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Post by the Scribe on Sept 5, 2020 8:54:13 GMT
 www.lindaandthemockingbirds.com/LINDA AND THE MOCKINGBIRDS
is a road movie with music — a song-soaked, foot-stomping trip straight to the heart of what it means to be Mexican, and to be American, and the complex joy of being both at the same time.
Linda is Linda Ronstadt and The Mockingbirds are Los Cenzontles ("mockingbirds" in the Nahuatl language), a band and a music academy for young people in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this documentary by award-winning director and producer James Keach, we ride with Ronstadt, musician Jackson Browne, and a busload of Cenzontles from Arizona to the little town of Banámichi in Sonora, Mexico, where Ronstadt's grandfather was born.
On the way we learn of Ronstadt's long friendship with Eugene Rodriguez, a third-generation Mexican-American and musician who founded the Cenzontles 30 years ago to reconnect working-class kids with the dignity and beauty of their ancestral music and culture. It worked so well, and the Cenzontles became musicians of such skill and heart, that they drew admirers and collaborators like Ronstadt, Browne and Los Lobos.
The film explodes with rhythm — the pounding feet of zapateado dancers, the strumming of jarana and guitar, the clacking buzz of the quijada, a donkey jawbone. And it swells with soulful voices. It's a journey of pride and self-knowledge with a solid rootsy groove. (This is not Latin-ish "Dorito music," Ronstadt says. "This isMexican music.")
When will this film break your heart? When a young Cenzontle, Sarahi Velazquez, dedicates to Ronstadt a sorrowful song about a lonely orphan in a palm grove, a tune Ronstadt learned from her father, as Ronstadt softly sings along? When you meet the five dazzling Ortega sisters, so bursting with music that their proud dad, a carpenter, says he sometimes has to tell them to knock it off and go to sleep? When two Cenzontles singer-teachers, Fabiola Trujillo and Lucina Rodriguez, harmonize on Woody Guthrie's "Deportee," giving the old song a haunting dimension only immigrant voices can supply? Or when Rodriguez — beside the razor-wired border in Nogales — tells of crossing over as an undocumented girl of 10? Her perilous family journey inspired Browne and Rodriguez to write "The Dreamer," a song that asks: "A dónde van los sueños?" — "Where do the dreams go?"
As Linda and the Mockingbirds powerfully shows, they go to young people, who learn from their elders and add their own spirit and soul, bringing forth new flowers from ancient roots.
Synopsis courtesy of Lawrence Downes
UPCOMING SCREENINGS
More info coming soon! Linda Ronstadt Documentary ‘Linda and the Mockingbirds’ Acquired by Shout! Studios (EXCLUSIVE)
www.yahoo.com/entertainment/linda-ronstadt-documentary-linda-mockingbirds-181610530.html
Chris Willman
VarietySeptember 4, 2020, 11:16 AM MST
“Linda and the Mockingbirds,” a documentary about Linda Ronstadt making a journey to Mexico to explore her musical roots there, has been picked up for worldwide rights by Shout! Studios, the distribution and production division of the Shout! Factory home video company.
variety.com/t/linda-ronstadt/
variety.com/t/shout-factory/
The film was originally slated to premiere at the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend. Shout! is promising that the doc will be out later in 2020 via various distribution platforms.
In a follow-up to last year’s Ronstadt documentary “The Sound of My Voice,” “Linda and the Mockingbirds” narrows in on a road trip undertaken by Ronstadt, Jackson Browne and a group of younger musicians made to the Mexican town of Banámichi in the state of Sonora, the birthplace of Ronstadt’s beloved grandfather.
variety.com/t/jackson-browne/
It’s said to deal with border politics, racism and other personal or hot-buttontopics affecting Ronstadt’s and Browne’s companions on the trip: the instructors and students of Los Cenzontles, a school and studio based in San Pablo, California dedicated to the promotion of Mexican roots music.
“Mockingbirds” was directed as well as produced by actor-turned-filmmaker James Keach, who also produced the earlier “Sound of My Voice.”
variety.com/t/james-keach/
“It has been an honor to create a second documentary with Linda Ronstadt, whom I love and admire,” Keach said in a statement. “Crossing the border on this musical journey to Mexico with Linda, Jackson Browne and the young musicians of Los Cenzontles opened the minds and hearts of all of us working on the film. I hope it will open the minds and hearts of everyone who sees it.”
Keach’s other music-doc credits including executive-producing the recent “David Crosby: Remember My Name” and directing and producing 2014’s “Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me.” As a producer he was instrumental in getting the Johnny Cash biopic “Walk the Line” made as well.
In announcing the film, Shout! said that it was at Ronstadt’s request that Keach embarked on making a second film that would focus on her relationship with the Los Cenzontles Cultural Arts Academy. Ronstadt has been known for her associations with Mexican music ever since she interrupted her pop career in 1987 to release “Canciones De Mi Padre,” a labor of love that unexpectedly became a commercial success and was certified double-platinum.
The announcement was made by Shout! founder-CEOs Bob Emmer and Garson Foos. Alex Exline is a producer on the project along with Keach; Nion McEvoy, Alexandra Komisaruk and Michele Farinola are executive producers. Keach’s PCH Films spearheaded the project.
Shout!’s Jeffrey Peisch (who negotiated the deal along with the company’s business affairs VP Steven Katz and the filmmakers’ rep, Julie Dansker) said that “the film beautifully blends multiple stories, focusing on Linda Ronstadt’s Mexican-American roots, celebrating the music and culture of Mexico and offering a passionate and personal story about immigration.” |
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 5, 2020 9:29:48 GMT
Linda Ronstadt returns to homeland, rekindling love affair with Mexican music, culturetucson.com/entertainment/music/linda-ronstadt-returns-to-homeland-rekindling-love-affair-with-mexican-music-culture/article_df046d43-0eea-5956-95bc-4c43bcf4dae2.html
Ernesto Portillo Jr. Feb 23, 2019 Updated Aug 10, 2020
As the bus headed north and the Naco Port of Entry disappeared in the southern distance, Tucson-born singer Linda Ronstadt comfortably reclined in the rear row as her emotions and newly minted memories from the past four days nestled inside her.
She had spent the weekend with a group of musicians and music-loving family and friends in Banámichi, Sonora, a small town along the Río Sonora several hours south of the U.S.-Mexico border. Her grandfather, Federico José María Ronstadt, was born nearby in Las Delicias, before migrating to Tucson in the early 1880s.
Ronstadt has previously visited this land — an accordion of jagged mountain edges on whose slopes saguaros and organ pipe cactus stand as silent sentinels and the lush valley floor is covered with fava beans, garlic, cottonwoods and palo verdes. The history and culture of the indigenous Ópata and Pima, Jesuit missionaries and Basque colonizers, and the Mexican ranching families courses through her soul like the water that runs through the valley.
Over the years, Ronstadt has created friendships and relationships with people whom she considers long-distant kin.
“Well, it’s so beautiful here and people are so nice,” she said softly over the low murmur of the bus that headed to Tucson last Monday evening. “And it’s just an ideal town. The people are so very cordial. They remember my dad and grandfather. I’ve met people who didn’t know my grandfather personally but remember his name and what he stood for. That means something.”
Being in Banámichi is something special for Ronstadt, who first visited the area with her father, Gilbert Ronstadt, before he died in 1995. Her connection to the land and the people is strong.
