![mexico accordion mexico accordion](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0076/8783/1605/products/MXIIUCGDTINBKFBE_03_1600x.jpg)
This makes it an easy target for critics of pop music in any genre.īut the highly syncopated music with complex changes and rhythms is made for dancing (and dancing close), drawing big crowds to weddings, holidays, parties, rodeos, parades, baptisms, quinceañeras, even indoor church services. They usually tell melodramatic tales of spurned love and found love and, well, anything to do with love. The popular banda songs heard constantly on the radio today are modern compositions, written and marketed like pop tunes.
![mexico accordion mexico accordion](https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0399/4540/4575/products/Songs-of-Mexico-For-accordion-Cover.jpg)
But banda is much, much more popular in Mexico than country music is in the U.S., its long-term appeal having long outlived the flash-in-the-pan Nashville sound of the late 50s. It’s kind of like how country music in the United States is perceived by city folk. People in Mexico either love banda or they hate it. It’s a catalog of songs that’s not always unique to the genre itself but which sometimes stretches back a century and a half to pre-Revolution Mexico. There are no stringed instruments here like the violin or gut-stringed guitar found in mariachi.Ī typical banda has at least 12-15 musicians, but the largest groups can have 20 members who play a combination of cumbias, corridos (narrative story-songs), rancheras, and ballads. Clarinets, trumpets, trombones, tubas, French horns, more trumpets, powerful virtuosic singers, bass and snare drums all make up the instruments in a banda. Several years ago, I was (I thought) alone taking photos at midnight in a graveyard on the Day of the Dead and someone (or something) was playing The Rays’ “ Silhouettes on the Shade.”īanda music: this horn-heavy genre of Mexican music usually features, at least, a dozen guys in matching neon-colored suits who play polka-influenced, military marching band-based tunes. Old American rock music can be heard from time to time, but it’s far from the norm. All haunt the clubs and bars who cater to that kind of music. The country’s musical history started thousands of years ago with, of course, its indigenous people, and it continues evolving today in the bars, living rooms, and streets of its small towns and big cities.īanda, mariachi, norteño, and ranchera are among today’s most popular genres which play on the radio and on one’s cell phone, but other genres which have developed include huasteco, jarocho, grupera, tamborazo zacatecano, and marimba-based ensembles.Īnd rock groups obviously exist, who play Mexican rock, along with pop groups, Latin alternative, ska and electronic groups. As diverse as Mexico is, the same can be said for its music.