Kronos Goes Beyond Kitsch to Capture Musical Mexico

Once, on a street in Mexico City, David Harrington, the Kronos Quartet’s first violinist, encountered a one-armed street musician playing standard melodies by blowing on the edge of an ivy leaf. It is an eerie sound, unlike any other, and you never forget it. Harrington knew instantly, he told the audience at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Friday night, that one day Kronos had to play with Carlos Garcia.

Alas, Garcia was not on hand for the concert; we had to make do with his sublime, sweetly honeyed playing of the popular ‘40s hit tune “Perfidia,” on tape. Garcia wasn’t the only thing on that tape that accompanied the Kronos’ live performance. There were also other Kronoses, the quartet overdubbed over and over to re-create the schlocky plush texture of the 101 Strings orchestra of the ‘50s.

And if that were all there was to it, it might have seemed droll, even slightly offensive, kitsch, which is how a couple of high-minded classical critics have greeted Kronos’ wildly innovative, Postmodern global music masterpiece of a CD, “Nuevo,” from which this concert derived.

But hearing “Perfidia” live proved that kitsch was hardly all there was to it. There were prerecorded street sounds, which located Garcia in his aural time and space. And then there was the performance itself, Garcia exquisitely expressive and the Kronos playing with a rapt fervor that resulted in anything but the antiseptic hi-fi-era background music of 101 Strings and its like.

And then there was the concert itself, hearing this music among an enthusiastic crowd that included both new-music-oriented Kronos fans as well as an audience conversant with Mexican culture (references to Mexican TV stars were, for instance, warmly applauded).

“Nuevo” launched the UCLA Live season, the most ambitious and venturesome the school has ever presented. Part of that ambition is to create context through both obvious and unexpected juxtapositions. On Friday, Kronos, which is the ensemble in residence for the series this year, was preceded by Plankton Man (a.k.a. Ignacio Chavez), operating his computer to make the kind of remixes that are currently the rage on the energetic Tijuana dance scene, and the polished, entertaining Mariachi Reyna de Los Angeles, which proudly proclaims itself the first all-women mariachi band in America.

No evening that attempted to look widely at Mexican music could, of course, do more than scratch but a few surfaces. And it is to the Kronos’ credit that the ensemble is neither in the business of appropriation or of doing musicological justice. Rather it is a quartet with perhaps the most extreme case on record of what the California multicultural composer Lou Harrison calls the “me-too-ism” that has propelled the phenomenon of world music. The quartet--which also includes violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Jennifer Culp--are inveterate collaborators, and that is what “Nuevo” is all about.

Every number in “Nuevo” (Kronos played 10 of the 13 on the CD) represents a different aspect of Mexican music, but also a different notion of collaboration, often with complex layers. Another standard, “Se Me Hizo Facil” (It Was Easy for Me) by the popular Mexican songwriter Agustin Lara, was arranged by Agentinian American composer Osvaldo Golijov to include modern string quartet effects that cause the melody to fade in and out of focus. It is as if we listen through a veil of history.

Many of the arrangements are by Golijov. He makes a raucous song from Sinaloa all the more raw by using ragged amplified distortion of the quartet. Meanwhile, Golijov’s own “Festival for the Holy Mother Guadalupe,” for marimba (here prerecorded by Luanne Warner) and background sounds from the ritual festival in Chiapas is a quiet meditation on a mystical occasion.

When Kronos goes to Mexico, it doesn’t just walk the streets, but also turns on the tube. Surely the strangest music of the evening was hearing the Turkish march from Beethoven’s “Ruins of Athens” in a pop setting, juxtaposed with “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” among much else, including wild sound effects, as it once was on a popular Mexican comedy show, “Chespirito,” and its spinoffs.

The arrangement by Ricardo Gallardo, to this listener’s utter amazement, successfully strives for the transcendental in the end.

“Mini Skirt,” a goofy cut from one of Juan Garcia Esquivel’s groovy bachelor-pad LPs from the ‘60s, is yet another revelation--silly and dated, of course, but also full of quirky, inventive electronic effects.

Oddly enough, it was in Mexican art music that Kronos on this occasion came closest to appropriation in an arrangement of Silvestre Revueltas’ well-known orchestral showpiece, “Sensemaya,” for which they were joined by the impressive Mexico City percussion ensemble Tambuco.

The percussion worked just fine, but no amount of amplification or gripping playing from four string instruments can achieve the instrumental power of the piece.

And at the end, Kronos’ collaboration with Cafe Tacoma missed the thrill of live interaction, however virtuoso the quartet was in synchronizing with a tape of the exciting Mexican rock band. Still, that slight impression of disembodiment was the exception to a venture into musical Mexico that brought us, in an hour, a more visceral sense of a culture than you would think possible.