By Christopher Hartwell @SILIENCESEEN
In a world of many sounds, people often forget that all music has roots. The Cascada de Flores band is no exception.
Performing at Las Positas College Mertes Center for the Arts this past Wednesday, Sept. 14, Cascada de Flores took the main stage in the auditorium.
There were free refreshments provided by the Puente club, headed by their club president Olivia Trujillo
“We are going to have a fundraising event in 2 weeks, so we are going to sell “Durros”, which are like little chips, and we’ll be serving the Horchata again, except this time we’ll be selling it for the club.” Trujillo said. “We’ll be in front of the cafeteria, you can’t miss us.”
Aside from free cookies, horchata, and iced tea, there was incredibly vibrant music by the band Cascada de Flores, which was notably free of charge to the community.
The group’s style brought life to the traditional music of our southern neighbors, playing a diverse selection of songs to best reflect the culture of the many areas in and around Latin America.
The emotions of their music were noticeably moving to the audience too, as during the sextets rendition of “La Casa en el Aire”, dancing ensued throughout the crowd as well as upon the stage.
The group had a firm handle on more than just their music, as several members of the group started dancing in various styles while performing. Fancy footwork was displayed by Arwen Lawrence as she tapped her heels to the rhythm of “Claveles”, an upbeat traditional bambuco song, and the crowd was held captive to every aspect of this performance.
Later during the show, a call and response was formed as the audience joined in to sing with Jorge Liceaga during “Marla”.
Jorge Liceaga, who wrote and led the song “Marla”, said, “Marla was a true story, we were waiting in the airport for an hour and a half, and this airplane doesn’t move anywhere, and you know, I was sort of waiting and this lady, she comes and says I have something to give you, some refreshments, and I was just so gracious that I wrote Marla.”
He went on to add, “In Mexico, we used to have really great composers doing really great funny songs about everything like here, like in every society there is a real clown! But in my case, I was very fortunate to have this song, because people like it. It was very fun to see all the process between the music and the lyrics. Again you saw here, this group has a lot of different kind of music.”
Liceaga continued, “We try to bring a little part of the tradition of music, the popular music, and the new music. We try to create all this in one show. And this, sometimes it’s like that. It’s sometimes too much, but it’s an opportunity to show that a good bass player and a good trumpet can do this, and I get to play with them.”
For those interested in hearing these vibrant sounds, have no fear. Kyla Danysh told the express “We are going to have a CD release at the community music center in San Francisco on October 23 at around 7 p.m.”
The six members were all a sight to behold, as Arwen Lawrence danced and sang, Jorge Liceaga played guitar and sang, Marco Diaz played piano and trumpet, Kyla Danysh played violin, Saul Sierra-Alonso played double bass and Brian Rice was the percussionist.
Together, they formed a true tour de force in their performance, and were impressive to say the least.
Liceaga agreed that this performance hit the mark stating “there’s people who are very young but very interested to play this kind of old style music. To put this here for the young people here at the college, or the not too young people, like some who were here, for us it’s a goal to play for them.”
With this in mind, hopefully there will be more shows after this one considering how much of a success Cascada de Flores performance was.