But now at 72, she no longer sings in public. She is dealing with the incrementally debilitating Parkinson’s disease, which was diagnosed in 2013. Ronstadt, considered one of pop music’s greatest voices and who was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2014, cannot easily travel.
This trip to the Rio Sonora, organized by longtime friends Bill and Athena Steen of Canelo, could be Ronstadt’s last. Then again, given her profound appreciation for the people and the culture of the Río Sonora, she’s likely to return again.
LASTING LEGACY
Ronstadt returned to Banámichi on a mission. She was joined by a group of 17 folkloric dancers, ranging in age from 8 to 20, and four adult singer-musicians from Los Cenzontles Cultural Arts Academy in San Pablo, California, north of Berkeley. Ronstadt has been a key supporter of the group for nearly 30 years. Also on the trip were her cousin Bobby Ronstadt and nephew Petie Dalton Ronstadt, both Tucson musicians and singers, and her longtime friend, pop-rock icon Jackson Browne from Los Angeles.
Bobby Ronstadt, left, and Peter Ronstadt played for the tour group in Cucurpe, Sonora, just east of Magdalena de Kino, Sonora. The tour group, which included Linda Ronstadt, were traveling to Banámichi, the birthplace of the Ronstadt patriarch, Federico José María Ronstadt. Photo taken Friday, February 15, 2019.
In addition, a film crew accompanied Ronstadt. Documentary filmmaker and actor James Keach (“The Long Riders,” “Walk the Line,” “Razor’s Edge”) is making two documentaries, one on Ronstadt and the other on Los Cenzontles. The Ronstadt documentary is expected to be a theatrical release and also would be shown on cable.
The trip was filled with impromptu singing and staged dances on the plazas of Banámichi and the neighboring town of Arizpe, where Juan Bautista de Anza, the 18th-century Basque explorer of California and New Mexico, is buried. On the bus, the Cenzontles students sang and strummed their stringed instruments; in the small town of Cucurpe, Bobby and Petie Ronstadt sat at a doorway and serenaded in English and Spanish during lunch; and on the second evening, Browne, with guitar in hand, joined Cenzontles’ vocalists Fabiola Trujillo and Lucina Rodriguez, singing lilting harmonies late into the evening in the dining room of the comfortable La Posada del Río Sonora, the colorful hotel facing the Banámichi plaza.
Members of the Los Cenzontles dance group, from San Pablo, California, perform on the plaza in Arizpe. Linda Ronstadt has been a longtime supporter of the group.
“The music of the countryside is best sung in the countryside,” said Eugene Rodriguez, founder and director of Los Cenzontles.
The musical and dance component of the trip reflected Ronstadt’s long love affair with Mexican music and culture imbued in her by her father, known to many as “Gibby.” She has supported Mexican music as a singer, collaborating with Tucson-born Mariachi Cobre and as a performer at the annual International Tucson Mariachi Conference as well as other mariachi festivals in the U.S. and in Mexico.
More than 30 years ago, Ronstadt, who has sung rock, country and American standards, released her landmark recording, “Canciones de Mi Padre.” It was a collection of classic Mexican songs backed by mariachi, inspired by Ronstadt’s childhood days, her music-loving father and a unique friend, Tucson-born icon musician and singer, Eduardo “Lalo” Guerrero. Having sold up to 10 million copies, “Canciones” is considered the best-selling non-English language record in the U.S. and served as Ronstadt’s platform to promote and preserve Mexican music worldwide.
In Arizpe, fans surrounded her, taking selfies as soon they unexpectedly spied her on the plaza on a cold, windy afternoon. “We all have her music,” said Alejandro Manteca Elías of Phoenix, who attended Salpointe Catholic High School with some of Ronstadt’s cousins, and who was with two siblings visiting family in Arizpe. “We grew up with her.”
In Arizpe, Sonora, Linda Ronstadt, right, is approached by longtime fans, Dr. Jesus Antonio Manteca Elias of Chicago, his sister Edna Manteca Verdugo of Tucson and their brother Alejandro Manteca Elías of Phoenix. The three were visiting their mother, Clementina Elías Manteca in Arizpe and were unaware that Ronstadt was in town.
Ernesto Portillo Jr. / Arizona Daily Star
But it’s Ronstadt legacy that makes its lasting impact on the students who were possibly on a trip of their lifetime.
Verenice Velazquez is a 20-year-old student at UC San Diego who sings, dances and plays several instruments with Los Cenzontles, which she joined when she was 7. It was her first time performing with Los Cenzontles in Mexico, the country where her parents were born. Being with Ronstadt and sharing Mexican music in Mexico was beyond special, she said.
“It means a lot. It’s really amazing to just be able to know these traditions and perform them in California and it’s even more amazing to bring them back to Mexico where they are from,” she said during a lunch break on the bank of the Río Sonora on the final day.
“It’s a dream to be on this trip with such a well-known artist that my parents know really well and listen to her music.”
MAGICAL CONNECTION
The magic of Banámichi, where years of tradition remain as strong as the tiny red-hot chiltepines that grow wild, and the fiery bacanora distilled from Sonoran agave plants, has lured Ronstadt back and will continue to pull on her emotions.
Linda Ronstadt, facing in at left, and her traveling companions have lunch at a ranchito outside of Banámichi. The Sonora River valley is filled with small ranches that raise cattle, crops and distill bacanora, Sonoran tequila.
“What I remember is seeing a house on the corner,” she said as she recalled a memory from a visit with her father. “We looked at the church. He said his grandparents were buried there in that church. (She couldn’t remember some details and names and she chuckled at herself a bit.) Anyway, first thing I did was look at the church and then I saw the house to the right of it on the corner and I thought if that was our house.”
Her emotions haven’t changed over the years and several visits, she said.
“I still have that same sense of pride. That is where I’m from. This is what I stand for,” she said. “There is something real special and magical about the Rio Sonora valley. It has a different mix of cultures. It’s tangible.”
Ronstadt’s connection to the Río Sonora is similar to that of countless families in Tucson and Southern Arizona. Arizona license plates are common, and it’s not rare to see a decal with the University of Arizona’s block “A” on a pickup decorated with horseshoes hauling supplies or livestock. Families go back and forth from the Río Sonora valley to the deserts and mountains of Arizona.
Ronstadt explained it this way: “There’s kind of homesickness that we all have inherited genetically. Maybe I inherited some from my great-grandfather Friedrich August when he came to Mexico from Germany or my great grandmother (Margarita Redondo Ronstadt) who was from Mexico. ... But maybe she had some homesickness leaving her comfortable hacienda.”
Bill Steen, whose grandmother was also born in Banámichi and who grew up in Tucson with the Ronstadt family, was pleased that the tour, with all its parts, came together. The difference between this trip and previous ones he’s accompanied Ronstadt on, he said, is that the “potential wildness that teetered on falling into complete chaos fell into perfect harmony.”
For Ronstadt, her visits to the Río Sonora are indeed full of harmony. The memories abound. And from this last and possibly final trip, she said she’ll keep as her favorite image when the dancers from both groups joined in an impromptu, joyful celebration to the song, “La Bamba,” in the cold Arizpe air.
Los Cenzontles perform in front of Linda Ronstadt and an audience in Arizpe, Sonora, Sunday, Feb. 17.
Ernesto Portillo Jr. / Arizona Daily Star
“We have lots to learn from each other,” she said.
But will this be her last trip? Will she return?
“If I can hitch a ride,” she said with a laugh.
