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Fun facts about Bandas!

I just had the pleasure of hanging out with Alfredo Herrejon and the guys from Banda el Recodo. I asked him a lot of questions about all kinds of nitty gritty details and he was happy to oblige me.

Here's what I learned:

Banda el Recodo was founded in 1938 in Sinaloa. It's the most popular banda in Mexico and probably the most popular brass band in the world. There are 17 members, all of whom are full time and live in Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico. The musicians aren't allowed to play in other bands.

They tour constantly around the states and Mexico in 2 sleeper buses. Staff + band total about 40 people. They've also toured Europe and elsewhere.

Since their inception they've had 5 tuba players. Alfredo is the 5th, taking over from Carlos Soto “Jokoki”, who played for 20 years.

Originally they used an Eb tuba which they call “tuba pecho” or “chest tuba” to differentiate between that and sousaphone, which they just call “tuba”. Later they switched to Eb sousaphone, and later Bb sousaphone, which is pretty standard throughout Mexico. Alfredo plays a 14k.

Alfredo was previously an Eb alto horn player (harmonia) with El Recodo. He also played trumpet with them for a while. Many of the players play several instruments. Some banda recordings are made with just a handful of players, overdubbing themselves. Alfredo does this on the record “Thalia con Banda”.

The valve trombone players in the banda play King 3Bs. They have the tuning slides cut off so the horns play in C instead of Bb.

All of the musicians read music and most have conservatory training. However the entire book is memorized. At a recording session they read new charts but have to quickly memorize them for gigs.

There used to be different regional styles of brass bands in different states. Orchestration varied – some had saxophones, which aren't common in Sinaloa. More and more the Sinaloan style brass band is taking over, replacing regional styles.

The band is playing a show late Sunday night in Queens, at “La Boom” in Woodside. How often to you get to hear a full-time 17-piece professional brass band with a sousaphone player?

BTW I'm Jacob Garchik, a musician in NYC, and I'm a banda super fan. I co-lead “Banda de los Muertos”, NY's premiere banda and have long been obsessed with playing and learning about this music.

Great info!

I have been listening to Banda since the late 1970s, used to play my old LPs I had collected on my radio show (it was supposed to be a jazz show, but it mutated to be just about anything brass related - that annoyed some of my listeners...)

A few months ago I was in the Artichoke Festival parade in Castroville, CA - they had 2 marching bands and FIVE bandas (the bandas were playing for the dancing horses.) The bandas were of various quality, but they all had pretty strong Sousaphone players.

For anyone fortunate enough to live or travel through Milwaukee, the Banda station is 104.7 and the Polka station is 104.9. In a short listening session you can hear a LOT of very creative tuba playing. And a LOT of non-orchestral concepts of tuba tone.

I live in Western Washington State but have relatives in Central Washington, about 100 miles from Yakima. There are large farming communities around Yakima and all of Central Washington and many of the workers are from Mexico. Some are migrant and others are rooted down in farms of all sorts. Many fruit orchards and wine grapes are a popular crop. As you can imagine, there is banda on the radio. From right about Snoqualmie Pass which marks the border between east and west to my destination, the music comes in clear and loud. I love the brass band sound!

I've seen banda on YouTube but would like to hear it live. On YouTube, there were many bands that were all young girls- age 14 to 19 or so. They sounded pretty good.

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Went last night to see Banda el Recodo with Banda los Recoditos in Queens. Recoditos played from about 1am-2am and Recodo was 2:30am-3:30am! The place was packed beyond capacity. Probably 1000 people.
Both bands were absolutely astounding - musicianship on a very high level. I guess that's what you would expect from bands that play hundreds of gigs a year.
Both sousaphone players were ridiculous. They are truly the stars of the band, constantly improvising, and playing the entire time, very hard and very loud, with hardly any breaks.
I think Alfredo uses a Garibaldi mouthpiece, fairly small.
He has an late 50's naked lady Conn 14k. It's got a thumb ring sodered inside the bell, which holds his microphone. I'm not sure what mic he was using, but it looked like a bass drum mic.
They might use solfege syllables instead of note letters - but I've encountered that with a lot of musicians outside the states, including in Eastern Europe.

We live on the edge of the S.F. bay area, towards Santa Cruz county. I've heard that many local Banda groups are pretty desperate and looking for "tuba" players (they really mean sousaphone). And that decent tuba players can find banda gigs pretty easily, as long as they speak Spanish well enough to work within the band (they don't have to be hispanic at all), and are willing to practice that style of music. In particular, I've heard that from several people about Watsonville (a local agricultural town with a predominantly hispanic population). Now, we're not talking high-end professional banda groups, but the kind of small orchestras that play local restaurants, community concerts, and probably their musicians have day jobs.

My kid is obviously not qualified ... he's not good enough on the tuba, he's too young to play in restaurants and bars, he doesn't speak Spanish (yet, he'll start learning it this year in high school), and we don't have a sousaphone. But I do wonder whether local tuba players can make some money on the side playing banda. Brian Kane might know more.

I'd like to share this with anyone who wants to try out the style - here is a chart I transcribed for the song Sin Autorizacíon, by Banda Los Recoditos (from their recent album, Para Ti Solita).

Although all the notes are here with my attempt to translate their articulations, there is a whole self-contained style at work, from tone to attack to, to, to. It's a different approach to the instrument. Anyway, it's fun to play.

