SAN DIEGO.- “With the Mariachi Sol de México, we always carry a different repertoire for the public that has already seen us, year after year and that has become a Christmas tradition.”
This is how Maestro José Hernández began the interview with El Latino anticipating the show that bears the warm title of “Mery Achi Christmas” 2021, which in its fifth edition will be held next Wednesday, December 8, starting at 7:30 pm at the San Diego Balboa Theater, in Balboa Park.
A family show
“I want to invite all the countrymen and all the people who love Mexican music to bring their family, their children, their friends. It is a completely family show, very beautiful. There are still tickets for sale; I hope to be able to greet all the countrymen ”, said the heir to one of the great tradition of mariachi music in Mexico.
Interviewed by telephone, Hernández anticipated: “We have some tributes to different singers and composers, from Javier Solís, Vicente Fernández, Cuco Sánchez, José Alfredo Jiménez, and also classic Christmas songs from Blanca Navidad, El Niño del Tambor. We also pay tribute to the music of Tchaivkoski, from the Nutcracker.
So it’s a great variety of music. It is how beautiful that the public takes away a beautiful memory and also a very positive and beautiful image of what mariachi is ”.
Tribute to Emanuel
In a special way, he also referred to the tribute he has prepared for Emanuel’s music: We have worked with him several times in Las Vegas ”, he specified,“ and I promised him that we would pay him a tribute; Ballads of his that were never recorded with mariachi and we recorded them on this album and we also have other very beautiful songs, some sounds, some rancheras songs and it is a very beautiful and very eclectic album, very varied musically speaking, I am sure it will suit him to be liked a lot by the public ”.
It was also reported that Maestro Hernández and his Mariachi Sol de México are launching their new album, “Embajadores del Mariachi: 40 Aniversario”, with new recordings of their greatest musical successes during the more than 40 years of experience. The CD will be on sale during concerts, as well as in online music stores.
Launches it in February 2022
“The album is already finished,” he stressed, “but we are going to release it in February of next year; He was late because I had health problems two years ago I was detected bone cancer and two months ago I got COVID and I was in the hospital for 26 days; so we had to postpone the album. Right now I’m feeling better; I’m doing the concerts with the boys. They are new potpourris and some new songs written by your server ”.
“We are going to present some songs live in the Christmas program at the Balboa Teather,” he answered a specific question.
About the memories Christmas brings to José Hernández, a child, a teenager and now in his adulthood the Christmas season answered without hesitation:
“For us it was more what it was to get together with the family and my mother towards a delicious pozole or ‘x’, we really celebrated more, look, with food than with gifts; we were not a family that had a lot of money at that time. I was born in ’58, imagine in ’60 we were already in Los Angeles.
And it was difficult because my dad was a Mariachi too and there wasn’t much work at that time. Then somehow they invented ways to celebrate Christmas with my brothers. “
The mariachi, a family tradition
“My family has interpreted Mexican music since 1863”, he recalled, “we are six generations of musicians, so since I was a child I knew that I was going to be part of a mariachi band and look what a blessing, this year I celebrate 40 years with the Mariachi Sol de México, then my dad was a mariachi and all my brothers were mariachis “
“I saw them on television, (when they were) in Mexico City, who did programs there on Televisa, accompanying José Alfredo, Lola Beltrán, Lucha Villa, Marco Antonio Muñiz, that is, it was very nice and I watched the My father’s face was the pride I had when I saw my brothers on television, because at the age of ten I also wanted to start playing the trumpet and at the age of 15 I began to work professionally with the mariachi ”.
“My great-great-grandfather Pedro Hernández, (the founder of the family’s first generation of mariachis), was born around 1843, but he had 17 children, imagine. And one of his sons, Crescencio, who was my great-grandfather and a brother of his, who was also called Pedro, in the data we found about his work, said that it was symphonic, in those days they called musicians symphonic “, he highlighted the interviewee.
So in past generations, he added, there it started with my great-great-grandfather Pedro, then Crescencio and a son of Crescencio, my grandfather José Hernández, who was born in 1901 also played violin as well as my father, Esteban Hernández who was born in 1924.
About his father Esteban he indicated that he had six children who also played mariachi: “My brother Pedro, Crescencio, Antonio, Humberto, Jesús and I, I have two sisters but they don’t play mariachi. But now I already have a daughter who plays the violin and sings and she is going to be in charge of a Mariachi Femenil that I have called Reina de Los Angeles, which was the first mariachi made up of women in the United States in 1994 ”.
For the fifth time
It is the fifth time that we are going to be there in a row. It has already become a tradition and every time they speak to us to invite us.
Noting that this event has been carried out by the elements of Mariachi Sol de México for 25 years, he announced that after their presentation in San Diego they will visit other cities in California, Arizona, Texas, as well as Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon.
Maestro José Hernández has 35 years of experience as a restaurant owner and 47 years as a musician, artist, composer and mariachi educator in the US and Mexico. He recently opened his new restaurant Casa Del Sol Cocina Mexicana in The District at Tustin Legacy. Casa Del Sol, the home of José Hernández’s Mariachi Sol de México, nominated for several Grammy Awards, and the first female ensemble in the United States.
The members of the Mariachi Sol de México are: Trumpets: José Hernández, founder / director, Jorge Contreras, Moisés Ortiz; Violins: Adrián Grijalva, Gustavo Peña, Isau Arellano, Deni Morales, Fernando Moreno, Guadalupe González; Strings: Jorge Flores, Alejandro Ascencio, José “Pepe” Pérez; Harp: Guillermo Acuña.
It is worth remembering that the Balboa Theater is located at 868 Fourth Avenue, in downtown San Diego.
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