Think “folksy” but, like other folk music, ranchera contains a world of variety and strangeness. Like US country music, the ranchera songs appeal to their tradition-holding audience through both lyrics and melodies, usually three-chord polkas or waltzes that rise and resolve in predictable ways. Times review – the music of “Ernesto Hill Olvera, sightless organ virtuoso with an extraordinary sense of timing (not unlike George Shearing’s)…” Talk about fun for the whole family.Īguilar covered the gamut of Mexico’s regional styles. The Zacatecans and their two children played to El Norte’s growing immigrant communities with horses, a mariachi ensemble, and – according to a 1966 L.A. Though the Million Dollar Theatre hosted a slew of Mexican acts, from the prolific singer-songwriter José Alfredo Jiménez to Sinaloan brass band Banda el Recodo, no one put on a bigger spectacle than Antonio Aguilar and Flor Silvestre. Here are some of Musart’s greatest songs, as good a place as any to start exploring regional Mexican through the decades. Over the decades, Musart has captured most of those trends and helped set a few of them in motion. Its artists innovate, chase and set trends, and speak to their audiences in familiar ways they haven’t heard before. “Cocktails, on the eighth floor.”Īll of which is to say: Despite its reputation for down-home folklore and singing on horses, regional Mexican is a music biz like any other, and an absolutely modern one at that. “The photo-art department is on the seventh floor,” wrote the building’s architect in a 1970 article in Billboard. Its Musart Tower was a long-time Mexico City landmark and a proudly modern facility, combining practical necessities like silently air-conditioned studios with large helpings of sophisticated glitz. It’s bought up other successful labels like Balboa and Panart. (If any pair of record label honchos has had better names, please let us know in the comments.) Musart has remained a Baptista family business, and an ambitious one. Baptista Covarrubias, a recording industry veteran, having previously started the Peerless label with the German-born Gustavo Klinkwort Noehrenberg. Listen to the best songs from Musart Records on Apple Music and Spotify, and scroll down for our list. Aguilar and Silvestre, of course, also recorded for Musart. In the mid-’60s, at the height of Beatlemania, horse-riding singer Antonio Aguilar and his wife Flor Silvestre were packing wistful crowds into L.A.’s Million Dollar Theatre with their legendary “charrerías” (musical rodeos). Back when Musart was selling Beatles songs to Mexican fans, it was also marketing Mexican music to expats living in El Norte. In the United States, regional Mexican is the most popular Spanish-language radio format its stations routinely score top 10 Nielsen ratings in major markets like L.A. Musart’s reputation, however, is built upon its catalog of what we now call “regional Mexican” music, a mezcla of national genres like mariachi, banda, corridos, norteño, and cumbia.