Mariachi reluctant to trumpet arrival of trumpets
Violins are still and integral part of mariachi orchestras.
When people in Mexico first heard broadcasts of trumpets playing with mariachis, radio repair shops were awash in business. Folks thought there was something wrong with their sets.That's a story Jonathan Clark heard over and over in his 12-plus years in Mexico researching the history of the mariachi.Clark is regarded as the world's foremost mariachi historian. He was a key adviser to Linda Ronstadt for her "Canciones de mi Padre" recording projects."It's got to be fantasy," Clark says, speaking by phone from Los Angeles, "but it's a great story."Today, a mariachi without trumpets would seem unthinkable. Just listen to the sounds emanating from tomorrow night's Tucson International Mariachi Conference Espectacular concert for proof. But Mariachi Vargas trumpet player Miguel Martinez - the man who defined the trumpet's role in the mariachi world - often told Clark of resistance he encountered early on."He started out in the mid-'30s as a young boy in Garibaldi," recalls Clark, "and he said at that time, about half the groups had a trumpet, half didn't. Just one trumpet, by the way. Never two. That was unheard of."Often Martinez was left out."When a customer came up and said, 'Do you have trumpet?' he didn't know what to answer," Clark recalls. "Half the customers would hire you because you had a trumpet, and half would hire you because you didn't."Sometimes the band would arrive and play a song, and the group leader would be called aside by the patron and told to send the trumpeter to the restaurant or the bar."I've heard that from many sources with the old, old mariachis," Clark says. "This was in the 1930s and even into the '40s. By the late '40s, pretty much every mariachi had one trumpet. And then by the mid-'50s, every mariachi had two trumpets. That was definitely an urban phenomenon."There are plenty of tales of the mariachi's instrumental evolution, some true, some not. One of the most commonly repeated is the story that the trumpet became a standard instrument after it was broadcast regularly on Mexico City's powerful XEW radio station.The tale is that it was used to play the same tune as the violins, which didn't come through on the microphones. But Clark points out that the same microphones that were used by radio stations were used by record companies, and the strings project just fine on record. He also found considerable photographic and anecdotal evidence of trumpets being used here and there long before the arrival of Radio XEW."That's one of the major myths of mariachi music," he says of the radio story. "It's even been repeated in encyclopedias and references."Today's mariachi ensemble generally consists of violins, vihuela (a keel-backed rhythm guitar), guitar, trumpet and guitarron (the genre's jumbo bass guitar). But it wasn't until the 1940s that this lineup became standard."You've got two basic types of mariachi - urban and rural," Clark explains. "The rural mariachi had a lot more variation in instrumentation."In addition to trumpet, percussion, clarinet, flute and a variety of curious stringed instruments came and went."Eventually you found all of these regional variations coming to the city and ended up playing together, being combined in different manners," Clark notes. "The instruments that were most functional became standardized."The ones that were least functional fell into disuse."The harp is basically in disuse," says Clark. "There's a handful of very visible mariachis that use the harp, like the Vargas, but 99.9 percent of mariachis in the world don't."The same is true of the guitarra de golpe - the original mariachi guitar. That's pretty rare today."