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 5, 2020 9:36:17 GMT
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 5, 2020 9:41:43 GMT
I can only guess at the approach this documentary will take but I hope it focuses (at least in part) on the cultural influence of Linda Ronstadt. Aretha Franklin has been in the news lately and to my mind at least there are significant parallels and comparisons between the two not only what they meant to the cultures they came from but also the culture they influenced, the American culture. Aretha within the sphere of Black American culture and soul music and Linda within the Latin American culture and Mexican-Latin music. Both have brought a sense of pride, worth and inclusiveness to all those living within the confines of some difficult times in our nation.
Having participated in this march for immigrant human rights with Linda (Phoenix 2010) I came to appreciate her in a whole different way. She truly cares about her "causes" and definitely walks the walk. Few know about or appreciate her efforts because she is humble and always kind. (except maybe in politics lol but I can relate)
For anyone new to this message or the forum please follow this thread for more on this topic: conservatism.freeforums.net/thread/628/cultural-influence-linda-ronstadt?page=1 Immigrant March - Phoenix, Arizona January 16, 2010Linda at 3:14 behind the Stop the Hate sign. I know this had to be a grueling few mile walk for her but she did it. Sheriff Joe Arpaio had the loudspeakers blaring Linda Ronstadt music (Different Drum) as we passed by his county jail. Linda spoke at the rally's end. 
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 5, 2020 10:03:28 GMT
an earlier trip south...
Linda Ronstadt’s Borderland Read the Original article in the NYTimes
www.nytimes.com/2013/12/29/travel/linda-ronstadts-borderland.html?pagewanted=all
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
We are driving outside Naco, Ariz., near the Mexico border, on a two-lane blacktop under a half-moon and stars. The distant mountains are lost in shadow, and there’s not much to look at beyond the headlight beams and the rolling highway stripes.
In the middle seat of the minivan, Linda Ronstadt is talking about her childhood.
“We used to sing, ‘Don’t go in the cage tonight, Mother darling, for the lions are ferocious and may bite. And when they get their angry fits, they will tear you all to bits, so don’t go in the lion’s cage tonight!’ We had really good harmonies worked out for that.”
“We” is her sister, Suzy, and her brother Peter, who used to terrify her when she had to go to the woodpile at night.
“My brother would load me up as much as he could then he’d tell me, ‘There’s a ghost!’ and then he’d run and then — Aaaaaah!! — there’d be kindling spread all over the ground.”
The ghost stories — and howling coyotes and pitch-black landscape that surrounded her family’s home — left an impression. “I am really scared of the dark.”
Actually, as we drive through the night in the Sonoran Desert, what she really seems to be is delighted. She can’t stop laughing.
When Linda thinks of home — meaning where your soul inhabits the soil, wherever else your body might be — it’s not Southern California, the place forever associated with her professional life, as Queen of Rock in the land of Byrds and Stone Poneys and Eagles. Nor is it San Francisco, where she lives now.
Her home lies in dryer, poorer country.
It’s in southern Arizona and northern Mexico, in Tucson and points south, where giant saguaros, slender and humanoid, signal touchdowns all over the hills and beside the highways. It’s where the mountains are jagged islands in a blue ocean of sky, where the rock-and-thorn terrain is hostile to people but friendly to cottonwoods, organ-pipe cactus, green-skinned palo verde trees and mesquite. It’s fertile range for cattle and horses, and well cultivated in alfalfa, peanuts and agave.
It’s the cowboy-and-Indian West. It’s a deep vein of Mexican-America, a rich stretch of bicultural borderland from Nogales to Agua Prieta. It was where Ópata, Yaqui, Pima and Apache Indians, Mexicans, Spaniards, Basques and Jesuit missionaries converged and collided in the 17th and 18th centuries.
It’s where Linda’s great-grandfather Frederick, an immigrant from Hanover, Germany, settled in the 1850s, becoming a mining engineer and a colonel in the Mexican Army. His son Federico, Linda’s grandfather, was born on a Sonoran hacienda and brought his family to Tucson in 1882. Tucson is where Linda was born, in 1946, second daughter to Gilbert and Ruth Mary Ronstadt, sister to Peter, Suzy and Mike.
You may not have thought of Linda as a Mexican-American singer, but if you’ve heard her, you’ve heard her deep Sonoran roots. Hearing the ranchera singer Lola Beltrán for the first time can bring the shock of recognition to a Linda fan; there’s influence and long tradition behind that lustrous voice. Those old Mexican songs in Linda’s hit 1987 record “Canciones de Mi Padre” were ones she learned before she was 10.
Linda, who is 67, published a memoir this fall, “Simple Dreams,” which touches only briefly on her Arizona girlhood before moving on to her recording career. I knew about Linda the rock ’n’ roll sex bomb, who just made the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and I’d gotten to know her through her work in Arizona for civil rights and immigration changes. But after reading her book, I wanted to know more about little Linda the pony wrangler and devotee of Hopalong Cassidy, and the place she grew up in the 1940s and ’50s.
I emailed her this summer and asked if she was up for a memory trip. She was — she still has a house in Tucson, and many relatives and friends to see. (Other families have family trees, she told me. “We have a family anthill. Tucson is just swarming with Ronstadts.”) And she was eager to go back down into Sonora, a journey she’d made only a handful of times. We hatched a plan: We’d meet in November, when it’s cooler, see points of Ronstadt interest in Tucson, cross into Mexico at Naco, then head down the Rio Sonora valley to grandfather Federico’s hometown, Banámichi. She wanted to bring some old friends along as guides: Bill and Athena Steen and their son Kalin, who live in Canelo; and Dennis and Debbie Moroney, who raise cattle in Cochise County, near the border. Linda and Bill would meet me in Tucson, and we’d pick up the others on the way, for a truck-and-minivan caravan down memory lane.
The dusty, friendly little Tucson where Linda used to ride to the drugstore in a pony cart is mostly gone. Linda’s father once ran the F. Ronstadt Hardware Company, selling windmills and farm machinery to ranchers. The site is now the Ronstadt Transit Center downtown bus depot.
Some points of interest on the Ronstadt trail remain. There’s the Fox Tucson Theater downtown, where her father sang, billed as Gil Ronstadt and his Star-Spangled Megaphone. Singing is simply what Ronstadts do. Her father wooed her mother with mariachi tunes. Her grandparents cherished opera; her mother loved the American songbook and taught her children those comically bloody lullabies. Peter was an accomplished boy soprano. He, Suzy and Linda used to sing in local clubs as a folk trio, the New Union Ramblers.
That early ’60s club scene is gone, and the Fox, which now screens movies and presents an eclectic mix of musicians, wasn’t quite the place to start.
Our trip began with a deeper time plunge: to Mission San Xavier del Bac, 10 miles south of downtown, on the Tohono O’odham Indian reservation. Linda calls it her “spiritual center.” (It’s also a line in Paul Simon’s song “Under African Skies”: “In early memory mission music was ringing ’round my nursery door.” Linda supplied that image, and sang harmony.)
The original mission was founded by the Jesuit Padre Kino in 1692. The existing church, begun in 1783 and never quite finished, is an astoundingly intact example of Spanish colonial architecture, alive with saints and angels. Linda performed a Christmas concert there in the ’90s, the sanctuary washed in candle-glow.
We met Linda’s friend Bob Vint, an architect who has been guiding a 25-year restoration of the mission, a project that has some years to go. He led us into the choir loft, where we marveled at the opulence below: the intricate geometries of trompe l’oeil frescoes, the wood carvings, the statue saints in hand-sewn clothing. Dogs from the reservation ambled in and out of the front door and lounged in the nave.
