Bruins explore heritage through music

In 1984, the San Jose-based musical group Los Tigres del Norte released “La Jaula de Oro.” In spite of the song’s cheerfully wailing accordion and upbeat tempo, the lyrics tell the frustrating story of an immigrant father trying to pass on his culture to his children, only to be adamantly and ardently rebuffed by them with that scalding rejection that can only be dished out by a sassy adolescent.

Clashes of ideals between parents and children have been going on for ages, with these clashes over the preservation of culture oftentimes coming to the forefront in recent years. “I don’t wanna” meets “You’ll appreciate this later on.”

However, for several Bruins, there is no clash. Cultural heritage is willingly accepted, explored and expounded with enthusiasm. Via the encompassing reaches of music, bridges between the past and the present are melodically formed.

“I think it’s drawn me to a lot of cultural practices which, I think, otherwise I wouldn’t necessarily be as informed about,” said Ravindra Deo of his playing the tabla, a traditional Indian drum that produces light yet widely varying warbling sounds.

“It (has) definitely enriched my exposure.”

Deo, a fifth-year ethnomusicology student, confessed that his appreciation of the tabla didn’t develop overnight.

“My parents kind of urged me to play when I was very young. My dad had actually learned some when he was younger, so he tried to teach me a little bit and I wasn’t interested at all,” he said with a laugh. “But later, when I was about 7 years old, we went to a concert and we heard someone playing tabla and I enjoyed it a lot.”

Asking his father to teach him to play, Deo soon took to the tabla and has been playing ever since.

From one son and his drum to five sons and their band, students across various cultures are finding ways to preserve history. In recent years, Los Hermanos Herrera have become an unofficial UCLA institution. Playing at on-campus music festivals, giving guest performances for music classes, and flooding Bruin Plaza with the harmonious sounds of their five-man band, the quintet of brothers ““ all Bruins, past and present ““ have essentially devoted their talents to preserving the diverse sounds of the Mexican music they grew up listening to.

With the recent release of their fifth CD, “Siempre Unidos,” Los Hermanos Herrera have taken cultural preservation to the next level.

“My father played in a group with his brothers, and they played traditional Mexican music from Veracruz,” said Jorge Herrera, the eldest of the Herrera brothers and a current graduate ethnomusicology student. “We always grew up with that music background. We grew up with it, and we’ve always liked it ever since we were little. (When we started playing), our father never forced us to do it. We decided that we wanted to do it on our own.”

The group ““ composed of Jorge, Luis, Miguel, Juan and Jose Herrera (and sister Rebeca, still in high school) ““ is well versed in the musical traditions of northern and southern Veracruz as well as in the more commercially popular traditions of northern Mexico, all the while aiming to illustrate just how diverse Mexico is.

“When people think about Mexican music, they picture short, fat guys with hats playing the guitar, but it’s so much more than that,” Herrera said. “There’s a whole side of Mexico that’s not even known to the United States. We like to entertain people with our style of music, but even more than that, we want to educate them.”

Of course, one need not be born into a specific culture in order to develop an appreciation for it. This afternoon, amid waning sunlight outside the Fowler Museum, the recently formed student group Musical Diaspora will be playing a concert, setting out to prove that all can admire music and culture with their performance highlighting the music of South America.

“(The music) has a lot of the elements of the tango, and all of these South American dances that are totally part of the area’s culture,”

But at first, learning to understand another culture’s music was slow going.

“A lot of (classical) musicians haven’t played any South American music before, and our first rehearsals were kind of rough,” said Brandi Babb, a flutist and graduate music student, performing in tonight’s show. “We can play Mozart and we can play Beethoven, but we’ve been working on that for 12 years. It’s harder for us to just feel music, but it’s broadening our perspective of what music is.”

Babb, along with clarinetist and fellow graduate student Tanitra Flenaugh, dubbed the new musical ensemble Musical Diaspora to emphasize its function as a medium through which the music of one part of the world can be dispersed to the masses.

“Playing classical music is great, and you play totally beautiful things, but for me, this is giving me a chance to step outside of the box and let more of my emotions go, to show more of the colors that I maybe won’t be able to show with Mozart,” Babb said.

“There are just certain ways that things need to be played.”