Conjunto and Orquesta

Please read Manuel Peña on conjunto and orquesta. Here is some amazing music to accompany your reading. Spend some time with this great music, listen carefully with headphones on. In general, embedded videoclips are more important than examples that are just linked.

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Conjunto, the pre-war generation

Narciso Martínez, again, El Huracán del Valle, letting the bajo sexto do what an acordion's left hand usually does, the better to go bananas with the right hand.

Pedro Ayala, with tololoche joining the accordion and bajo sexto on the schottische.

Bruno Villareal, the first to record: here

Lolo Cavazos, ripping it up as an old guy: here

Santiago "El Flaco" Jiménez, Sr., with tololoche,  here

Conjunto, the post-war generation

Valerio Longoria sings and plays a ranchera, with drum set.

Valerio Longoria again, performing a bolero (called, "Baby, Don't Smoke in Bed") - note the guitar, drum kit, and more complicated minor chord progression

Tony de la Rosa, a great song here

El Conjunto Bernal had a very professional sound - great tenor voice (Gerardo Reyes), harmony singing, Eloy Bernal's agile bajo sexto, and not one but two sick virtuoso chromatic, rather than diatonic, accordions (more buttons, more ways for your polka to go horribly wrong) played by Óscar Hernández and Paulino Bernal:

(Here they are many years later, after going Christian, doing a cumbia against horoscopes and other forms of "witchcraft")

And then, after the 1960s...

.. conjunto music went back to older, more conservative styles

(like Ramón Ayala and the Bravos del Norte)

Orquesta music

The early, conjunto-infused orquesta of Beto Villa

(Here are links to excerpts from Villa's earliest recordings, the local mega-hits "Por que te ríes" and "Las delicias")

And then BV in the '50s, doing his mambo/tropical thing:

Jaitón smoothie Balde González and his orquesta: "Amor vencida"

More orquesta (on the ranchero side) - Isidro López's "texachi." Notice the accordion alongside the big band:

Little Joe and the Latinaires:

Little Joe again, here in English singing rock/rhythm & blues:

In a similar vein, Sunny and the Sunliners more Tejano here and below, singing straight-up Sam Cooke-style Rhythm & Blues :

On the jaitón side of orquesta, Sunny and the Sunliners (above), Latin Breed, and Jimmy Edwards.

On the ranchero side, Isidro López (above), Agustín Ramírez, Freddie Martínez, and Joe Bravo

Peña's post-Chicano orquesta experimentation: Little Joe y La Familia's "Las nubes" (here in English) - (love the prog-rock lick at 0:31):

Extra bonus video - Little Joe's 1986 "Redneck Meskin Boy" here