their travels and encounters.
“We’re kind of unusual,” he reflects, backstage at the Vancouver Folk Music Fes- tival. “For a long time you didn’t really find many bands like us made up of internation- al musicians. I’m born in Montreal, Volker Zander [bass] and Martin Wenk [trumpet, accordeon] are from Germany, Jacob Valen- zuela has Mexican and Portuguese family roots, and now we’re playing with a Span- ish artist as well, Jairo Zavala. We have a unique direction and mindset of musicians, and our record collections come from all over the map – folkloric Mexico, South America, Portugal, Spain, India.”
The seed for Calexico was planted in California in 1990 when guitarist and bassist Burns met drummer John Converti- no, who was then drumming with Giant Sand. Burns signed up to the band, which later moved to Tucson, and in 1994 the pair left to form the Friends Of Dean Mar- tinez, playing a mix of roots rock, alt-coun- try, jazz and folk with Latin flavours.
The outfit morphed into Calexico two years later and, with the addition of horns and Paul Niehaus’s spacey and tasteful pedal steel guitar, the band’s hallmark sound was quickly forged in songs that evoke the vast, parched landscapes of the south-west US and north-west Mexico (just an hour’s drive from Tucson).
According to Burns, Calexico owes its original Mexican connection to the gal- lantry – and resilient liver – of his musical partner. “Both of John’s parents played music and sang and they had a school in the basement of their house in Long Island, where they taught piano, accordeon, guitar, and voice. Their family band played around the US and John says that when he turned 21 they were in El Paso [Texas], and he went across the bor- der into Juárez and bought gardenias, handed them out to every woman he saw, young and old, and wound up sitting in with a norteño band. He barely remem- bers that night, but he was drinking a lot of tequila and having lots of fun.”
Burns brings to Calexico the jazz, rock, surf, and classical music he learned to play at a young age in southern California, as well as his later passion for Portuguese fado. “When I first heard Amália Rodrigues, around 1993-4, I immediately felt the connection, that saudade or melancholy, the minor mode. I fell in love with the music, the melodies, the format.
And some of the songs we’ve written, and still write are influenced by that kind of format, a beautiful blend of eastern, west- ern, and African.”
The inspiration from Spain dates from around eight years ago when Burns and Convertino were introduced to the music of Amparanoia, who shared the same European label. A concert in Rotterdam that featured both outfits was arranged, everything gelled, and lead singer Amparo Sánchez and guitarist Jairo Zavala became close friends and associates of Calexico.
By 2008, Zavala was one of the band’s ‘auxiliary members’, and had his own group DePedro. He and Sánchez, in search of a new venture, got together with Calexico to lay down tracks for three albums at Wavelab studio in Tucson. “We did these sessions back-to-back, with everyone playing on each other’s project,” says Burns. “It’s like we’ve become a collective of an international sort. Calexico plays on most of the tracks of DePedro’s [self- titled debut]
album, as well as on Amparo’s Tucson – Habana.”
Travel, location, and dislocation pro- vide a loose narra- tive theme linking the starkly beautiful songs on Calexico’s own Carried To Dust, which
emerged from those sessions and was released later in 2008, featuring Sánchez singing lead on Inspiración.
The lyrics
penned by Burns – either on his own or with Convertino – are delivered in a dry voice with an understated intensi- ty. His allusive lan- guage at times sug- gests the magic- realism of some Latin American writers – such as the opening lines of Victor Jara’s Hands, the album’s first track, named after the singer-song-
T
writer mutilated and killed in Chile in 1973 after the military coup: Wire fences still coiled with flowers of the night/ Songs of the birds like hands call the earth to wit- ness/ Sever from fear before taking flight.
he songs of Carried To Dust are the crystallisation of Calexico’s diverse musical influences, performed with a unique range of instruments. “You
don’t normally find a quietly-played nylon acoustic guitar playing a Spanish-style rhythm with drums and brushes that figure prominently in the mix, alongside pedal steel and trumpets playing in harmony that have a pop sensibility and a vibrato reminiscent of mariachi music. We just follow our ears instinctively.”
For Calexico there are no fences or frontiers, only connecting wires.
www.casadecalexico.com F 21 f
Photo: Aubrey Edwards
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