f40 Bolero Central


In Mexico’s dangerous Costa Chica region, they still treasure the passionate love song tradition of Latin America. Mary Farquharson recently did a recording trip with Eduardo Llerenas of Discos Corasón and tells us what they found.


tightrope. “You have to maintainÁlvaro a perfect balance and not fall off the rope into a marsh of sentimentality.” Great bolero singers, like him, tread carefully and they take the audience with them so that, as the song comes to its climax, everyone breathes a sigh of relief and then asks for more. There is, after all, life after love and madness is only temporary.


A


Boleros continue to be the great love songs of Latin America, 132 years after Pepé Sánchez wrote Tristezas in Santiago de Cuba, the undisputed capital of this reper- toire, from where they travelled and took root in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Spain, Argentina and, via New York, over most of the world including Africa and China. Time passes, but in a region of Mexico that is iso- lated from the capital by geography and by reports of violence in this difficult time, the essence of the great boleros – the raw ener- gy and hopeless passion – comes naturally to the bands we (myself and Eduardo Llere- nas, founder of Discos Corasón) recently recorded and produced on a CD titled Como Un Lunar, Boleros De La Costa Chica.


Como Un Lunar, ‘Like a beauty spot,’ is the name of a bolero from the 1950s, writ- ten by one of Mexico’s greatest artists, Álvaro Carrillo. He dedicated it to a prosti- tute known as ‘Long-leg’ and it’s a beautiful call for tolerance. Nobody is perfect but our faults are like a mark, a beauty spot on a woman’s face. Anyone who dies perfect, has not been human. Although Carrillo’s classics have been translated into 20 languages and covered by Frank Sinatra, he was almost unknown as a person when he and his wife were killed in a car crash in 1969. Carrillo was only 49 but his music was already enor- mously successful all over Latin America. In Mexico there are few people who can’t sing at least three of his boleros from start to fin- ish. Anyone who’d like to join this crowd could start with Sabor A Mi, Luz De Luna and Cancionero.


When we asked Carrillo’s younger son, Mario, why so little is known about his father, in comparison with the other gods of Mexican song like Augustin Lara and José Alfredo Jiménez, he told us that it was part- ly due to the geography that divides the


n old Cuban friend, known in Mexico as ‘The Black Angel with the Velvet Voice’ once told us that singing boleros was like walking on a


Costa Chica from the rest of Mexico and partly because Álvaro was Afromexican and not exactly a matinée idol to look at. Incred- ibly, even in these times of social media, many Mexicans are not even aware of the large black population on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of Mexico or the musical her- itage they continue to create.


Carrillo’s mother was indigenous which also breaks with the idea that the black, Indian and mestizo communities keep apart. Strictly speaking, the Costa Chica runs from Acapulco in Guerrero state, to Huatulco on the coast of Oaxaca, although, in terms of musical culture it is the villages and towns in the foothills that border the two states where the best boleros, like the traditional chilenas, sones and columbianas, are created by mestizo, Indian and Afromexican artists.


Although Carrillo had inspired our search for bolero singers in the Costa Chica, we were very open to finding other, less famous composers and were looking for singers of all different styles. On each of our trips to the region, we met singers in towns and villages of Oaxaca and Guerrero who were the stars of local parties and who’d made piles of home-recorded CDs, but who’d never seen inside a recording studio or, for the most part, travelled to the capital. For Como Un Lunar, we chose five of the best bands from all over the region and when you hear them sing, what strikes you straight away is a real natural talent, enormous com- mitment to the music and a pleasure in music making that reminded Eduardo Llerenas and me of the great days of the Casa de la Trova in Santiago de Cuba in the early ’90s.


Álvaro Carrillo O


n one of the journeys to the region we were accompanying Lucy Duran who was working with the Malian balafon play- er Lassana Diabaté in


Afromexican villages along the coast of Oaxaca. After one of her workshops in the village of Santiago Llano Grande, we met the singer Chogo Prudente and really liked his style of playing boleros, which is com- pletely his own. He adds a stronger rhythm section and, at the same time, a feeling of blues as well as the call of Chilean protest songs from the 1980s. His voice is accompa- nied on instruments from the local devil dances as well as by the virtuoso guitarist Hector Díaz whose bursts of flamenco, jazz and son fit surprisingly well into a classic bolero. Chogo is less impressed by the her- itage of Álvaro Carrillo than other artists; for him a bolero is music to be played in the local bars for a few pesos but, when we presented him live in Mexico's most impor- tant arts festival, the international audi- ence embraced him like a star. He has that quality, despite his annoying tendency to tell journalists he’s not really a musician and to keep quiet about all the boleros he composes in his spare time.


Also in Oaxaca, on the bypass round one of the biggest towns in the region, we heard the incredible voice of Pedro Torres which, since he’s now in his late 50s, isn’t nearly as well-known as it should be. Pedro reminds Eduardo of Eliades Ochoa in the first recording he made of him in 1985: a man who knew he was good, however small his professional world was at that time. Pedro is also enigmatic, at this moment he doesn’t have his own band but pushes play- ers who accompany him very hard and will only make recordings if he’s sure they’ll turn out well. He is very close to Álvaro Carrillo’s original magic, in fact he has duetted with two of the composer’s best friends and knows the repertoire perhaps better than any other artist.


Across the border in Guerrero state, we found a trio of indigenous singers, Los Tres Amuzgos, who sing boleros by Carrillo, as well as their own compositions, in both Spanish and Amuzgo. They sing three-part harmonies in the style of Los Panchos, the famous Mexico City band from the ’50s, but with a flavour that is rougher and more deeply passionate. The band have been playing together since 1987. Their version of Cancer brings new significance to this


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