‘We’re just playing us’
Jenny and the Mexicats perform in Santa Fe this weekend in SWAN Park
Jenny and the Mexicats are known for infusing their music with all sorts of genres — jazz, flamenco, cumbia and rockabilly all make the shortlist.
But according to the band’s double bass player, Luis Díaz, “We’re just playing us.”
Díaz, who goes by the stage name Icho, said there are probably 20 different musical styles that flow through the band’s repertoire.
“We are really open people,” Icho said in a phone interview from Madrid, where the band was touring. “Everything we hear, we want to do. It’s really weird. We never say no to anything. It’s more like, we play in Mexico, we start adding cumbia. We go to the States, we start doing country. … We come to Spain, we play flamenco. We love music, and we just explore a lot.”
Jenny and the Mexicats will perform in Santa Fe this weekend as part of the Santa Fe Bandstand’s Southside concerts.
Díaz described the group’s live
shows as a “rhythmical” dance party.
“We have been doing this 10 years. … We know how to move people,” he said. “We can make people dance, and be really quiet and listen to a song.”
The international group formed in 2008 while the members were all living in Spain. Díaz met Jenny King, a British singer and trumpet player. They connected with flamenco guitarist Alfonso Acosta, aka Pantera, whom Díaz had met as teenager when both were living in Mexico, and playing in punk and rockabilly groups. On drums, including the cajón, Spanish native David Gonzalez Bernardos came on board.
Díaz cited the group’s varying backgrounds for the variety of the styles it plays, and the mix of Spanish and English in the songs. He recalled a long-lasting language barrier in the band’s early days when vocalist King didn’t yet know Spanish. Gonzales Bernardos still doesn’t speak English.
“I think the first conversation of the four of us in the same language happened four years later,” he said.
The Santa Fe show will span the Mexicats’ decade together, Icho said.
Though the set list always changes, he said, there are tracks they always play because of their YouTube popularity — “Tiene Espinas el Rosal,” a smooth Latin tale of heartbreak that the band created in 2015 with Mexico’s Grupo Cañaveral de Humberto Pabón, has garnered 213 million hits online.
There will also be recent songs, including those from its 2017 album “Mar abierto,” or “Open Sea,” which Díaz says uses the theme of water to tie all of its songs together.
“We still believe in albums, not singles,” he said. “We create the album in a conceptual way. We want people to hear the album from the beginning to the end,”
This weekend’s concert is the third 2018 installment in Santa Fe Bandstand’s Southside shows at SWAN Park off N.M. 599, scheduled for each Saturday in July.
Starting last year, the annual summer concert program expanded to a venue outside the downtown Plaza for the first time.
Michael Dellheim, Executive Director of Outside In Productions, the company that organizes Santa Fe Bandstand, said the series’ creators began to question whether they were reaching the entire local community.
“There’s a perception that the Plaza has been taken over by tourists and the people have been squeezed out,” Dellheim said, adding that there are many locals who won’t go downtown. “People are just really happy to feel like they’re being recognized.”
SWAN Park can hold more people than the Plaza in the large grassy area where a portable stage is installed and taken down for each performance. Dellheim said kids can play in the nearby playground.
About 1,300 people attended the first July concert with local Latin band Nosotros, according to Dellheim. He expects that number to be higher for Jenny and the Mexicats, citing the band’s more than 500,000 Facebook likes.
To handle vehicle traffic — the park’s main lot holds just 94 cars — the Bandstand is starting to use six-passenger golf carts to transport people to and from an overflow lot to the west.
Wherever the Mexicats go, Díaz says, there will always be crowds because “there are Mexicans everywhere.”
“Our goal is not just to bring the Mexicans,” he said. “A lot of Mexican bands go to the U.S. and do shows for Mexicans. Our goal is to do more than that.”