01. Paleta (2:40)
02. Head Above Water (3:06)
03. Boogaloo Arizona (2:04)
04. Are We Better Now? (2:53)
05. Curandero (3:22)
06. Early in the Morning (2:33)
07. Eres Oficial (2:28)
08. Me dejo Llevar (4:27)
09. El Chumina (3:14)
10. No Te Esperaba (2:52)
11. Little Space (3:14)
12. Why You Looking That Way (2:32)
13. Bora Bora (2:28)
14. Hoodoo Voodoo Queen (2:29)

Sometimes, things fall together as if they’re simply fated to exist. Orkesta Mendoza found that; as soon as the songs began to flow for Curandero, their second album for the Glitterbeat label, the stars seemed to align and everything was composed, recorded and mastered in just a few short months.

“We did it so fast that the result was light,” explains band leader Sergio Mendoza. “We went along with it without a lot of thought or planning.”

It all came quite naturally. Yet the road to following up 2016’s lauded ¡Vamos A Guarachar! didn’t start out so smoothly. In 2018, the band began work on new material, but it didn’t quite click.

“I went on tour, then went back into the studio in August 2019,” Mendoza recalls. “We wrote all new songs. Going fast and having a different approach meant we weren’t so serious, some of the tracks are very playful.”

It shows; there’s joy in every note. The music flows as if it had been waiting to appear. It crosses and re-crosses that fluid border between Mexico and the United States, mixing rock and pop with ranchera and cumbia alongside snatches of mariachi horns. And hovering over everything is the spirit of ‘60s boogaloo.

“Boogaloo has lyrics in English, Spanish and Spanglish,” Mendoza says. “Joe Cuba mixed Latin rhythms, Soul and R&B together and made something new. The R&B part was a real reference point for me, but the rhythm was obvious in the percussion and the handclaps.”

Mendoza was born in Nogales, Arizona (USA) but grew up across the border in Nogales, Sonora (Mexico). Rock arrived in his life after he moved back to the US, when he was still a young child. Inevitably, the different styles simply blended in his mind and fit together in his life.

“Yeah, I’m definitely a Rock’n’Roll fan,” he says, “but it’s in my DNA to have Mexican and South American styles in my music. In my head, though, Orkesta Mendoza is definitely a rock band.” That deep love of rock crosses time as well as space. “Eres Oficial,” for instance, looks back to the 1950s to evoke the ghost of Buddy Holly in its insistent guitar chords, and the production that puts an emphasis on the drumbeat. The song’s catchy; it sticks in in the brain, with a classic, spare feel.

“Much of the album has that more stripped-back sound,” Mendoza admits, “and the space to let the music through makes it more radio-friendly.”

That’s also very apparent in cuts like “Head Above Water” and “Little Space.” They bristle with hooks and immediacy and the kind of Latin flavours that would have been perfectly at home on old AM radio. They breathe.

“With “Head Above Water,” I was thinking about The Police,” Mendoza says. “You can hear it if you listen; we mixed the drums a bit louder, with the snare up front, the way Stewart Copeland played. And “Little Space” actually started out like The Jam. I wanted Nick Urata from Devotchka to sing on it, I thought he’d be perfect, and I sent him the track with my guide vocal. What he sent back was completely different, but it was so cool that I ended up reworking the song around what he’d done. So what began as The Jam ended up as vintage Mexican Cumbia.”

It hadn’t been Mendoza’s intention, but Curandero quickly became an album filled with guests.

“Originally it was going to be just the band, but it turned into our collaboration album! As we recorded, I kept hearing different voices for the tracks. I knew I wanted Nick, then Joey Burns of Calexico (Mendoza is a longtime member of the band) was just right for guitar and bass on “No Te Esperaba” which also features Chetes from the legendary Mexican rock band Zurdok.”

He even recruited the renowned Spanish singer Amparo Sánchez, who brought her fiery magic to heat up “Boogaloo Arizona,” a track that could almost be Curandero’s clarion call.

“I’ve known her for about 12 years,” Mendoza says. “We run into her at festivals, and she sang with us in Barcelona. Her voice is maturing in a very cool way. We’d talked about collaborating. I sent her the track and she put her voice on it.”

Curandero has a close, intimate feel, but this wasn’t a band playing together in a room; all the musicians came in separately to track their parts. The consistency of sound comes having the touring band drummer and bassist on most of the songs, and from Mendoza’s production which makes everything seem organic and bright. The music leaps out of the speakers.

