Traditional Music from Mexico

The Estampas de Mexico cultural troupe had been traveling and performing at various cultural festivals for the better part of a decade before releasing this collection for London's ARC Records. The group adds the music of a new Mexican state to its repertoire each year, and this album accordingly highlights the troupe's abilities in performing music from six or seven states around the country. The album starts in the West, rolling through traditional song forms and traditional lyrics from Jalisco and Guerrero. Very briefly stopping on the East Coast with a song or two from the Veracruz region now and then, the group otherwise holds to the Western states, with additional stops in Nayarit and Nuevo Leon. When Estampas de Mexico rely on traditional instrumental forms, the band works well — "El Jarabe Jaliscience" is outstanding. On purely a cappella numbers, the results are a bit more hit and miss — "La Cucaracha" fails to generate either excitement or academic interest, but a Mayan chant is intriguing given the voices of the female vocalists. While the music is almost always performed at a high technical level, there's an odd stiffness to the proceedings, possibly the result of Estampas de Mexico being an (initially) academic cultural troupe rather than one of the street bands that they emulate. There are countless albums of Mexican traditional music available, and this one doesn't necessarily break any new ground aesthetically. However, the breadth of cultural areas covered by the troupe does make the album a fair starting point for the intrepid listener curious about Mexican sounds in general and needing a hint of direction for further forays.