RIVA PALACIO, Mexico — Don Juan Reynoso looks tired. After three wives, 18 children and 92 years of hard living, you probably would too. But being tired is one thing. Being finished is another.
Outside Reynoso's single-story home, the midday sun is hammering the dusty streets of the Tierra Caliente, the fabled "hot lands" of west-central Mexico. It's an ideal time for a siesta, and Reynoso, slumped in his living-room sofa, appears to be drifting toward oblivion.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday March 15, 2005 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 40 words Type of Material: Correction
Mexican singer -- A profile of Mexican calentana singer Don Juan Reynoso in Saturday's Calendar section contained a reference to pasodoble that was misspelled pase doble. Also, Reynoso's manager, Lindajoy Fenley, was identified as a man. Fenley is a woman.
But what's this? Someone has just stuck a bow and fiddle in Reynoso's gnarly hands. Like a man slowly waking from a dream, the maestro takes his stick and slices it across the strings, drawing out the achingly earnest notes of "Lazos de Amor" (Bonds of Love).
Reynoso's face is impassive and, apart from his arms, his body barely moves. But there's no mistaking the old man's rapturous concentration, the depth of his connection to this eccentric, fiercely emotional music. It's hard not to agree with his manager, Lindajoy Fenley, 56, who says that if Reynoso -- the greatest living master of calentana music -- weren't still playing, "he would be dead."
In fact, not long ago many Mexicans thought that Reynoso was dead, and that calentana culture -- named for the Tierra Caliente -- already had one foot in the grave. That makes it all the more surprising to learn the story of what Fenley calls Reynoso's "resurrection" over the last dozen years: a handful of new recordings and reissues; regular showcases in Mexico City and other cultural hotspots; a few U.S. and Canadian concert appearances, including nine straight years at the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, Wash.; and scads of tributes and awards from Mexican politicians, among them the prestigious Premio Nacional.
Even more than his technical skill, it's the sheer ardor of Reynoso's playing that can make listeners gasp out loud. "He takes out the violin and he attacks it like a hyena ripping into a lioness," says Paul Anastasio, 51, a Seattle-area violinist and music instructor who caught the calentana bug in the late 1990s and now makes annual pilgrimages here to study with Reynoso. He and Reynoso also have transcribed more than 500 musical charts of Reynoso's violin fingerings to help make them available to a wider audience and to establish some degree of copyright control over his core repertoire.
Government support
Meanwhile, calentana music, if not quite a full-blown Lazarus act, does appear to be enjoying a modest revival on both sides of the border. More young musicians are taking up the instruments of their ancestors. Mexico's national arts council has launched a one-year stipend/scholarship program to encourage new compositions of traditional Mexican music, including calentana. The state government of Michoacan is actively promoting its musicians and recently made a new Reynoso recording. And several Mexican American musical groups include some music of the Tierra Caliente in their playlists.
Most telling, perhaps, is that a devout handful of American musicians and music students such as Anastasio are making their way south to study with Reynoso and about a dozen other graying calentana masters scattered across the region. Though these old men and their doggedly archaic music aren't likely to become the next Buena Vista Social Club, their new foreign apostles hope they can help preserve calentana's legacy. "Most of these guys can't travel, so I've got to pick their brains while I can," says Anastasio.
Like Reynoso, who was born in the small hill town of Santo Domingo, Coyuca de Catalan, in the state of Guerrero, around the start of the Mexican Revolution in 1912, calentana music is a paradox: parochial but worldly wise, raw yet debonair, especially in the hands of a man who has been playing it nearly his entire life.
Though less celebrated than other Mexican roots music, such as the son jarocho and huasteco of eastern Veracruz state, calentana is a complex, addictive stew of ingredients: traditional Spanish pase dobles mixed with Cuban danzon and tango, European waltzes, marches, minuets and polkas, and U.S. fox trot and swing influences that drifted across the border via radio or were brought here by touring big bands, often liberally spiced with African syncopation.
A traditional calentana ensemble consists of one or two violins, a thumping tamborita ("little drum") and a guitarra panzona, also known as the tua, a stubby, fretless guitar with a round back, strung with goat gut. The resulting sound can be as fastidious as a Haydn string quartet or as rough and sensual as a midnight hootenanny in an Appalachian hollow. Its sweetly fatalistic themes are romantic yearning, time's remorseless passage and nostalgia for one's native land.
