LOS TEXMANIACS: A TALE OF TWO BAJO SEXTOS
The first bajo sexto Max Baca ever owned rests in a display case at the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix.
Baca’s father brought it back from Juarez, having bought it for $50 at a cantina where it hung on a wall as a decoration.
“He and my mom would cross the border — back in those days it wasn’t a big deal — and they’d usually come back with these cactus candies, just little piles of sugar,” Baca says. “But he knew I wanted a bajo. He saw it and made an offer.”
Macedonio Baca was an accordionist. His sons would rush home after school, where each was to practice on the accordion for an hour. But when their father took the boys to Lubbock to see Leonardo “Flaco” Jiménez play, sevenyear-old Max was fixated on Óscar Téllez, who accompanied the legendary accordionist on the big-bodied 12-string bajo sexto.
“I knew that’s what I wanted to do,” Baca says. “I wanted to play the instrument making that sound.”
The bajo sexto has opened all the doors for Baca. With the Texmaniacs — his nephew Josh Baca on accordion, and multiinstrumentalists Noel Hernández and Lorenzo Martínez — he has performed for American troops in Iraq and adapted a
native folk song for an audience in China. And completing a circle started when he was a boy, he’s spent years collaborating with Jiménez. Bacas also was a crucial contributor to the supergroup Texas Tornados, and he can be heard playing on a Rolling Stones album.
But Baca’s focus over the past 20 years has been Los Texmaniacs, the conjunto band he started in 1997 in San Antonio.
The group has becone a Texas treasure in that time, preserving and gently modernizing the music Baca heard alongside the rock ’n’ roll of his youth in Albuquerque, N.M. Conjunto exists as a sort of musical ombré effect in which shades of folk music from Mexico and shades of dance music from eastern Europe are blended into a new thing. Los Texmaniacs dig deep into the form’s history, while also finding more contemporary songs that fit into the tradition.
The band just released “Cruzando Borders.” The title is loaded with potential for interpretation, touching on matters socio-political, international, musical and religious.
“We needed a good concept and thought about doing an album of corridos,” Baca says. “But that was too big. We just didn’t realize how many of them there were. So we kept one corrido. But we started thinking about this border thing. It felt like a good time for it, even though I don’t like to get too political. That can get you in trouble. But this music has taken me all over the world to play for all kinds of people. There’s a lot of meaning in this idea of crossing borders; much of the meaning is musical.”
Baca recalls a gig in China where they were invited to an outdoor singalong, accompanying a girl playing the erhu — a two-stringed bowed instrument. A promoter there asked Los Texmaniacs to learn “The Moon Represents My Heart,” a folk song he says is known by nearly everybody in the country.
“The people went berserk,” Baca says. “To hear this song that they all knew their whole lives but played on the bajo sexto, it was something familiar but something they’d never heard.”
Baca toyed with the idea of doing a broadly international collaborative album. But with “Cruzando Borders” he found a subtheme emerging in the songs: Many of them touched on the idea of identity. Most obviously Rumel Fuentes’ “Mexico Americano,” Santiago Jiménez’s “Soy de San Luis” and Rick Treviño’s “I Am a Mexican.” But also songs like Woody Guthrie’s “Deportee,” about a plane crash that killed 28 migrant workers. Guthrie was struck by how coverage of the tragedy excluded any of the victims’ names. Even Willie Nelson’s “Across the Borderline,” which has a dreamy lyrical quality, touches on the identity theme, at least it does to Baca.
He mentions one of his grandmothers, who was Navajo. She married his grandfather, who was from Mexico.
“Basically they were from the same people just across a border,” he says. “So that song sticks with me. It’s a beautiful song, and an identity song. ‘Up and down the Rio Grande, a thousand footprints in the sand’ … . It’s a phenomenal and deep song.”
Some of the songs balance their seriousness with a bit of humor. In “En avión hasta Acapulco” a slighted man buys a one-way plane ticket for his unfaithful lover. Even “Soy de San Luis” — written by Jiménez’s father and once recorded by the Texas Tornados — has comic undertones when a busted relationship results in a phone call for money to get home.
While many of the songs hew close to the border, “Don Luis el Tejano” tells a different story. Juan Barco wrote the song from Washington state, telling the story of a Tejano laborer who migrated to the Pacific northwest for work.
“It’s a cool, genuinely written song that represents a story that doesn’t usually get told,” Baca says.
Barco’s song is at times devastating: “Un zurco largo pasaron los años,” translates “He spent the years in a long furrow,” or “rut.”
“La chicharronera” offers a more playful tone.
“I’ve heard albums from different conjunto guys where the first song sounds like the second and the third,” Baca says. “So we try to change it up a little, but not too much. Nothing we can’t replicate when we do the gig.”
One of those gigs will be at Rockefeller’s this weekend. And they’ll take Baca and Los Texmaniacs further afield from Texas, ambassadors for a music they hope to pass along to another generation.
“Winning a Grammy was great, but my favorite award came from a seven-year-old kid at a school on the south side of San Antonio,” he says. “He wrote, ‘Hello Mr. Baca, my name is Kyle. We’re doing a project about music, and I chose you.’ That floored me more than the Grammy did. To know somebody that age is interested in this music, I put that letter in a trophy case.”
Baca will receive another honor this year. He’s donating his most treasured bajo sexto to the Smithsonian, which will place it in an exhibit in the National Museum of American History along with one of Jiménez’s accordions.
That bajo sexto has its own little story.
It wasn’t Baca’s first. But it was his first that was wellmade, that he played on professionally. His father gave it to him in 1972. Years later, Baca and Jiménez found themselves in the company of the Rolling Stones, adding bass and accordion to “Sweethearts Together,” a song from the 1994 album “Voodoo Lounge.”
Baca brought along his bajo sexto, which caught the attention of Stones guitarist Keith Richards, who immediately tried to buy it from Baca.
“He told me to name my price,” Baca says. “He kept saying, ‘I need this. I need it.’ But I told him it had too much sentimental value.
“It’s funny when I came home off the road, I told my dad. He called me (an idiot). He said I could have bought a bunch of bajos with the money.”
Baca thought he’d pass it down to his son, but says his son never felt drawn to the instrument.
So now it will head to Washington, D.C.
“It’s a pretty big honor,” he says. “There with Flaco’s accordion. And all these firsts. The Wright Brothers’ first airplane. And my first real bajo sexto.”