Sones de México Ensemble Timeline 1994-2024

~1994: Victor Pichardo, Juan Díes, Gonzalo Córdova and René Cardoza form Sones de México Ensemble. Their first public performance is on April 9 at Taller Mexicano de Grabado, an art gallery in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood for an exhibit opening commemorating the death of Mexican Revolution land rights hero Emiliano Zapata. Drummer Raul Fernández joins shortly afterward. During the first year, Sones de México completes 54 public performances.
~1996: The quintet releases their first album, ¡Que Florezca! (Let it Bloom), a four-part suite of songs based on the elements of Air, Water, Fire, and Earth. Guests on the album include Guillermo Contreras and Gonzalo Camacho of Grupo Jaranero. Other guests (Ghanian Yewe drum master Gideon F. Alorwoyie, Flamenco guitarist Héctor Fernández, and Chicago musicians Howard Levy and Stuart Rosenberg) hint at the group’s early interest in cross-cultural collaborations.
~1999: Sones de México Ensemble began long-time cross-cultural collaborations with Irish fiddler Sean Cleland, and with CSO trumpet player John Hagstrom and his brass quintet, both of whom would record in the band’s albums.
~2002: The group records and releases their second album, Fandango on 18th Street. The album captures the spirit of a “fandango,” or dance party, on the main street of Pilsen, the artistic heart of Chicago’s Mexican community. Later that year, Gonzalo Córdova leaves the group and is replaced by Hermo Contreras. A few months later, the group is invited to perform live on A Prarie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor, a syndicated radio show, and they are heard by 5 million people across the U.S.
~2007: The group released their third album, Esta Tierra es Tuya (This Land is Your Land). The album serves as an immigrant manifesto, as exemplified by the title song, a norteño arrangement of the great Woody Guthrie song that celebrates all of America’s people. The album also marks a new confidence in the band’s musicianship and ambitions by including original arrangements of music from other genres, including Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 and Led Zeppelin’s Four Sticks. The album is nominated for a Latin GRAMMY™ in the “Best Folk Album” category. The band travels to Las Vegas for the ceremony. The ensemble also records two songs for YoYo Ma’s Silk Road Project: “Crossroads,” featuring a Chinese-Mexican collaboration with the Yellow River Performing Arts Ensemble (this material was released years later in the band’s 2013 album). On May 1, members of the ensemble marched among thousands of protestors on Chicago’s Grant Park to demand immigration reform. Images of this march can be seen in the band’s music video for Esta Tierra Es Tuya (This Land Is Your Land).
~2008: The group’s third album is nominated for a GRAMMY™ in the “Best Mexican/Mexican-American Recoding” category, and it is invited to perform at the World Folksong Festival in Beijing China following the Olympic Games.
~2009: The band does a serendipitous, impromptu performance of “La Bruja.” a son jarocho, with blues harmonica master Billy Branch at the Chicago Blues Festival Kick-Off Party at Buddy Guy’s Legends bar. That year, the ensemble began a fruitful relationship with the National Endowment for the Arts and produced a series of annual U.S. tours featuring concert performances and educational outreach programs like “Beyond the Music: A Musical Geography of Mexico”, “Corridos: Mexican Tragic Ballad Songwriting Workshop”, and the syndicated radio show “La Hora del Son” expanding their reach to 40 U.S. states.
~2010: Sones de México continues on a rich musical course with not one, but two new album releases: Fiesta Mexicana, a 2-CD children’s album with narratives in both English and Spanish and íViva La Revolución!, which celebrates the centennial of the Mexican Revolution. The group toured coast-to-coast promoting their albums at the Getty Villa Museum in Santa Monica, CA, and Carnegie Hall in New York City. On November 20, the group releases ¡Viva la Revolución! exactly 100 years after the start of the Mexican Revolution at the House of Blues in Chicago. Special guests include Guillermo Velazquez y Los Leones de la Sierra de Xichú and Alejandro Flores of the Mexican rock band Café Tacvba. In the summer the group opens for trumpet player Doc Severinsen, of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show fame. Severinsen sits in with Sones for a memorable performance of the mariachi classic “El Niño Perdido.”
~2011: Some band members begin independent musical projects. Fiddler Juan Rivera forms the son huasteco-style trio Los Condenados Huastecos with Alex Chavez (huapanguera) and Carlos García (jarana). This trio also collaborates frequently with the Mexican Dance Ensemble troupe. Music Director Victor Pichardo forms Los Pichardo, a family band with his two sons Yahvi (vihuela) and Zacbe (harp) and daughter Gabriela (violin) specializing in son planeco.
~2012: In anticipation of the coming turn of the Mayan calendar, which many had sensationalized as the “end of time”, the group conceives of a new multi-media stage show to celebrate the dawn of a new age. The work, titled 13 B’ak’tun, incorporates original compositions as well as works drawn from jazz, Irish, and Chinese traditions. Sones de México begins a collaboration with the Academy of Mexican Dance and Music, a Chicago-based Mexican folkloric dance company, who appear in face paint and stylized Mayan costumes for this concert. Its premiere coincides with the calendar turn in December 2012.
~2013: The album, 13 B’ak’tun is released on CD, with original cover art by noted Pilsen artist Héctor Duarte, one of the artists who once invited Sones de Mexico Ensemble to perform for the first time in 1994.