I rejoined Linda and Bill the next day, and we headed to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, west of downtown. Built subtly into a hillside in the 1950s, it’s a marvelous place to be dazzled by desert wildlife, minerals and plants. Linda’s father was a founding member. We strolled the walkways, saying hello to pensive prairie dogs, and pored over exhibits of gems and reptiles. Linda gave me a tutorial on cactuses and birds, though we did not ramble too far. Linda learned not long ago that she has Parkinson’s disease, which has made it harder to walk and impossible to perform. Though there is little that’s frail about her, she trembles slightly and treads deliberately, using hiking poles to keep steady.
Later, she and Bill guided me to another revelation: Sonoran hot dogs. Imagine a sausage noble enough to be given a Viking burial, wrapped in bacon, placed in a longboat-shaped bun, laden with beans, tomatoes, onions, peppers, salsa, radish slices and other treasures. We had a few at El Güero Canelo, a Tucson landmark, and staggered off to resume the Journey.
We talked about music and Mexico. Linda is dauntingly well read; her thoughts and associations spool out fast, the names pile up. The year she took her grandfather’s 1898 Martin guitar and left home for Los Angeles, soon to be opening for Odetta at the Troubador, I was more or less being born. I hid my post-boomer ignorance as best I could.
As we neared what’s left of the tiny town of Canelo, Linda noted the geological skyline. “See that hump in the mountains, that Brahma bull hump? That’s when you know you’re getting closer.”
We stayed a night in Canelo, at the Steens’ rambling complex of exquisitely plastered and tinted straw-bale buildings and work sheds (the family teaches straw-bale construction and plastering). Ducks and cats wandered around as the sun fell and a chill settled over the cottonwoods.
Linda put her poles aside and lay back on a bench to watch the stars. As Venus sank to the horizon, the rest of us drank shots of home-distilled bacanora, smooth Sonoran mezcal, from a Bud Light bottle, and talked about things I’ve forgotten.
The next morning we reloaded the minivan for a while. (Linda had a lot of bags.) I said it was like being on tour. “Except nobody’s looking to score drugs or get laid,” said Linda.
We drove on, out of the Coronado National Forest, live oaks greening the mountainsides, and through Fort Huachuca, an Army base. We got coffee in Bisbee, a town that reminds Linda of San Francisco — hilly, with hippies and tourists, though also with an open-pit copper mine.
Once we crossed the border at Naco, it was open road: the sprawling West of childhood books, grassland, mesas, cactus and agave. The countryside immediately lost the American fixation with right angles; now we were among free-form mesquite fences, lush underbrush in shades of gold and green, barriers of half-buried tires, road cuts freely shedding rocks and gravel. A highway sign said, mysteriously: “Hassle-Free Vehicle Zone.”
“It feels so much like home, more like Tucson than Tucson,” Linda said. “These mountains look so familiar to me. I just feel like they’re old faces that I know and love.”
I saw raptors gliding by, and roadrunners in the brush. We tuned to Mexican radio and heard banda music, whose shrill oompah sound owes so much to German immigrants. When we stopped for gas, guys with piles of bootleg CDs approached. We bought two by Chalino Sanchez, folk-hero of narcocorridos, old-style ballads celebrating modern-day drug culture. Chalino is known for having a terrible voice that people feel compelled to listen to anyway.
“He sings kind of like a goat,” Linda said, though she admires him, too.
Far sweeter was Trio Calaveras, a ranchera group founded in the 1930s, whom Linda knew from 78s her father brought back from Mexico. I had brought CDs. On the song “Crucifix of Stone,” a prideful man, betrayed in love, stands in misery in the moonlight beneath Christ, who cries with him. Linda listened in bliss.
“It’s that delicate combination of pleasure and anguish,” she said. “Singing on the edge of tears, holding it in, then the falsetto release — there’s incredible tension and dynamics in it. That’s pure indigenous Mexican.”
We stopped for lunch at the home of Lupita Madero, a friend of Bill’s. The simple meal was as pure Mexican as it gets: caldo de queso, fresh cheese soup, with refried beans dusted with wild chiltepin chiles, quince preserves and Sonoran flour tortillas, so thin you can see your hand through them, and coffee that Lupita roasted in her backyard, near the ristras of dried chiles and caged parakeets.
Then we were back on the mountain highway, and soon there lay below us a broad vista of the Sonora River valley, ancient thoroughfare for conquerors, missionaries, Indians and immigrants. In the cool of November, the mountains were crumpled velvet, the farmland green patches and stripes running this way and that.
The cliffs were turning pink as we raced against the setting sun. Driving in rural Mexico at night can be dangerous, Linda said: Livestock like to loiter in the dark on the warm asphalt.
The towns had Indian and Basque names — Bacoachi, Arizpe — and their welcome signs bore founding dates in the 1600s. Reaching Banámichi at dusk, we stopped at La Posada del Rio Sonora, run by a couple from Alabama, Darrin and Cheri Jones. With its boldly painted walls and tilework, potted cactuses and palms, it’s one of the loveliest inns I’ve ever seen. I relished the tropical feel, the rooftop terrace, my deep tile tub and the Wi-Fi.
We sat out on the roof and ate flan and drank bacanora. Dogs barked in the night. Linda held forth on music and politics, as the tabletop filled with peanut shells and the bacanora bottle slowly emptied.
Linda and I walked across the town plaza for 9 o’clock Mass the next day at the Church of Our Lady of Loreto, where her great-grandparents were married. The priest gave a stern homily about getting the kids to unplug the computadora. Between his rapid Spanish and the muddy speakers I missed most of it, so I concentrated on silent prayer. (Dear Lord, thank you for letting me go to Mass with Linda Ronstadt.)
Linda pointed to the statue of the Blessed Virgin above the altar. “I like that they have La Virgen at the top,” she whispered. “Girl power!” Linda went to Catholic school, but it didn’t take. “I was an atheist by third grade,” she told me, though there is a Haitian goddess she prays to, for President Obama.
That afternoon, we took in a show by a high school troupe, performing folkloric dances from Sonora and southern Mexico. A group of us gathered on the balcony of a friend’s house near the hotel, and as the scalding sunshine lowered to a golden glow, a dozen young men and women in brilliantly hued costumes swirled and twirled and stomped, gloriously. Linda noted with pride that Mexicans could take German raw materials — accordions, tubas, polka rhythms — and make them sexy. Watching the men do a difficult stumbling dance in silly old-man masks, Linda laughed as heartily as she had all trip.
The next morning, our last, we stopped by Las Delicias, a few minutes from Banámichi. Linda’s grandfather’s house was abandoned years ago. All we could see behind a barbed-wire fence was a mud-red corner of a structure, barely a shard of adobe, slowly being engulfed by nopal cactus. We gazed a while, then hit the road.
Outside Naco, Linda was in a relaxed mood. Though she hates hearing her old stuff, she surprised me by letting me play a CD of her album “Simple Dreams.” As her younger self sang Warren Zevon’s “Carmelita,” about a junkie “all strung out on heroin on the outskirts of town,” Linda asked: “Am I pretty convincing as a gun-toting heroin addict? Are you buying that?” The question cracked her up.
