BIOGRAPHY
A nine-piece ensemble, Quetzal grew out of the artist-activist community of East Los Angeles that was shaped by the tumultuous political events that shook Los Angeles and Mexico in the 1990’s. Fueled by the drive to bring a contemporary urban reality to foundational forms of music like son--a Latin American song form that contains a story and different combinations of African, indigenous and Spanish rhythms, depending on its region--Quetzal is equally fueled by the drive to affirm human dignity through art.
In 1993, in the midst of a Chicano arts renaissance ignitedby the Rodney King verdict and subsequent uprisings, Quetzal Flores, a guitaristand the son of two activists who came of age during the Chicano Movement of the late 60’s and early 70’s, decided to put together a band. The band would follow in the Chicano arts tradition. It would address the economic marginalization and cultural denigration that most of the various band members had experienced and observed all around them, using Spanish, English, Spanglish and Mexican forms and icons as cultural affirmation. The idea was to return to a more blatant grass-roots agenda, yet more spiritually infused than the one that the previous generation had forged.
A politicized Chicano art scene was flourishing in Los Angeles, once again, with poets, painters, musicians and hundreds of young people who came to hear, in their own cultural context, uncompromising critiques of the intolerable disparities the riots had exposed. With guitar driven folk-rock and melancholic melodies—the first incarnation of its sound—the band Quetzal began painting neighborhood portraits that revealed a community with profound strengths and profound wounds thus becoming one of the Chicano scene’s cornerstones. Then another political earthquake hit. On January 1 st 1994, calling themselves the Zapatista Army for National Liberation, indigenous people from the jungles of Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas attacked local governments, announcing that they would no longer tolerate the conditions that were killing their communities from hunger and disease and they demanded the right to basic needs, education and dignity. The Zapatista movement catalyzed the L.A. Chicano art scene, the parallels were clear.
The band Quetzal, along with the other artists, responded by organizing and playing for fundraisers in support of the Mexican indigenous movement and making pilgrimages to Chiapas. Most importantly they became ardent students of “Zapatismo” and of their central concept of autonomy, as Flores explains it, “That what we have in our community is enough to create what we need.” According to the Zapatistas, a community can address injustice, by examining its own reality and posing the questions that will eventually lead to finding solutions. Infused and on fire with these principles, Quetzal ferociously made and played music. This experience climaxed in 1997’s cultural Encuentro between Chicanos, Mexicanos and Indigenous people, held in Mexico, that the band helped organize. They participated in exchanges of performances, discussions, and in workshops in which they wrote songs collaboratively with the Zapatistas.
Although still rock and folk driven, they had started their exploration of son—especially son jarocho from Veracruz, Mexico and son montuno from Cuba--and bolerothe popular Mexican romantic ballad, originally from Cuba, that relies on guitar and voice. Flores started to play jarana and cuatro, the guitars used for jarocho. Lead singer Martha González, brought a powerhouse voice. From the moment she joined the band, she became part of the songwriting team and contributed to the percussion section with congas and zapateado, a Mexican style of dancing on a box (during the inquisition, the playing or owning a drum was illegal, therefore instead of hands on skin, the people used feet on wood). With a long history of singing in traditional Mexican styles, Gabriel Gonzalez sang background and duets that brought vocal polish to the group. Dante Pascuzzo, an award winning bassist, expanded the band’s R&B and jazz feel, with his expertise in both these genres. Martha remembers the first album fondly, “It was uncontrolled energy and like any untamed force, it came with a big bang, and it was beautiful.”
Brazilian born Edson Gianesi brings his expertise in percussion instruments from around world therefore creating deftly organized percussion arrangements together with drummer Kiko Cornejo who was trained in western classical and world percussion. In addition to the training on the streets and in the jungles, many of the members of Quetzal have music related degrees from some of the best Universities around the world and they all either currently or in the past work as directors, coordinators, and workshop teachers of after-school arts programs in Los Angeles public school system.
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