~2014: The ensemble begins a new collaboration with the group Third Coast Percussion while doing an artistic residence for the Rush Hour Concerts in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood. The residence included a concert featuring J.S. Music performed with Mexican instruments at St. James Cathedral and broadcast on WFMT 98.7FM. The group celebrates its 20th anniversary in September with an all-star concert at Chicago’s Pritzker Pavilion featuring past and current members and several special guests from across their many collaborations. Nearly 10,000 people were in attendance. Also this year, after conducting a year-long feasibility study and competitive analysis funded by the Arts Work Fund, Sones de Mexico Ensemble opened a Mexican Music School with an immersive, Spanish-language, music and culture curriculum and held its first guitar classes at Casa Juan Diego Youth Center in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood. The program later expanded to Centro Romero in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood.
~2015: Sones de México performs three ambitious concerts premiering new concepts and collaborations. The Afro-Mexican Blues Connection featured a collaboration with Chicago blues group Billy Branch and the Sons of Blues. It explored the musical and cultural similarities and differences between the African Diaspora in Mexico and the United States. The Ensemble then collaborated with The Irish Music School of Chicago to tell the story of Los San Patricios (the St. Patrick’s Batallion), Irish immigrants to the U.S. who fought on the side of Mexico during the U.S. invasion of 1846-47. Finally, the Ensemble arranged, composed, and performed a new live score to silent cinema pioneer Sergei Eisenstein’s lost classic ¡Que Viva México! for the Chicago International Music and Movies Festival. Also in 2015, Ensemble co-founder Juan Díes toured the country leading a workshop on Corrido songwriting, including one at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. that included the participation of new U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. The group opened the 10th Latino Music Festival with a multimedia performance of Cantata Santa María Iquique, Chilean composer Luis Advis’ story about the dramatic struggle of the workers in the salt fields of northern Chile in the early part of the 20th Century.
~2016: Sones de México Ensemble participated in the 20th season of Chicago SummerDance in Grant Park, headlined the official Indianapolis Mexican Independence Day ceremony, and took the “Los San Patricios: the Irish Soldiers of Mexico” concert collaboration to Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana.
~2017: Sones de Mexico Ensemble performed a concert during the totality of the Great American Solar Eclipse. Later that year the ensemble, among other musicians, accompanied The Ballet Folklórico of Guadalajara at the Pritzker Pavilion of Millennium Park, traveled to Washington, DC to celebrate Día de los Muertos at The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), and celebrated their second fundraiser gala event, titled “¡Que Florezca! (Let it Bloom)” commemorating the 20-year anniversary of their first album.
~2018: The ensemble joined long time collaborator The Mexican Folkloric Dance Company of Chicago for their 35th Anniversary Gala Concert, at the Studebaker theater and joined Billy Branch and the Sons of Blues, again, for two concerts as part of the Chicago History Museum “Amplified” exhibit on the history of the Chicago Blues.
~2019: Sones de México Ensemble joined forces with Orbert Davis and the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic at Chicago’s Jay Pritzker Stage in MIllennium Park to explore the Mexican experience in Chicago, through a jazz perspective, for their Immigrant Stories project. They also headlined the opening day at the 10th Mole de Mayo Festival, in Chicago’s historic Pilsen neighborhood, and received recognition from the festival organizers for their 25th Anniversary, which they celebrated later in the year with their second fundraiser gala event.
~2020: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most Sones de México performances and programming were postponed or canceled. However, the ensemble pivoted and presented several live stream versions of their signature program “Beyond the Music: A Musical Geography of Mexico,” and offered their music classes online.
~2021: In association with the Chicago Park District/Night Out in the Parks, Sones de México collaborated with the Tony Award-winning Goodman Theatre to present “Zulema” with a script commissioned by the band from Chicago playwright Dolores Diaz. This spectacular musical journey followed the protagonist, young Zulema, many thousands of miles from her Chiapas home in Mexico to Chicago crossing a broad and diverse musical landscape along the way. Following that production, Sones de Mexico Ensemble played the part of the on-stage mariachi band in the Goodman Theatre production of the mainstage play “American Mariachi,” which had been postponed due to COVID-19 the previous year.
~2022: In partnership with Metropolitan Family Services (MFS), and founded by the Ralla Klepak Foundation, Sones de México embarked on a two-year project to expand their Mexican Music School. The project included curriculum development, textbooks, and teacher training. The program was introduced at MFS North Center with a Summer Camp that served 44 new students from the Belmont-Cragin and Hermosa areas.
~2023: The Mexican Music School launched guitar and violin classes at their Belmont-Cragin site, which added 76 new students through the Spring and Fall sessions, growing the number of students to over 150 across the three sites (Pilsen/La Villita, Rogers Park, and Belmont-Cragin/Hermosa), and online. The school also launched a Teacher Training Camp which was completed by 16 prospective instructors. Also this year, the ensemble introduces “The Black Music of Mexico,” a captivating series of live performances and conversations with Chicago’s African American neighborhoods, exploring the presence of African culture in Mexico. Also, in partnership with AgeGuide and Sounds Good Choir, Juan Díes led an online singalong program for Spanish-speaking seniors and people with dementia in Chicago’s collar counties: DuPage, Grundy, Kane, Kankakee, Kendall, Lake, McHenry, Will and Cook.
~2024: Marks Sones de México Ensemble 30th Anniversary. The ensemble traveled to southern Illinois to perform in the path of the second North American total eclipse in seven years. They also launched a multi-sensory variation on their “Beyond the Music: A Musical Geography of Mexico,” a foodways edition featuring a cultural history of diverse regional cuisines from Mexico prepared live and explained by Chef Dudley Nieto to accompany the Ensemble’s music. Later this year they will hold their 30th Anniversary fundraising Gala dinner at the National Museum of Mexican Art.