Mariachi Music Gets Some Respect, Center Stage : Culture: The director of Los Camperos is glad to see the art form being accepted beyond cantinas, to concert halls.

For most people, the mention of mariachi music conjures up images of cantinas or outdoor fiestas. For Natividad Cano, director of Mariachi los Camperos de Nati Cano, mariachi is an art form, and its move from cantina to concert hall is long overdue.

“People are finally realizing that the mariachi musician has (too much) talent to only play weddings and pinata parties,” said Cano, whose group plays in Costa Mesa today. “They realize that the music is here now for 150 years--and that maybe it’s going to stay for another 150.

“A concert like this gives us a chance to show the public that there is more to mariachi than ‘La Bamba,’ ‘Cucarucaru’ and ‘Besame Mucho.’ ”

The Mariachi Los Camperos performance is the opening concert of the 40th-anniversary season for the Orange County Philharmonic Society, the presenting group best known for bringing virtually all major touring orchestras to the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Ironically, if the center’s former president, Thomas R. Kendrick, had had his way, the concert wouldn’t have taken place. Kendrick said he didn’t feel ethnic performances were appropriate for the Segerstrom Hall stage. But after some acrimonious debate earlier this year, the center’s board ultimately relented and granted the OCPS permission--at least for this season--to present such programs as Los Camperos, Les Ballet Africains (Nov. 20) and the Chieftains (Dec. 6).

Elsewhere, Cano is playing a wide variety of venues, including concert halls, all over North America with singer Linda Ronstadt; the ensemble recently returned from the Midwest and Canada and will tour Tennessee later this month.

“People, they’re hungry for this kind of music,” Cano said in a phone interview from his restaurant, La Fonda, in Los Angeles.

Saturday’s program will feature dance troupes representing three regions of Mexico.

Ballet Folklorico de la Fonda will perform dances from the Huasteca region--”more elegant, typical of a fiesta,” Cano noted--and, accompanied by Conjunto Jarocho Hueyapan, dances from Veracruz--”more tropical, white dresses and fans.” Ballet Folklorico Ollin will be featured in music from the state of Jalisco: “aggressive, more happy, even more fiesta, everybody yelling, ‘Ha ha ha,’ and stomping; most closely associated with mariachi.”

Mariachi los Camperos will perform, among other works, “Huapango” (Fiesta) by Pablo Moncayo Garcia. The piece was inspired by mariachi music but, according to Cano, was written in 1941 for the Mexico City Philharmonic. There will also be an overture written by Cano.

“Before the opera, they always have an opening number, so we will also have an overture,” said Cano, who was born in Ahuisculco in the state of Jalisco in 1933. “It tells my (early) life: when I started with music, when I played the small towns, when I went away by train. . . . You will hear the melody when I fell in love.

“I even used Strauss’ ‘Blue Danube Waltz.’ In those days, 40 years ago, way back, I remember that people would always ask, ‘Do you know how to play “Blue Danube?” ’ If you would not play it, they would say, ‘Then you are not mariachi,’ that you were no good. They thought that you had to play classical music to be good. What a mistake!”

In fact, Cano studied violin at the Academia de Musica in Guadalajara, and classical music was his second choice for a career. He lectures on ethnomusicology at UCLA, and in 1990, he received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Cano has been director for more than 30 years of Mariachi los Camperos, which was formed in Tijuana but has been based in Los Angeles since 1969.

Cano compared classical and mariachi techniques.

“A lot of music is a black-and-white situation, no in-between,” Cano said. “The mariachi plays kind of imperfect, and for a musician not used to it, it is difficult because it is imperfect. If you just write it on a sheet, it is impossible to interpret, because it comes from a style way back. Even the same note, you make it shorter or longer according to style of the region you’re playing. Jalisco or Huasteca, we would have to play it differently.

“It’s like cowboy music,” he continued. “You almost have to be born with it. How they hold the bow on the violin is so different from watching the philharmonic (violinists) play. I’m not sure you can learn it at a university.”

Cano learned to play mariachi music in a band with his father and grandfather; he began at age 8.

“I enjoyed the music, but some of (the life) was not so nice,” Cano recalled. “There were some disappointments. We’d play salons, and I remember one day playing for one guy and he decided not to pay us. They took us in a taxi, (but) we came back home walking, and I was hungry. But that was part of it. My idea now is to get the mariachi out of the cantinas.”

Cano’s ensemble was among several featured on Ronstadt’s mariachi albums “Canciones de Mi Padre” and “Mas Canciones.” Their own recording, “Canciones de Siempre,” has just been released on the PolyGram Latino label. He credits Ronstadt with changing public perception of the genre and opening the doors to a wider audience.

Cano spoke excitedly of the upcoming concert at the Performing Arts Center, which he called the group’s Orange County debut “in that kind of place.”

“Nobody’s going to get up to get a beer (while we play),” he said. “People really go there to listen to the music and watch the dances, which is different from playing in a park for 10,000 people. . . . We can be creative.

“I once had an interview with Dan Rather at an international mariachi conference, and I remember he asked me what was next. I said, ‘One of these days we’re going to be in a concert hall doing a concert by ourselves.’ At that time, I had been in a concert hall once, 20 years before, but we were backing somebody else--which was also great.

“This time, nobody is in front of us. To me, this is an accomplishment.”

* Mariachi los Camperos de Nati Cano plays tonight at 8 at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Presented by the Orange County Philharmonic Society. $13-$30. (714) 556-2787.