Springfield Sister Cities Association invites you to the C-Street City Market, 321 E. Commercial Street at Jefferson, on Saturday June 8 at 10:00am (weather permitting) for a free concert by Grupo Musical Canela, a four-piece band from Springfield’s sister city of Tlaquepaque, Jalisco, Mexico. Canela will be joined by special guest Enrique Ortiz. It's free and open to the public. You can get a taste both of Mexican culture and locally grown food.
“It’s the usual Farmer’s Market day (at the C-Street City Market), so it’s always a lovely time to visit anyway,” according to Cindy Jobe, Executive Director of Springfield Sister Cities Association. “The guys are here, actually, for several different events.” They were part of a private event Thursday evening at the Botanical Gardens. While not a public performances, Jobe noted that “it lets us get to a new audience.” Tonight (Friday June 7) at Shuffle on South Campbell Avenue, there will be a showcase not just for Señor Ortiz and Grupo Canela, but all the area bands that will travel to Mexico for a music festival in July—it’s a fundraiser for their trip. And after the band’s performance on Commercial Street Saturday morning, Jobe said they “will hustle from there and go to the southwest Missouri region Scout picnic. So we’re trying to show off their talents here as much as we can.”
Enrique Ortiz acted as spokesperson for the musicians. In addition to being a musician himself, Ortiz is a professor in the school of marketing at the University of Guadalajara. “We are very glad to be here, and we are honored to be invited by Sister Cities in Springfield. This is not the first time that we are here, and we are so glad to be received with a warm attitude from all of the people involved with the Sister Cities program.” Referring to Grupo Canela, Ortiz called them “a group of young men that is the next generation that is replacing us,” meaning musicians of Ortiz’s generation. (Well, not yet; Ortiz is obviously still very much active!) “We are proud of them, because they had the opportunity to study formal music, and they are very well prepared. So they are now transforming the Mexican music into a more global sound, and also with the roots of the music in our Latin countries.” It’s part of a trend in the past few decades, with what Ortiz called a “fusion, (which) is the way the music is in evolution now. But we think that we can preserve the basic sound of Mexican music or Latin music, by transforming it in a contemporary sound.
“I can say,” Ortiz went on, “globalization is good for the interchange, the exchange, of knowledge and music and art in general. And I think we are enjoying now a new age of music in Latin America. Of course, we are also playing our music in English, because our objective is to get, as Sister Cities says, ‘Peace Through People.’ The contact from people to people is the seed for change.”
And to emphasize the point about the evolution of Latino music, Enrique Ortiz and Grupo Canela performed one of Ortiz’s compositions, “Degar más allá,” which he describes as “an inspirational song about people who need to achieve a goal. ‘Degar más allá' means something like ‘going farther and beyond,’ or ‘going forward.’ The style is Brazilian samba.”
For more information visit http://peacethroughpeople.org or their Facebook page.
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