Later, after T-bone steaks and beers in Sonoita (Linda’s vegetarianism, like her atheism, is relaxed), the Steens drove home while Linda and I headed back to Tucson. I had more music to follow. Linda’s memoir lists a dozen performing relatives, like her brother Michael, who records with the group Ronstadt Generations. Linda’s niece Mindy, Peter’s daughter, sings in the All-Bill Band Featuring Mindy Ronstadt (with Linda’s cousin Bill on bass, and another Bill on guitar). You can see them every other Wednesday at a place in east Tucson called the Irish Pub,
That’s where I spent my last night in Tucson. I found Peter there. Over burgers and Bass ale, he told me stories about Linda as a teenager and his days as a young cop (he’s the former Tucson police chief). I listened while keeping one ear on Mindy singing Crosby, Stills and Nash, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor and old cowboy songs. Her voice was Ronstadt-pure.
When Mindy got to “Desperado,” the old Glenn Frey-Don Henley song, I got that shivery thrill Hawaiians call chicken skin. On song after song, Peter sang harmony with his daughter. He did it quietly, for nobody else’s benefit. Like Linda, whom I would hear softly singing with the radio on the road to Banámichi, he was just too musical not to. On my way out of town the next morning, I stopped by Linda’s, a 1920s house full of Mexican artwork and delicate porcelain and set about with roses and olive trees. Suzy was there, loading a garden statue, a naked cherub, into her pickup. The three of us leaned over the truck bed and talked awhile. I had asked Linda if she had any old photos for this article, but she hadn’t found any usable prints. She said she’d look over some slides and let me know.
Back in New York, I got this email: “Pete and Suzy and I are loading slides in the projector this minute.”
Then, an hour and a half later, this: “Didn’t find any useful photos, but just for a moment we fell into three-part harmony on a few lines of ‘Fair and Tender Maidens.’ ”
TASTING MENU
A trip down the Rio Sonora valley of Mexico is a plunge into the past. It’s not quite the 1600s, but in those little colonial towns — strung along the valley like rosary beads, as Linda Ronstadt says — you will find few if any restaurants, A.T.M.’s, gift shops or other tourist amenities. You can find delicious eating, though: peanuts, dried and powdered chiles, and fragrantly delicious quince paste, called cajeta, and other homegrown foods are sold by the roadside.
At La Posada del Rio Sonora in Banámichi, the cooks make the cheese soup called caldo de queso, and eggs with machaca, dried beef, served with feather-light Sonoran flour tortillas. On the table next to the salt and pepper you’ll find chiltepin chiles, which look like holly berries, with a little wooden mortar for grinding them to red-hot tasty flakes. (If you crumble them with your fingers, don’t rub your eyes ever again.) And the bar has bacanora.
If you don’t get out of Tucson, eat at Café Poca Cosa, whose Mexican-inspired menu changes daily, or the Arizona Inn, a gracious old hotel of pink adobe and privet hedges. The huevos rancheros, with chorizo, are not an ancient recipe, but yummy.
Lawrence Downes is an editorial writer for The Times.
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 5, 2020 12:36:47 GMT
Telluride Film Festival Reveals 2020 Selections: ‘Ammonite,’ ‘Nomadland,’ Werner Herzog, and Morewww.indiewire.com/2020/08/telluride-film-festival-2020-lineup-1234577591/#!
There will be no Telluride Film Festival this year, but organizers have announced what the festival would've looked like.
Ryan Lattanzio
Aug 3, 2020 12:07 pm
There will be no Telluride Film Festival this Labor Day in Colorado, but the programmers have unveiled what this year’s selections would have been. Much like the Cannes Film Festival’s 2020 lineup, this year’s Telluride films can at least carry the imprimatur of the festival as we head into the fall circuit. The 47th edition of the Telluride Film Festival was scheduled for September 3-7. See the full lineup, as revealed on Monday, below.
The idea in presenting the Telluride selections is to recommend the best in film this year in hopes that audiences will seek out these movies at other fall festivals (or what remains of them) down the line. With the 2021 Academy Awards pushed way out to April 25, there’s at once less pressure on these films to perform for awards but also a crush of movies backlogged since quarantine hit, making for a competitive season.
See the full Telluride lineup below.
www.indiewire.com/2020/08/telluride-film-festival-2020-lineup-1234577591/#!
LONG SHORTS
THE LETTER ROOM (dir. Elvira Lind, USA, 32 min)
LINDA AND THE MOCKINGBIRDS (dir. James Keach, USA, 40 min)
PAWS IN PRISON (dir. Bill Guttentag, USA, 31 min)
THE TOXIC PIGS OF FUKUSHIMA (dir. Otto Bell, Japan-USA, 35 min)
WHEN WE WERE BULLIES (dir. Jay Rosenblatt, USA, 36 min)
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 26, 2020 12:33:54 GMT
Linda and the Mockingbirds | Official Trailer (2020)2,828 views•Sep 22, 2020
PCH Films
26 subscribers
For more information please visit - www.lindaandthemockingbirds.com
Linda and the Mockingbirds is a road movie with music — a song-soaked, foot-stomping trip straight to the heart of what it means to be Mexican, and to be American, and the complex joy of being both at the same time.
Linda is Linda Ronstadt and The Mockingbirds are Los Cenzontles ("mockingbirds" in the Nahuatl language), a band and a music academy for young people in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this documentary by award-winning director and producer James Keach, we ride with Ronstadt, musician Jackson Browne, and a busload of Cenzontles from Arizona to the little town of Banámichi in Sonora, Mexico, where Ronstadt's grandfather was born.
On the way we learn of Ronstadt's long friendship with Eugene Rodriguez, a third- generation Mexican-American and musician who founded the Cenzontles 30 years ago to reconnect working-class kids with the dignity and beauty of their ancestral music and culture. It worked so well, and the Cenzontles became musicians of such skill and heart, that they drew admirers and collaborators like Ronstadt, Browne and Los Lobos.
The film explodes with rhythm — the pounding feet of zapateado dancers, the strumming of jarana and guitar, the clacking buzz of the quijada, a donkey jawbone. And it swells with soulful voices. It's a journey of pride and self-knowledge with a solid rootsy groove. (This is not Latin-ish "Dorito music," Ronstadt says. "This is Mexican music.")
When will this film break your heart? When a young Cenzontle, Sarahi Velazquez, dedicates to Ronstadt a sorrowful song about a lonely orphan in a palm grove, a tune Ronstadt learned from her father, as Ronstadt softly sings along? When you meet the five dazzling Ortega sisters, so bursting with music that their proud dad, a carpenter, says he sometimes has to tell them to knock it off and go to sleep? When two Cenzontles singer- teachers, Fabiola Trujillo and Lucina Rodriguez, harmonize on Woody Guthrie's "Deportee," giving the old song a haunting dimension only immigrant voices can supply? Or when Rodriguez — beside the razor-wired border in Nogales - tells of crossing over as an undocumented girl of 10? Her perilous family journey inspired Browne and Rodriguez to write "The Dreamer," a song that asks: "A dónde van los sueños?" — "Where do the dreams go?"
As Linda and the Mockingbirds powerfully shows, they go to young people, who learn from their elders and add their own spirit and soul, bringing forth new flowers from ancient roots.
Synopsis courtesy of Lawrence Downes
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 26, 2020 12:51:07 GMT
Linda Ronstadt on New Documentary, Her Mexican Heritage and the 2020 Election
39 views•Sep 23, 2020
abohamza4
1.32K subscribers
One year after The Sound of My Voice, Linda Ronstadt will star in another documentary: Linda and the Mockingbirds. Directed by James Keach, the film chronicles her 2019 visit to Mexico with Jackson Browne and the students of Los Cenzontles Cultural Arts Academy. In the new trailer, Ronstadt, Browne, and Los Cenzontles embark on the bus ride from the Bay Area to Mexico.
