Sometimes, things fall together as if they’re simply fated to exist. Orkesta Mendoza found that; as soon as the songs began to flow for Curandero, their second album for the Glitterbeat label, the stars seemed to align and everything was composed, recorded and mastered in just a few short months.
“We did it so fast that the result was light,” explains band leader Sergio Mendoza. “We went along with it without a lot of thought or planning.”
It all came quite naturally. Yet the road to following up 2016’s lauded ¡Vamos A Guarachar! didn’t start out so smoothly. In 2018, the band began work on new material, but it didn’t quite click.
“I went on tour, then went back into the studio in August 2019,” Mendoza recalls. “We wrote all new songs. Going fast and having a different approach meant we weren’t so serious, some of the tracks are very playful.”
It shows; there’s joy in every note. The music flows as if it had been waiting to appear. It crosses and re-crosses that fluid border between Mexico and the United States, mixing rock and pop with ranchera and cumbia alongside snatches of mariachi horns. And hovering over everything is the spirit of ‘60s boogaloo.
“Boogaloo has lyrics in English, Spanish and Spanglish,” Mendoza says. “Joe Cuba mixed Latin rhythms, Soul and R&B together and made something new. The R&B part was a real reference point for me, but the rhythm was obvious in the percussion and the handclaps.”
Mendoza was born in Nogales, Arizona (USA) but grew up across the border in Nogales, Sonora (Mexico). Rock arrived in his life after he moved back to the US, when he was still a young child. Inevitably, the different styles simply blended in his mind and fit together in his life.
“Yeah, I’m definitely a Rock’n’Roll fa....... more
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