Banda el Recodo, Zoe, Wisin y Yandel shine at Reventon festival

 

Longevity in pop music often is measured in weeks or months, not years or decades. So it was remarkable, and thrilling, to see Saturday's Reventon Super Estrella music festival in Los Angeles practically be stolen by a group that's been around since the 1930s and that is proving itself to be more adaptive than the collective fauna of the Galápagos Islands, writes Times' music reviewer Reed Johnson. 

Banda el Recodo, one of the oldest and best-known outfits from the northwest Mexican state of Sinaloa, was founded by the late Don Cruz Lizárraga and is now led with consummate professionalism and contagious enthusiasm by his sons. The ensemble isn't trendy. It turned up at Staples Center resplendent in traditional black outfits and cowboy boots, with clarinets, trumpets, trombones and drums in tow.

The group then proceeded to blow away the arena, packed with mostly under-30s, who joyfully danced and sang the words to every corrido, ranchera ballad or banda tune inflected with salsa, cumbia or even here and there a touch of hip-hop.

Read the rest of the review of Reventon here.

Photo: Banda el Recodo at Staples Center on July 18, 2009, for Reventon Super Estrella. Credit: Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times