Due to Ronstadt’s health (she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2012), she had to be able to lay down during the ride. “That’s another reason for the bus,” she tells Rolling Stone over the phone from her home in San Francisco. “My back can’t take sitting. I had to be as horizontal as possible.”
The group visited the small town of Banámichi, in the state of Sonora, where Ronstadt’s grandfather grew up. “It’s a beautiful, idyllic little town right in the middle of cow country,” she says. “It was a culture that didn’t have electricity until very recently. It’s right next to the river that has the most fertile soil in all of Mexico. The fruit that comes out of there is fantastic. The food traditions are food traditions that I grew up with. It’s really delicious.”
Browne, who has also worked with Los Cenzontles, happily came along for the ride. “The kids love him,” Ronstadt says. “He’s a natural teacher and muse.” In the trailer, Browne adds, “Look, if Linda Ronstadt invites you to go to Mexico, I don’t need any more than that. Let’s go!”
Ronstadt first encountered Los Cenzontles — founded by Eugene Rodriguez — in the early Nineties, and has been a patron ever since. “They were playing music on the street,” she says. “They were playing so well that they stopped me in my tracks.” The singer grew up in Tucson, Arizona, about 40 miles from the Mexican border. With fair skin and a German surname, her Mexican heritage wasn’t always apparent.
“I remember trying to tell Jane Pauley I was Mexican,” she says with a laugh. “She said, ‘You’re not Mexican. How far back in your family do you need to go to get a Mexican name?’ I went, ‘If you go back one generation, you get a Spanish name.
But Spain isn’t Mexico either.’ Mexico is a melting pot. It’s Spanish and German and French and indigenous American/Mexican. I’m all of those things.” As a child, Ronstadt and her family would visit Mexico frequently, often to eat lunch or shop. Her grandfather taught her many standards, which she later recorded on 1987’s Canciones de Mi Padre and 1991’s Mas Canciones.
The heartbreaking “La Orilla De Un Palmar” appears in both documentaries: a young girl performs it for her in Mockingbirds, while Ronstadt and her family sing it in The Sound of My Voice. “We sang with my grandfather to start with, and then we sang with my dad,” she says. “Then my brothers had various integrations with several of my cousins. They had a group and they sang it. You put together any combinations of Ronstadts and they can sing that song. [Laughs.]” Courtesy of PCH Films
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Post by the Scribe on Sept 26, 2020 14:13:39 GMT
New Linda Ronstadt Documentary Arriving Next Month
2 views•Sep 26, 2020
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Post by the Scribe on Oct 24, 2020 6:21:45 GMT
REVIEW: Linda and the Mockingbirds - Graham Strang's Roots and Routes #322
40 views•Oct 20, 2020
Graham Strang's Roots and Routes
87 subscribers
October 19, 2020
Yesterday, I got the chance to watch the wonderful new documentary, "Linda and the Mockingbirds." This movie tells a very important story and I think It's an important one to watch whether you're a Linda fan or not!
www.lindaandthemockingbirds.com/ |
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 17, 2020 12:24:47 GMT
"Change immigration laws": Linda Ronstadt reflects on her Mexican heritage & music in new filmwww.salon.com/2020/10/19/linda-ronstadt-and-the-mockingbirds-hbo-max/
The famed singer's new doc "Linda and the Mockingbirds" crosses the border to celebrate Mexican culture
By GARY M. KRAMER
OCTOBER 19, 2020 9:26PM (UTC)
Linda Ronstadt in "Linda and the Mockingbirds" (HBO Max / Shout! Studios)
Linda Ronstadt may have retired from performing in 2009, but the Grammy-winning singer is still involved in music. The inspiring documentary, "Linda and the Mockingbirds" chronicles Ronstadt's journey back across the U.S.-Mexico border to Sonora, her grandfather's hometown, for a concert by Los Cenzontles (The Mockingbirds).
www.salon.com/2013/10/07/linda_ronstadt_there_are_always_predators_around_and_you_have_to_keep_an_eye_out_for_them/
www.salon.com/tv/video/705499
The group, founded in 1989 by Eugene Rodriguez, and supported by Ronstadt, performs traditional Mexican dances and songs — like the ones Ronstadt sang on her double-platinum "Canciones de mi Padre," which remains the top-selling non-English language album in American record history.
The hourlong documentary, directed by James Keach, concentrates on how music can be a family project, uniting people with its power, culture, and tradition. Learning the roots of one's heritage, as Ronstadt did, brings understanding, visibility, and pride. In interviews in the film, Ronstadt emphasizes that music carries truth. For anyone who has ever heard her perform, the power of the singer's voice comes through.
"Linda and the Mockingbirds" also addresses immigration stories and fears, racism, and themes of deportation that are very much in the minds of the performers and their families.
www.salon.com/2019/08/29/immigration-cruelty-may-actually-be-hurting-trump-even-as-he-pushes-it-to-new-levels/
www.salon.com/2019/05/09/racism-on-the-brain-a-neuroscientist-explains-how-the-world-moved-right/
www.salon.com/2019/07/22/trump-to-curtail-due-process-for-immigrants-facing-deportation/
The singer, who was also the subject of last year's fantastic documentary, "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice," spoke with Salon about Mexican culture, music, and her new documentary.
You have long supported Los Cenzontles, as a patron and as a fan. How did you get involved in this group?
I was walking down the street in San Francisco, and I saw this group dancing and playing music. I thought they were from Michocán, and they were from here. They understood the rhythms and the dancing and the singing. They said they were playing to earn money to go to Mexico — to Michocán and Oaxaca — to study the regional music and culture; their families were from Mexico, or they were born there. I had my Mexican show on the road at the time, so I added a concert to raise money for them. I was really impressed by the way they were taught from a deep pedagogy — music as a way to socialize and communicate with people. They have parties and dance with each other.
I was thrilled when you recorded "Canciones de mi Padre." Do you feel you needed to achieve the success you did to have the resources to make this passion project?
No one was going to let me do it otherwise. I didn't have any agenda except to sing better. I didn't think I was very good when I started. I only wanted to get better.
I also appreciated your advice that you "need to learn the tradition in order to break it." I admire your ability to sing different musical genres. How do you feel you break with tradition in your career?
It's important to build on what came before. I learned to sing from my Mexican background. We sang Rancheras, not blues. I wanted to sing that and felt my voice couldn't do it. Rock and roll didn't offer me an opportunity to find my own true voice. It was going to Broadway to sing "Pirates of Penzance" that gave me the upper register. Then I could sing standards and then Mexican music. The Mexican songs were better than the ones I sung in English because they had better melodies. I love singing in Spanish. It was the language of music from when I was little.
I love that you mouth all the words to "A la Orilla de un Palmar," as Sarahi dedicates her version of the song to you in the documentary. You talk about how music helps us make sense of our sorrows and what oppresses us, and to celebrate the joy, and what lifts us up. Can you talk more about that? Your singing is inspiring to so many people.
I learned that song from my grandfather, and we knew what it was about — a little orphan girl — and it made us cry. You sing the chorus slowly, "I'm a little orphan and I have no friends." It was a special song as a family. I asked the Chieftains to record it. I got one take. My voice cracked in the middle of it.