Even the album’s sole instrumental, the toe-tapping “Bora Bora,” sounds like it was recorded in a dark, smoky club, with the feel of a soulful big band fueled by the retro, percussive power of Mambo.

“That was inspired by a bar called Bora Bora in Nogales, Sonora, a piano bar we used to go to, a guy playing an organ with a drum machine. Old ladies in their red dresses would be sitting there, waiting for men to show up and buy them a drink.”

That vintage sensibility even takes Orkesta Mendoza back further – all the way to the 1940s on the closing track. “Hoodoo Voodoo Queen” is the Andrews Sisters on a fantasy trip south of the border. The harmonies of Moira Smilie, Carrie Rodriguez and Gaby Moreno sparkle over percussion, pedal steel and glorious, honking sax. It’s a distinctly addictive oddity, and yet a perfect way to end the record, the unexpected twist that bursts like a brilliant bubble to close out the disc. And in its own way, it makes perfect sense beside the rest of the songs.

“You know,” Mendoza says, “I made Curandero based around boogaloo, but really, it was just an excuse to rock out. Boogaloo is the root, but Rock’n’Roll, that’s my love, too.”

Curandero. It’s border music, without borders.

1. La Banda (Llego La banda)
2. La Caminadora
3. Luna De Miel
4. Cuando Yo La Conoci (Noche de Luna)
5. Sombras
6. Tanger
7. Tusk

Sergio Mendoza is a true border crosser – born in Nogales, Sonora, but later raised the other side of the Mexico-U.S. divide in Nogales, Arizona… his musical upbringing traversed similar paths.

But it was only upon later arriving further north in Tucson and through his playing, writing and producing with the band Calexico that he came to realise the true potential and positivity of this apparent culture clash.

Having already explored the world of uniquely inventive re-interpretations alongwith Mexican Institute of Sound’s Camilo Lara as the arrangers behind Mexrissey, Sergio returns to the form here on a selection of tunes from the past, variously of Mexican, Cuban, Peruvian, North American …. and North Aegean origin – ranging from the surf-punk twang of “Tanger” (originally composed for just voice and piano), to what Sergio describes as “one of the most beautiful melodies ever written” – “Luna De Miel”, whilst also exploring the poppier end of the spectrum, even veering towards kitsch, on “Sombras” and finishing off with the classic “Tusk” – given a Fleetwood Mex makeover.

Recorded at Wavelab Studio in Tucson, AZ, the EP was produced and arranged by bandleader Mendoza with Orkesta stalwarts Jaime Peters, Sean Rogers and Marco Rosano. Sergio then invited some of his friends to come and sing. Collaborators include Phoenix, AZ native Quetzal Guerrero, taking lead on the title track; Brian Lopez, co-frontman of cumbia-psyche sensations XIXA (and an original member of the Orkesta), provides both harmonies and lead on “Cuando Yo La Conoci”; and opening up proceedings on “Llego La Banda” is Portuguesse fado artist Raul Marques.

says Sergio: “‘La Caminadora’ is our take on these songs that we love so much. It’s also the best example of how the band sounds since it was all recorded and mixed in less than one month. Edits were minimal, therefore creating one of the most raw recordings of the band.”

Vacilando ‘68’s own involvement with Sergio stems from a trip out to Tucson in 2012, when we were introduced to him by Marianne Dissard, with whom Sergio was working at the time as co-writer and main musical foil on her third album ‘The Cat.Not Me’. Over lunch at Sergio’s favourite downtown haunt Cafe Poca Cosa vinyl plans were discussed which finally came to fruition with the release last year of side project Los Hijos De La Montana [critic/DJ Pete Paphides’ most played album of 2017]. Vacilando ‘68 is delighted to be part of this continually evolving journey.

