For some years now, the tuba has been going through a metamorphosis. Call it, as I do, a Tuba Civil Rights Movement.
People long associated the instrument with polkas, elephants, clowns, and players at the back of the band, imprisoned by conductors’ preconceived notions of what the horn, and those who play it, were capable of.
But today, tuba players have found freedom and, through hard work and focus, they dazzle, unconstrained by others’ views. Many things aided this transformation: improvements in tuba manufacture, more composers writing tuba music, intense competition among players. But much of it has been due to just a change of mind. Tuba players throwing off the psychological binds that kept them confined.
As I wrote my latest book, The Perfect Tuba, I recalled where I saw this liberation first: in Mexico and Los Angeles, among immigrants who crossed illegally in the trunks of cars or swimming rivers to seek better lives.
Many came from Mexican ranchos‚ rural villages far from towns and cities, where life could be brutal and lawless, hard work was a given, and progress was not. “Baile el viernes; cuerpo el sabado” (Dance on Friday; corpse on Saturday) was one saying that nailed the truth of rancho life.
In the cloistered rancho economy, those who were not connected to power or money lived with stifling limitations on what they could achieve, what others believed them capable of. Among their few options was heading north illegally to the United States. The trek and its risks attracted those with the drive to change their lives. First in Los Angeles, then in the U.S., they found they could transform their energies into real economic advancement and widening possibilities. Teenagers arrived here knowing only how to milk cows. Yet they became wizards in tile work, plumbing, electrical, and carpentry; they opened small businesses. They refuted the notions that others held back home.
It may be hard to read this, given all that’s happened in recent months, but this promise of liberation kept people risking death to leave Mexico.
I recognized this exhilarating lifting of the blinders when I saw it again, among tuba players.
The two liberation tales — of the tuba, and of Mexican immigrants — intersect in Los Angeles, with its robust economy, music ecosystem, and culture of breaking with old hierarchies.
The man who freed the tuba in Mexican music didn’t play the tuba at all. Chalino Sanchez was a poor Sinaloan ranchero who came to Southern California and, through his own gumption and desire, became one of the most influential musical figures to come out of the region during a vital period for DIY underground music, following in the footsteps of the late 1970s punk and mid-1980s gangster rap movements.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Chalino renewed — and democratized — the traditional corrido. The Mexican corrido — or ballad — had always been reserved for famous generals, revolutionaries, or bandits. But Chalino wrote corridos of poor, unknown men like himself from those wild ranchos, where murder was common. His best stories were about how some of them had died. Others, still alive, paid him to sing about how women loved them, and enemies feared them.
Chalino produced his own cassettes of these songs, often recorded with tuba-powered bandas, and sold them at car washes, bakeries, and swap meets. None of this happened in Mexico. It happened in the small suburbs on Los Angeles’ southeast flank where Chalino lived the last years of his life, populated by immigrants from the ranchos of Sinaloa and other northwest Mexican states.
His DIY approach captured an audience among those immigrants. Life was better for them now, and they were mostly content to be far from the poverty and violence of their youth. Still, they yearned to be reminded of home. The corridos Chalino wrote and sang slightly off-key, with a pistol in his waistband, took them back.
To many Mexican kids, growing up in L.A., their parents’ ranchera music was old and tired. Chalino turned banda and norteño music into Mexican genres that fit the edgy streets of L.A. in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Mexican kids who once listened only to rap embraced his songs — and the tuba with them. Guys could bump Chalino’s tuba-based banda music from their trucks on Pacific Avenue in Huntington Park, and girls would think they were cool. He packed parties and clubs in South Gate and Lynwood. His fame was mightily enhanced by his own murder in Sinaloa in 1992 at the age of 31.
That post-mortem fame became a phenomenon in itself and gradually took the tuba to a newfound starring role in banda music.
In the years after Chalino’s murder, the banda tuba took another step to freedom, thanks to Alfredo Herrejón, the young tuba player in the Sinaloan group Banda Tierra Blanca. In Mexico, banda leaders were dictatorial and confined the tuba to the simplest bass lines. Tuba players were hidden beneath their bells at the back of the band. No display of musical skill allowed, no starring roles. That was left to trumpeters.
Tierra Blanca’s leader, though, permitted his musicians a bit more freedom, and Herrejón worked out new bass lines for the ranchera classic “Mi Gusto Es” (My Pleasure Is), which Tierra Blanca released in 1997. Tierra Blanca was based in Mexico, but “Mi Gusto Es” and its bass line quickly electrified tuba players in Los Angeles, where Chalino had already set the stage for a new role for the instrument. With that recording, Herrejón “changed the sound of the tuba,” said one player I spoke with. “[It] was no longer an accompaniment. It was like, ‘Here I am, here’s the tuba.’”
“Mi Gusto Es” freed Mexican tuba players of their chains. It also expanded the cross-border tuba rage that began with Chalino Sanchez.
In Southern California, as years passed, tubas became fixtures at backyard quinceañeras, birthday parties, and weddings. Nothing said the immigrant throwing the party had done well in the United States like a big gold tuba booming away. Mexican narcos came to love Chalino the way the Italian mob loved Frank. A tuba at a narco’s party showed he was top dog, at least for the night.
Tuba players in Southern California were soon making triple what trumpeters earned. Some of them grew into stars. They raised their tuba bells several inches, so now they could be seen. A few, like Herrejón, marketed signature mouthpieces. Olvera Music in Los Angeles began coloring the brass. A tuba could be cherry red, jet black, or royal blue, engraved with the name of the banda, or, most amazing of all, the name of the player himself. Such a big deal did tubas become in Mexican L.A. that for a while thieves were stealing them from high schools in South Gate, Compton, and elsewhere.
The tuba mania in Mexican Southern California has subsided somewhat. Yet the horn’s journey in Mexican music still reflects the liberation that so many immigrants I’ve met have experienced. It’s a gradual evolution in realizing what they are capable of, and that this is more than they were led to believe possible by the folks back in the rancho they left when they were teenagers.
Sam Quinones is a long-time independent journalist, formerly with the L.A. Times, and author of five books of narrative nonfiction and The Dreamland Newsletter on Substack. This piece is adapted from a chapter in his new book, The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work. This was written for Zócalo Public Square, an ASU Media Enterprise publication.