You have warm feelings of home. Do you think it was your leaving home, and being on the road, and dislocated for so long, that made you long for family, your memories from childhood and the music you heard, that prompted you to sing these songs?
I'm from the Sonoran Desert, which is a particular region and culture. It's on both sides of the border, which is arbitrary. I've always had a [passion] for that culture. There are big tall Saguaro cactuses — the one with the arms — that exist only within a 350 mile range. I also love the regional wheat tortillas, made with lard, and baked on a comal griddle.
I applauded your comment in the film about "Dorito" music — that Latin-ish is not Mexican. You are very conscientious of authenticity. Can you expand on this idea?
I get impatient because Mexican culture is not Taco Bell. It's a deep, rich culture of various genres and styles. There are [dozens of] different languages in Mexico and people don't realize how different the culture is. Aztecs talk about "a scattering of jade." To them, jade was more valuable to them than gold.
Many of the interviewees in "Linda and the Mockingbirds" talk about the pride this music and culture brings them. You've inspired people like Eugene and Lucina, who carry on this tradition. What observations do you have on the visibility and dignity of their Mexican heritage?
They inspired me! They were doing fine on their own when I met them. [Americans] don't realize people migrating come from beautiful cultures, and they left because of a drought, or NAFTA, which puts Mexican farmers out of business because of inferior U.S. wheat and corn. Most people who migrate don't want to leave their homes, and then they are treated badly here. They contribute so much. America doesn't realize [Mexicans] pay into the economy and can't draw out of it. They are willing to do low paying jobs and that pushes people to higher paying jobs.
www.salon.com/2018/10/07/how-is-new-nafta-different-a-trade-expert-explains_partner/
If we can get political, you make a very pointed comment in the film as the bus prepares to return to the United States that your 2-year-old grandniece, Annabelle could be caged. There are other testimonies, such as one by Lucina, about detention and fears of deportation. What can be done to change minds about these fears — both the immigrants and the people who want to build the wall?
www.salon.com/2018/06/23/care-about-kids-in-cages-then-its-time-to-break-the-republican-grip-on-power/
www.salon.com/2020/07/03/he-built-a-privately-funded-border-wall-its-already-at-risk-of-falling-down-if-not-fixed_partner/
One thing is change immigration laws. Banks are making money from the cartels. Drug laws need to be changed. Get rid of the private prison system; it's like the new slavery with [cheap] labor and separating children and keeping them in inhumane conditions. It's a violation of human rights laws.
www.salon.com/2011/12/01/how_private_prisons_game_the_system/
Watching the amazing Ballet Folklórico performance in the film, I wondered, Linda, you're a fantastic singer. But can you dance? These kids were singing, dancing, and playing music. I can't do any of those things!
The step they have to learn, and the phrasing are done together as a piece and that's an advantage they have. I wish I'd learned that as a child!
Last year "The Sound of My Voice" came out. This year "Linda and the Mockingbirds." I'm pleased there is so much renewed interest in your life, your music, and your legacy. What are your thoughts on all of this attention being paid to you now?
I had nothing to do with the films. They just happened. They weren't my idea. I'm retired.
I'd like to take credit, but it isn't the case.
"Linda and the Mockingbirds" is available digitally on Tuesday, Oct. 20.
GARY M. KRAMER
Gary M. Kramer is a writer and film critic based in Philadelphia. Follow him on Twitter.
MORE FROM GARY M. KRAMER
www.salon.com/writer/gary_kramer
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 17, 2020 12:28:47 GMT
Linda Ronstadt OC Film Fiesta Q & A: Linda and the Mockingbirds
886 views•Oct 26, 2020
Media Arts Santa Ana
27 subscribers
MUSIC LEGEND LINDA RONSTADT, director James Keach and Eugene Hernandez, Executive Director of the Northern California traditional music ensemble Los Cenzontles participated in the OC Film Fiesta Q&A for her fantastic documentary, LINDA AND THE MOCKINGBIRDS on Sunday, 10/25/20, moderated by Media Arts Santa Ana Executive Director Victor Payan.
The film is available for streaming on Amazon Prime and multiple platforms.
The OC Film Fiesta is presented by Media Arts Santa Ana (MASA). To learn more about MASA or to make a tax deductible donatin to support our free youth media programs, please visit www.masamedia.org. |
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 17, 2020 12:31:20 GMT
ESTRENOS | LINDA AND THE MOCKINGBIRDS TRAILER | HBOL
517 views•Nov 6, 2020
HBOLatino
181K subscribers
Linda Ronstadt goes on a road trip back to Mexico to visit Sonora, the birthplace of her beloved grandfather. She travels with Jackson Browne and The Mockingbirds, a band and music academy. This documentary film explodes with rhythm and soulful voices. It’s about a journey of pride and self-knowledge with a solid rootsy groove. Only on HBO and HBO Max.
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 17, 2020 12:34:11 GMT
Linda Ronstadt: The Voice of Mexican-American Culture
322 views•Premiered Oct 26, 2020
Alamo Pictures
153 subscribers
Linda Ronstadt became one of the most famous Hispanic Americans in the music industry.
Subscribe for more from Factual America: bit.ly/AlamoPictures
The singing career of Linda Ronstadt spanned five decades. A versatile and talented artist, she has won ten Grammys, three American Music Awards, two Academy of Country Music Awards, and an Emmy. Along the way, she recorded the biggest selling foreign-language album of all time.
Now retired from singing, Linda continues to give back to the community, as captured by director and producer James Keach in Linda and the Mockingbirds. James joins us to share a side of Linda Ronstadt that few have seen in the process. His music-filled, road trip-style film captures the essence of Mexican-American culture and immigrant experience.
It’s a beautiful look into the coming together of two cultures, while simultaneously portraying the hardships far too many immigrant children must go through…
“With the internet, social media, and the amount of interactions we have, we realise there are so many different human experiences to ours that we’re curious about.” - James Keach
Time Stamps:
04:11 - When and where Linda and the Mockingbirds will be released.
05:35 - What inspired James to make this film.
08:27 - Who Linda Ronstadt is.
11:18 - How Linda is involved with helping children get into singing and dance.
13:35 - James’s road trip to Mexico with Jackson Brown.
15:43 - The way the Linda Ronstadt documentary evolved as James met more and more people who were being marginalised.
19:12 - The song ‘Dreamer’ and what it’s about.
21:25 - The importance of being open and frank with children when they are in vulnerable situations.
24:34 - Our first clip of the film, showing the reality of illegal immigrants.
26:28 - Where James grew up and the connection he had with Mexican culture in America at a young age.
30:45 - Why James didn’t include immigration statistics and ICE agents in the film.
32:00 - The detention policies that separate children and their families.
33:22 - What the film is really all about.
34:53 - The values that people in Mexican-American culture hold most dear.
36:11 - How James got into filming and directing.
40:24 - The importance of music in filmmaking and how it can help tell a story.
42:16 - Why this is the golden age of documentaries.
45:11 - James’s favourite Glen Campbell song.
46:21 - The next project James is working on.
49:51 - The lasting message James wants people to take away from this film.
Resources:
Linda and the Mockingbirds: www.lindaandthemockingbirds.com/
Shout Studios: www.shoutfactory.com/corp/sho...
