Bandleader Nati Cano, leading figure inmariachi music, dies at 81

[Dinesh jain]

Grammy-winning mariachi bandleader Nati
Cano, who stirred American audiences with the
folk sounds of his native Mexico and played a
key role in helping to teach young people how
to play the music, has died at age 81, a
bandmate said on Saturday.
Cano died on Friday at a hospital in Fillmore,
California, after a long battle with cancer, said
the bandmate, Sergio Alonso.
Born in 1933 in a rural town near Guadalajara,
Mexico, Natividad "Nati" Cano grew up with
the mariachi music his family of day laborers
played in their spare time.
The traditional folk music is centered on the
sounds of violins, trumpets, guitar and two
guitar-like instruments unique to Mexico, the
vihuela and the guitarron.
His father taught Cano to play the vihuela, and
he later went to an academy to learn the violin
before dropping out to join family members in
entertaining patrons at cantinas.
In 1960, after having moved across the U.S.
border to Los Angeles, he joined a mariachi
group that he would later come to lead and
rename Los Camperos, which translates to The
Countrymen.
Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano, as the
band has been known, went on to use a Los
Angeles restaurant called La Fonda as their
home base where they performed regularly.
They toured with singer Linda Ronstadt to
promote her 1987 album "Canciones de mi
Padre," and were one of several mariachi
bands Ronstadt relied on to make the
recording.
Cano was named a National Heritage Fellow by
the National Endowment for the Arts, and in
2008 he and Los Camperos won a Grammy
Award for best regional Mexican album for
their release "Amor."
Alonso, in a phone interview, called Cano the
most important figure in popularizing mariachi
music in the United States.
"He epitomized the band leader, he was stern
but he was fair. He was also very idealistic
and he really romanticized mariachi music,"
Alonso said.
Cano also played a key role in helping to start
a number of mariachi education programs in
public schools in the Southwest United States.
"In Mexico, if you're thinking about education,
about mariachi, yeah, you can find good
mariachi there," Cano told the Los Angeles
Daily News in 2008. "But as far as education
for the kids to learn, they're kind of behind a
little bit."

Bandleader Nati Cano, leading figure in mariachi music, dies at 81