Helena Simonett

¡Hijole! (Yikes!) ANOTHER important book on Mexican music with no Amazon customer reviews. If you have ever turned on Mexican t.v. and seen a hyperactive-seeming big band, decked out in over-the-top costumes, playing what sounds like 'oompah' music -- and quick changed the channel, as may be a natural response to the shock -- then you are missing a MASSIVE chunk of Mexican culture, and 'once you get to know it', some wonderful music besides. I'm fascinated by Helena Simonett's 'brass', pun intended, by her skill at researching the ethnography/musicology of this genre, and at presenting her discoveries in a very readable form. Banda developed in the northern state of Sinaloa (but with various early and interesting 'global' influences) to become one of the musical styles most listened and danced to, throughout Mexico and Spanish-speaking immigrant communities. At the time she wrote this valuable -- and fun -- book, Simonett was a Swiss graduate student recently arrived in Los Angeles, and her account of her research-junkets on both sides of the border is both thrilling and heart-warming. (As I also suggested in my review of Elijah Wald's Narcocorrido, the generosity of Mexican music's 'tough guys', and their respect for higher learning -- something most of them have been denied in their own lives -- is an intense cultural lesson in itself.)… (mere)