Why Mexicans don’t admit to playing the slide trombone

I went into the excellent and apparently men-only Cantina La Fuente in Guadalajara, Jalisco this morning and ordered a beer. An aggressive-looking youngish guy further down the bar started mouthing off loudly about gringos, so I went over to see what his problem was, and it turned out he was a frustrated sysadmin looking for his next drink rather than for a fight.

So what do you do, he asked. Various shit, I said, including music. In fact, I said, I play the trombone, toco el trombón. And the whole bar straight away started screaming with laughter. Eh, I said, so the paralytically drunken doctor leant against the wall on the other side of Mr Windows 2003 came round and showed me on his cellular a fascinating clip from the title of which I inferred that tocar el trombón (or la trompeta) is a Mexicanism for giving a blowjob–try miming if you don’t get it.

The strange thing is that I haven’t seen slide trombones in action anywhere in Mexico; maybe valves make sense in a country without many pavements for a push-me-off-the-pavement specialist.

(Mainly thanks to MP3 goddess, Madu D, I’ve listened to a whole lot of music here. I already knew a bit of banda stuff–banda is souped-up norteña with New Orleans/Dirty Dozen-type instrumentation–and I love some of the new things, but the most interesting tracks I’ve heard have been from a wild bunch called Nor-Tec aka Nortec, who mix new norteña in general and banda sousaphone licks in particular with kind-of screwed up techno.)

Related posts

• Pavement proxemics
• John Triggs
• Western values
• The Calathumpian Band and its horse-fiddle, great trombone and gyastacutas
• Mr Sánchez

Comments

1. Yotro sez:
   12 August 2006 at 8:50 AM

   I have fond and fuzzy memories of La Fuente. Negro Modelo beer straight off slabs of ice. The band sawing away on its island-balcony.

   Have you visited the Octavio Paz library at the University of Guadalajara? Well worth it. Beautiful proportions. Also murals which I remember as more elegant than Orozco´s … elegant execution, at least, the ideas being crude commie.

   Avenida Colón, Colonia Centro.

   http://servicios.cencar.udg.mx/iberoamericana/inicio.php

2. Yotro sez:
   12 August 2006 at 8:55 AM

   I have fond, fuzzy memories of La Fuente. Negro Modelo beer straight off great slabs of ice. The musicians scraping away on their little island-balcony.

   Visited the Octavio Paz library? Beautiful proportions. Also murals, which I remember as more elegant than Orozco’s … elegant execution, at least, the ideas being propagandistic.

   Avenida Colón, Colonia Centro

   http://servicios.cencar.udg.mx/iberoamericana/recinto.php

3. Dredger sez:
   30 September 2006 at 3:44 PM

   Never heard of Toni Tromboni?

4. Trevor ap Simon sez:
   30 September 2006 at 5:07 PM

   I guess you’re not talking about Werner Puntigam.

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