With Guitars Like Machetes: Son Jarocho 101

By Jasmine Garsd, NPR/Alt.Latino

“His guitar strums, they sounded like his machete whacks.” That’s how musician Fredi Vega describes his grandfather’s guitar work in this week’s Alt.Latino, which is all about the Mexican music style known as Son Jarocho.

When Vega told me this, I remembered the book Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man, by evolutionary neurobiologist Mark Changizi. Changizi proposes that language evolved from humans imitating the sounds in nature, while music emulates the sounds of humans moving. It’s one of many theories about the origins of music and language, and it’s much more complicated than that, but it came to mind when Vega told me about his grandfather, who was also a Son Jarocho musician. As was his great-grandfather, and his great-great-grandfather; Vega comes from five generations of musicians. They all played that beautiful music that mixes guitar strums like machete whacks, vocals that are almost like yodeling, lyrics that can be erotic, crude and/or breathtakingly romantic, and a dance style that looks like a hybrid between flamenco and tap.

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[Photo courtesy of Alt.Latino]

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