Music to Go With Raza’s Day of Dead

In Latin America, death is seen as an inevitable, natural part of life. This healthy attitude toward our potentially disturbing fates finds expression in annual Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebrations, when many nations pay their respects to their late loved ones.

Since it opened in 1971, the Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park has offered one of San Diego’s larger annual Dia de los Muertos festivals. This year, for the first time, the Centro’s Dia de los Muertos celebration is being combined with its Chicano Music Festival, now in its second year.

The festivities begin tonight with a dance from 9 to midnight, featuring the up-and-coming Los Angeles-based Latin jazz band Shades of Jade, with special guest Turiya. Celebrations continue all day Saturday with a variety of bands.

Though Dia de los Muertos is characterized by some Halloween-like symbols, the two holidays have little else in common.

“I know that a lot of people really get that confused,” said Eloise de Leon, performing arts coordinator for the Centro Cultural. “This is really a day when we commemorate our deceased love ones.

“I guess the reason for the confusion is the imagery we use--the skeletons, candy skulls or little coffins.

“This day is really to acknowledge that life and death are not so separate from each other, they’re both intertwined. We live and then we die, it’s an inevitable thing that’s going to happen, it’s a duality.”

De Leon expects more than 3,000 people to attend this weekend’s festivities.

Saturday’s lineup is an eclectic mix of Latin music, including Mexican ranchero songs from Duerto Moreno, authentic Andean folk music with Francisco Duchicela, guitarist Ramon (Chunky) Sanchez, vocalist Carlota Hernandez, Francisco Gonzalez (co-founder of the Los Angeles-based Latin rock band Los Lobos), cumbia, salsa and other Latin music by Mosaico, and contemporary fusion from the Tijuana group Pieles en Venus.

Shades of Jade, Friday’s headliner, may be headed for bigger things.

Band leader Bill Laster drives the music with his spirited approach to timbales. He grew up in New York, where he was smitten with Afro-Cuban rhythms.

“The guy I liked most was Willie Bobo,” Laster said. “He had a free style, a creative style. He was very modern, very much in touch with a jazz feeling.”

Laster formed Shades of Jade five years ago in Los Angeles, and the group has since recorded three self-produced CDs, the last of which will be released early next year.

Shades of Jade’s repertoire mixes material from several different eras.

“I’ve taken some from each,” Laster said. “We do classic jazz, like ‘Silver Serenade’ or ‘A Night in Tunisia,’ some originals by me, even things that fit more in the fusion era (Shades of Jade includes electric bass and electric piano). We don’t stick in one groove, we play a little of each style.”

Since Shades of Jade’s Friday night show is a dance, Laster said he plans to pick an especially lively mix of music.

Duchicela, one of the more intriguing bands from Saturday’s schedule, is made up of six young musicians from Cacha, a village high in the Andes mountains in Ecuador. At the moment, they are staying with a friend in San Diego, trying to heighten awareness of their music in southern California.

The group was founded in 1978 by Victor Leon, who plays guitar, mandolin and requinto , a tiny 12-string guitar, and Pablo Cayambe, who sings and plays wind instruments.

Duchicela is keeping alive strains of folk music made for centuries in their native land.

“Some people who have listened have told me they think the music resembles Irish music, or music from the Appalachians,” said Francisco Duchicela, a friend of the band (the musicians don’t speak much English).

“My own personal feeling of the music is that, sometimes I feel like I’m in heaven, or flying with clouds and birds over mountains, or like I’m riding on the sea with friends, or like I could be on a trip from one world to another.”

As Duerto Moreno, Delia Moreno and her daughter, also named Delia, sing and play guitars to keep alive different musical traditions.

“I came from Tucson to make this program because we were among the founders of the Centro Cultural in 1971,” said the senior Moreno. “We perform Mexican ranchero music, both traditional songs and my own compositions. The reason I sing this--my parents were cattle ranchers, they owned an 800-acre ranch north of Tucson. I was born into many cultures. My father was a guitarist-singer, my mother was a poetess.”

Although this weekend’s musicians said they don’t plan to select special music for the Day of the Dead, they appreciate the healthy attitudes toward death that the occasion promotes.

“When I was in Mexico on the Day of the Dead, people would go to the graveyard, hang out and party, bring food, have a great old time,” said Turiya. “It’s a very different approach (than North America’s). You face death down, you look at it, and that frees you to live. That’s common to most societies, but not ours.

“We don’t deal with death, we don’t talk about it. They go out and jump into it, and feel all those feelings, and do all the grieving they have to do, and acknowledge that they are willing to die.

“What comes out of that is a desire to live, to appreciate life.”

And De Leon believes the Dia de los Muertos celebration is important not just as a joyous, traditional holiday, but because it keeps alive the original culture of this area’s growing Latino population.

“What Duchicela is doing is parallel with what it is Chicanos are trying to do, which is to claim their heritage, not to assimilate into a different society and forget their past and forget where they come from.”

Tonight’s Dia de los Muertos dance at the Centro Cultural de la Raza begins at 9. Admission is $5. Saturday’s music festival costs $2. It begins at 11 a.m. with Duchicela and ends with a 3 p.m. set by Pieles en Venus’ (Venus in Furs). A stage will be set up outside the Centro building, on Park Boulevard. Visitors are invited to place their own symbolic offerings to dead loved ones on an altar set up inside the Centro, where the exhibition “Counter Colon-ialismo,” a revisionist view of the Spanish invasion of the New World, is also on view.