01. Cumbia Volcadora
02. Redoble
03. Misterio
04. Mapache
05. Cumbia Amor De Lejos
06. Mambo a la Rosano
07. Caramelos
08. No Volvere
09. Contra la Marea
10. Igual que Ayer
11. Nada te Debo
12. Shadows of the Mind

“Sergio Mendoza is probably my favourite musician of this time. He has the cumbia and mambo in his DNA, but he has the power to make it sound like today. His Orkesta is as punk as the Sex Pistols and as violent as Perez Prado” — Camilo Lara, Mexican Institute of Sound

“Orkesta Mendoza is one of the best live bands out there. Their music delves into a myriad of directions, rhythms and moods, big band orchestrations mixed with lo fi electronica, vocals en Español together with moving instrumentals.”Vamos a Guarachar” is epic and soulful, it captures that positive spirit of the Southwest” — Joey Burns, Calexico

Something is stirring in downtown Tucson. That’s no great surprise perhaps: Calexico have been sending out missives from the desert for 20 years now, Giant Sand for even longer than that, and the Green on Red revival is surely overdue. These three giants of American popular music ask questions of the form, chiefly because of where they are situated. Let us remind ourselves that this isn’t a big city in the American sense (it’s the country’s 33rd largest), but that its hinterland is indeed as big as it gets. For an hour south, Mexico starts. And this is where things get interesting.

Born in Nogales, Arizona, raised in Nogales, Sonora, multi-instrumentalist and band-leader Sergio Mendoza grew up listening to the Mexican regional styles jostling for headspace in a young, music-mad mind – cumbia mainly, but mambo, rancheras and mariachi too. The border is always a fierce arena of exchange, both commercial and cultural, and so there was American music too. At one point ‘rock and roll, the classics’, as Mendoza himself deadpans, seemed to win out and he stopped playing those ‘Latin styles’ for a good decade and a half.

The return to those sounds was a strong one in 2012’s Mambo Mexicano, co-produced by Mendoza and Joey Burns of Calexico – a band for which Mendoza has become an increasingly integral touring and recording member. While that record had a studied air, tentative in parts (as befits the renewal of an old love affair), ¡Vamos A Guarachar! is another beast entirely: by turns raucous (‘Cumbia Volcadora’, featuring Mexican electronic pioneer Camilo Lara), tender (‘Misterio’, surely Salvador Duran’s finest moment with the band so far) and plain serious fun, as in ‘Contra La Marea’ and ‘Mapache’, it also bears a robust electronic edge, a keen pop sensibility and all the hallmarks of Mendoza’s love of 60s rock, with the closing track, ‘Shadows of the Mind’, sure to be included if anyone decides to update the Nuggets collection for the 21st century. This is roundabout way of saying that it appears to have everything, but never too much of anything. Focused, fierce and beautifully executed by a superbly drilled set of musicians, it is a record that fully matches the band’s explosive live performances.

Nogales, Sonora, Nogales, Arizona: this is what the border looks like here – for now. To talk about borders and the diasporas they create, is to be pitched headlong into our era’s most urgent debate, marked by Trump’s lurid obscenities and the lines being hastily reinstated across Europe. Orkesta Mendoza’s contribution to that debate is to show us what the border sounds like and what masterpieces can be achieved by honest cultural exchange. What we decide to do with that information is up to us. With this record, however, we’ll have an awful lot of fun deciding.

You could, of course, take the trip to Tucson yourself, to the home of this essential set of field recordings. The scene hangs out together, so … if the stars align and their frantic tour schedules permit, you might see any number of folks from Calexico, Giant Sand or up-and-coming cumbia rockers Xixa deep in conversation somewhere in town with a quiet young man in black. That’s Sergio. Right now, in this endless game of Tucson tag, Orkesta Mendoza are IT.

Orkesta Mendoza:

Sergio Mendoza: vocals, keyboards, guitars, drums, percussion, programming, horns
Salvador Duran: lead vocals “Cumbia Volcadora,“ “Misterio” & “Cumbia Amor De Lejos”
Sean Rogers: bass, lead vocal “Shadows of the Mind”
Marco Rosano: sax, clarinet, trombone, keyboards, guitar
Raul Marques: backing vocals
Joe Novelli: lap steel

Selected guests:

Camilo Lara (Mexican Institute of Sound): voice “Cumbia Volcadora”
Joey Burns (Calexico): upright bass “Misterio”
John Convertino (Calexico): Drums “Misterio”
Gabriel Sullivan (Xixa): vocals “Nada te Debo”
Jairo Zavala (DePedro): vocals “Nada te Debo” & backing vocals “Misterio”
Ceci Bastida: vocals “Caramelos”
Quetzal Guerrero: vocals “Caramelos”
Tom Hagerman: string arrangement “Misterio”
Larry Lopez: drums
Jack Sterbis: percussion
Rick Peron-Trumpet