Mi Música: Traditional Latino Music


Mi Música features the traditional music of Colombia, Panamá and México with Iowa musicans "La Negra" Karin Stein (Colombia), Ed East (Panamá) and Jorge Morales (México) with Las Guitarras de Mexico. Listen to Latino folk songs, musical instruments and talk about how music changes when communities move from one country to another! This is a two-hour program.

Availability: weekday evenings, Saturday days and evenings

Fees to Artists (plus travel): $1,500

Participants: 6

 

Bios of Key Participants:
Ed East was born and raised in Panama City, Panama, where he began studying classical guitar at the National Conservatory. As a high school student he began playing percussion and trumpet, landing his first professional jobs while still in high school. Later he received a scholarship from the Institute of International Education to study music at the University of Northern Iowa where he earned his Bachelor of Music Education degree. He graduated with honors and was inducted into Kaa Lambda National Music Honor Society. While at UNI he studied trumpet with Dr. Keith Johnson and was a member of the orchestra, marching band, jazz ensemble, percussion ensemble, and faculty jazz quintet. He taught instrumental music in grades 5 through 12 from 1984 to 2000.

Ed presents clinics on Latin American music and performance, and multicultural music education. He adjudicates jazz festivals, concert band festivals, and has been a guest conductor for the Northern Festival of Bands presented by the University of Northern Iowa's School of Music. Ed also performs Latin-American acoustic and folk music with Calle Sur, a duo with Colombian-born artist Karin "La Negra" Stein and with Los Llaneros. He has also performed internationally as a jazz vocalist with Ed'E Duz Jazz. His interest in Afro-Cuban music led him to travel to Cuba where he studied with Jesús Alfonso Miró, and Israel Berriel Gonzáles of the famed Muñequitos de Matanzas.

Karin Stein brings to the Cultural Express the perspective of her rural upbringing in Colombia. Very rural, that is. She grew up as a cowgirl in the Llanos (YAH-nos) or plains of eastern Colombia, the country in which her German grandfather settled in the early 1900s. She grew up riding horses and watching red ibises stalk across emerald green rice fields on her father's farm. There was no TV in her neck of the woods or electricity—only a small transistor radio which sometimes worked, and from which she gleaned tidbits of an outer world. She attended school for the first time when she was twelve. In 1980 she moved to Iowa on a student scholarship and has lived here ever since. She performs Latin American music and lectures throughout the United States as a member of Latin ensembles Calle Sur (www.callesur.com) and Los Llaneros (www.losllaneros.com). During the Cultural Express, Karin will perform some of the traditional cowboy tunes with which she grew up as well as a small sampler of Colombia's Caribbean cumbia rhythm and Andean torbellino rhythm.

Las Guitarras de Mexico first came together in 1985. The 4-member group, whose musical tradition is rooted in the Mexico City area, plays regularly in Des Moines, around Iowa and the Midwest. Today, Las Guitarras plays for a variety of community gatherings and festivals. The group represented Iowa in the Global Sounds, Heartland Beats Midwest tour in 2000-2001 and at the 2001 Festival of Iowa Folklife. Lead vocalist and musical director Jorge Morales and was born in Mexico City, where he learned to play the requinto, a small acoustic guitar, from older musicians and recordings.

One of the best known types of Mexican guitar music is associated with trios and quartets in the Mexico City area. A group might consist of a requinto, a guitar, and a guitarron (an acoustic bass guitar), which accompany the vocal harmonies for boleros, cumbias, rancheras, corridos, huapangos, and jarochos, rhythms and styles used to seranade, for listening, and for dancing at home, on the streets and in local clubs. Morales, whose favorite songs are romantic ballads, is known for his meticulous attention to detail, intricate finger work and his lyrical voice.