Linda Ronstadt: The Sound Of My Voice: m.imdb.com/title/tt10011448/
Los Cenzontles: www.loscenzontles.com/
Connect with James Keach:
IMDb: m.imdb.com/name/nm0005077/
Connect with Matthew Sherwood:
Facebook: facebook.com/matthew.sherwood.14
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/matthewsherwood/
Twitter: www.twitter.com/sherwood1967
#MexicanAmerican #HispanicHeritage #LindaRonstadt
▬▬ FACTUAL AMERICA PODCAST ▬▬
Factual America explores the themes that make America unique through the lens of documentaries about America. Each episode a guest chooses a film and then discusses it with host, Matthew Sherwood. Guests include leading documentary filmmakers as well as experts on the American experience.
Matthew Sherwood was born and raised in Texas. He came to the UK in 2001 to work for The Economist. Matthew has worked in journalism and publishing and has a wealth of experience writing for publications, interviewing world leaders, and chairing conferences. Formally he spent his time helping diverse audiences understand the global trends impacting upon their lives.
Emmett Glynn is the producer of Factual America. Known to many in the broadcast world, Emmett is a London-based sound designer and producer who has delivered over 100hrs of TV documentaries for Channel 5, Channel 4 and the BBC. He produces three other podcasts and is developing documentaries alongside Alamo Pictures.
▬▬ ABOUT ALAMO PICTURES ▬▬
Alamo Pictures is a production company that makes US documentaries from a European perspective. Our goal is to create US documentaries for an international audience, remaining subjective by looking at American issues from a European point of view. This helps everyone to better understand America
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Post by the Scribe on Nov 27, 2020 9:34:24 GMT
Linda Ronstadt, East Bay’s Los Cenzontles, star in a new moviewww.mercurynews.com/2020/10/20/linda-ronstadt-los-cenzontles-go-home-together-in-new-movie/
PCH Films Linda Ronstadt appears in a scene from her movie “Linda and the Mockingbirds,” which explores her cultural heritage and her deep ties with the Los Cenzontles Cultural Arts Academy in San Pablo.
By ANDREW GILBERT | Correspondent
PUBLISHED: October 20, 2020 at 8:30 a.m. | UPDATED: October 20, 2020 at 3:55 p.m.
Linda Ronstadt had yet another trick up her sleeve.
While grudgingly agreeing to cooperate on the hit 2019 documentary “Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice,” she quietly set a different plan in motion. Shifting the focus from her extraordinary career, Ronstadt brought together the key players for a companion film celebrating Los Cenzontles Cultural Arts Academy, the scrappy San Pablo cultural beehive that has trained hundreds of young people in traditional Mexican music and dance.
www.loscenzontles.com/
Veteran documentary producer James Keach needed to nail down the crucial interview with Ronstadt for “The Sound of My Voice” and she kept putting it off. “Eventually she said, ‘I’m going to Mexico, why don’t we do the interview there?’” Keach recalled. That trip led directly to “Linda and the Mockingbirds,” a new documentary available for streaming by Shout! Studios and other platforms on Oct. 20.
Keach didn’t realize it when he agreed to the interview in Mexico, but Ronstadt’s trip back to her family’s hometown in Sonora wasn’t a casual visit. She had chartered a bus and invited a 22-member contingent from Los Cenzontles, including guitarist Eugene Rodriguez, the cultural center’s founder and director, and vocalists Fabiola Trujillo and Lucina Rodriguez (no relation to Eugene). Oh yeah, Jackson Browne was coming, too.
Keach not only got an interview with Ronstadt covering her entire life, he shot gorgeous footage of Los Cenzontles musicians and dancers performing in the town square of her familial village, Banámichi. The first people on screen after “The Sound of My Voice” title appears are Trujillo and Rodriguez, decked out in brightly-hued traditional dresses designed and sown by Eugene Rodriguez’s wife, Marie-Astrid Dô-Rodriguez (work she talks about in “Linda and the Mockingbirds”).
Once Keach started hearing the voices and stories of Los Cenzontles (which is Spanish for The Mockingbirds) he was smitten.
“Originally I was just going to go down and film the dancing and singing,” he said. “I started to get to know the stories, and I couldn’t help myself. I started shooting. There is a common denominator between the two films and that’s Linda.”
Members of Los Cenzontles perform in the Ronstadt familial village of Banámichi, Mexico, in a scene from “Linda and the Mockingbirds.” (PCH Films)
A pop superstar who reinvented herself again and again, Ronstadt first encountered Los Cenzontles in the early 1990s when she came across the company performing traditional dances from southern Mexico and singing in the indigenous language of Mixtec at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.
“They were doing these traditional dances from Michoacán perfectly, little kids, 11- and 12-year-olds,” Ronstadt said. “I started talking to Eugene and he told me they were trying to get enough money to go to Oaxaca and Michoacán to study with the masters.”
She decided to help out. In the middle of a tour performing the mariachi standards from her platinum album “Canciones de Mi Padre,” Ronstadt added a concert to the end of her run. She donated the proceeds to Los Cenzontles, funding the first of many trips south to study with elder traditional Mexican artists.
“She’s been our guardian angel” ever since, Rodriguez said. “Linda found a way to leverage her position to help us. She’s always done that for us. That’s the kind of person she is. She introduced us to Ry Cooder and Jackson Browne not because we’re going to save the puppies in Richmond but because Linda’s real values are about learning music at home. That’s where the connections get made.”
While the bus trip to Sonora provides a narrative thread through “Linda and the Mockingbirds,” the documentary’s heart is the stories of the young people who have found a home at Los Cenzontles. Again and again they talk about the way that learning traditional Mexican art forms has instilled pride in their heritage, which in turn makes them more confident and comfortable Americans.
For Ronstadt, Los Cenzontles harkens back to her music-filled childhood, when family gatherings revolved around songs and unhurried, delectable meals prepared from food cultivated nearby. Rather than fostering an ethic of competition, the center cultivates community.
“First of all, you don’t have to audition or have any special musical ability,” she said. “You just learn and put in the work. I don’t like the idea of music being delegated to professionals. They’re learning the music properly and they’re dancing and singing for their own fun. What a concept! They have some wonderful performers, but they take music off the stage and bring it back to the living room where it belongs.”
The film arrives in the midst of a buzz of activity at Los Cenzontles. Classes have all moved online during the pandemic, and the center has produced a steady flow of videos featuring the students, including eight for the Front Porch Sessions and another recent batch for the Backyard Sessions (both directed by James Hall). Last month the San Francisco Symphony released a video of a collaboration with Los Cenzontles on YouTube.
For Keach, whose production company PCH Films has created Oscar-nominated and Grammy Award-winning feature documentaries like “Glen Campbell … I’ll Be Me” and “David Crosby: Remember My Name,” deciding to make a film about Los Cenzontles meant a change of gears.
He covered Ronstadt’s Mexican background in “The Sound of Her Voice.” With “Linda and the Mockingbirds” he captured her fully in her element, surrounded by young people better equipped than many to understand how and why she insisted on singing and recording Spanish-language songs despite ardent resistance from her label.
“A lot of people who saw ‘The Sound of My Voice’ knew her as a rock star, not as a Latina,” Keach said. “They know her amazing voice, but not necessarily her background. Linda has inspired a whole new generation.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
LINDA AND THE MOCKINGBIRDS
Documentary featuring Linda Ronstadt, Los Cenzontles, Jackson Browne and more, directed by James Keach
When & where: Available for streaming and purchase Oct. 20 on Shout Studios, Amazon Prime, iTunes and other platforms; $9.99-$19.99 |
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