Here is a YouTube video link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5M_PDjcEkgo where you can hear the song but I'd recommend buying it (or the whole album) as the volume is a bit low. For some weird reason, there are other videos on YouTube that have this song but it is slightly higher in pitch - higher than I want to play. Sped up?

I'm too lazy to deal with online PDFs so here are PNG files: right click (CTRL click for Mac) and "save image as" for full page, printable/downloadable versions of each.

Wow!
Thank you for posting it. You did a lot of work!
-Art-

Nice work! I'm glad to see I'm not the only one checking this stuff out. Recoditos has some of the most virtuosic tuba parts. Great stuff.
I have about 30 complete transcriptions, for full 14-piece banda.
If anyone is interested, I've sold a few of these from time to time. Most are public domain.
Trevor have you tried playing any of these with other folks?

Very cool - I'm not the only Anglo checking this out!

Over the past 4 years, I've been listening to this more and more, AM 1270 in the Quad Cities, and also when I'm in Chicago. Through a sales clerk at Sam Ash Music in Burbank (Chicago, southside), I have become a supplier of sousaphones to the Chicagoland banda players. The vast majority of these guys are rather young, very talented, and after their day jobs, they play nights and weekends. Of course, they all want to play a King or Elkhart Conn 14K in gorgeous condition, but most settle for what they can get. When I was at Sam Ash Music yesterday afternoon, I did play-condition repairs for two guys. The instruments could have used a bit more work, but they had gigs last night and couldn't be without their horns.

Like any other style of music, you have to learn the style and repertoire and woodshed if you want to have gigs, but from what I'm seeing, if you really want to work regularly these days, this is quite an opportunity.

When I listen to a Chicago radio station that programs banda music (107.9 FM), some of the sousaphone part ranges lead me to believe that they might still be using an Eb horn...or the player simply has great technique on a BBb!

A big disappointment is when the "tuba" line is synthesized.

In my experience buying Banda LPs and CDs - if the cover shows more than 10 musicians it will probably have "real" instruments. If 5 or less, probably going to be a synth bass (and probably synth baritone/peck horns as well.)

I got really into banda when I was living in Chicago, and ended up dealing with a lot of local tuba players and tuba players-to-be when I was flipping sousaphones there. The sousaphone is to many Latino youths what the electric guitar was to me as a teenager: undeniably cool and perhaps somewhat unobtainable. Even a beat-up old Holton is still full of magic.

There were several groups advertising a tuba position and when I contacted them, I found that either my Spanish wasn't good enough (because my Spanish sucks) or they were looking for someone who was really well-versed in the style and weren't interested in "training" me on the job. I will say this - the majority of these banda tuberos are hardcore, along the lines of drum corps. They often do multiple three-hour+ gigs in a day during the summer and never stop playing throughout the set, generally outdoors and un-mic'd. I probably wouldn't have made it through the first day!

One interesting facet of banda music is that, although the good groups are really good, they don't necessarily have to be all that technically proficient to get the job done. Having a banda a the party = instant and automatic good time, even if they can't play anywhere near in tune. As long as the audience knows the song, they are totally well-received.

The Mexican fiesta has this wonderful tradition of someone hiring a banda to follow him around playing constantly. It's like you can buy prestige for the night (or as long as you can afford). For the interested, there is an okay book out there - pretty sure it was a doctoral dissertation that the author published - called Banda: Mexican Musical Life Across Borders, by Helena Simonett. She is clearly an outsider looking in but gives a decent history and discusses some of the big players in banda history, as well doing a decent job explaining song forms and subject matter. It's a bit jarring when you take a closer look at what some of those songs are about - they sound all cheery and upbeat but are often pretty gruesome!

jacobg: I have not played these with other folks. I just sat down one day with the CD player and transcribed a few songs so I could play along with the stereo. The one I posted is the only one I bothered to put into Finale, though.

David: totally. There is, however, a faction of the bandas moving toward electric bass, especially those groups that play more amplified gigs. But most would agree that they are not "the real deal."

On the radio in Cali you can regularly here La Banda music, and I've noticed that there's quite a lot of music being produced with synth bass. Even still, the synth bass is imitating a TUBA sound. Now thats a step in the right direction if one considers all the jazz tubist who try to sound like a bass, ha ha!

Say, doesn't this qualify as "edgy sousaphone playing"?

And now, ladies and gentlemen, even the modest one-finger keyboard player can sound like a full Mexican banda group! Yamaha is offering Banda Voice and Style expansion packs...free until September 13:

Seven new Voices are authentic, high-quality recordings of professional Banda musicians playing traditional instruments like tuba, charcheta, tambora and even a special “Gritos” kit containing over 60 unique vocal expressions. New Styles cover various genres of Banda from acoustic to electric to Duranguense.

Some of the Voices are:

TubaBanda
TubaDinamico
TubaMega

It's good to offer a way for untrained musicians to be involved in making music. Hopefully, this is not the road to more synthesized/sampled music replacing, excuse the expression, "the real thing."

Here's a bump for this topic, but I'm listening to banda today as a tonic for twenty straight nights of Sleigh Ride and bits of the Nutcracker, etc. (I'm still in the middle of that...). This is a group and a track I wasn't aware of before, and the tubist is crazy-good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WVAjTHgVo0" target="_blank

Not bad! I feel like the tuba sound might be partly a recording studio artifact -- compared to a live recording like this one, where it's awesome but more tuba-like.