La Sonora Santanera

Sonora Santanera is an orchestra playing tropical music from Mexico with over 60 years of history. The band was founded in 1955 by Carlos Colorado in the state of Tabasco, modeled after an earlier Cuban band called Sonora Matancera. However, the band created its own style. In 1960, comic actor Jesús “Palillo” Martínez helped the band play in Mexico City and get a professional record deal under the name of Sonora Santanera. From that time until 1986, the band changed members, but remained focused on Carlos Colorado, the sole musical arranger for the group. Colorado died in a bus accident in 1986, causing some members to split off and form another orchestra called Los Santaneros. The remaining members changed name to Internacional Sonora Santanera. Since the 1980s, little of the band’s sound changed although members continued to do so. In the 2000s, more bands appeared using the name of Sonora Santanera as part of their names, leading the orchestra to pursue legal actions and another name change in 2007 to the current name of "La Única Internacional Sonora Santanera".

The band is part of Mexico’s tropical music tradition with its early popularity coming from the popularity of tropical rhythms such as mambo, cha-cha-cha and others reinvented for orchestral bands in the 1950s and early 1960s.

The band has its origins in the community of Barra de Santa Ana, Tabasco. The first members of the group were Juan Bustos, Silvestre Mercado, Andres Terrones, Armando Espinoza and Sergio Celeda who had known each other since primary school. Carlos Colorado met this group of friends in 1955 and proposed the formation of a group. The initial name of the band was Conjunto Blanco y Negro but was soon changed to Tropical Santanera. The name Santanera was chosen because it is phonetically similar to Sonora Matancera, a Cuban band of the 1920s, after which the band is believed to have been modeled. Sonora Matancera created the format of an orchestra whose sound was based on tropical sons and boleros. They founded a Mexican tropical style and tradition. From the very beginning, Carlos Colorado was the leader of the band. He created the band’s own distinctive version of this tropical orchestra music as the arranger even when it played the same songs as Matancera such as Luces de Nueva York.

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Wikipedia