Jaime Muñoz, La Musgaña
McGonigel's Mucky Duck, Houston, Texas
1996

OK, here we are in Houston and you're going to tell me your name:
Jaime Muñoz
And you are with a band called
La Musgaña
And where are you from?
We are from Madrid, but we do music from Central Spain, a very huge region.
You do folk music, traditional music?
Yeh, we do traditional, nothing like flamenco or something like this, just traditional music from Central Spain.
I had a friend on my Celtic music show that had lived in Spain, and she said that sounds like its Galician.
The music we make?
I thing it was Cerado...the first song on your purple album.
Galician [he pronounced this "Galisian," not "Galithian" like Fiona.]. No its not Galician, Galician is in the northwest of Spain so is the very north of Spain. And this is under Galicia. We have influence from that but we use the bagpipe as well, we use the pipe and tabor, three hole flute, one hand flute and drum on the other hand and --plays both instrument. But is not exactly Celtic like Galician, its not Celtic music, it's a mixture between European music, European melodies I mean, like Celtic, but the rhythm sounds very Arab or North African or Oriental.
So you have influences from all over.
Yeh, we have influences from all over.
Sometimes Arab, sometimes Jewish, sometimes Celtic. In Spain, many people will pass throug from long time ago
What do you play, what instruments do you play?
Me, I play clarinet, I play flute, button accordion--diatonic accordion.
Is that the same type someone would see in Ireland?
It's the same look as one you see Sharon Shannon or Seamus Begley or some like that playing the accordion, is the same kind of accordion but the kind of tuning is different, so they use a B/C or something like that. A row is B and a row is C and I use a CF, so the system is simply different.
How long have you been on the road here? We've been here for 15 days today and we have to be here another 15 days more or so, we will be out of Spain for one month. 18 or 19 concerts.
Must be pretty hard on you to do it.
Yeh, it is. You get very tired sometimes, all the time flying.
So you're flying around.
Yeh, we're flying.
You were gonna talk a little bit more about your music.
And the instruments as well. Now in our band we use bagpipe. In Spain you can find 4 or 5 different kinds of bagpipes. So bagpipes is not only a Scottish instrument, but you can find it all over Europe. And of course in the Northwest, in Galicia, in Asturias, in Catalonia, in Valderila(?) Very many different, so we use one as well. We have as well the pipe and tabor as I said before, and we use the hurdy gurdy as well, it was an instrument that, for the medieval age.
I had read that that isnt the same kind of hurdy gurdy that you find in France.
Yeh, is the same kind. Its use was spread all over Europe in the medieval age, and in Spain it was played since 100 years ago, but now, last 20 years it has been a revival of that instrument as well. So we use all these traditional. I play bamboo flute for instance, and we mix that with more modern instruments like accordion, clarinet and bass...electric bass guitar, even. We use cittern as well, so we do a mix between very traditional music and the arrangements are a bit modernish.
So do you have rock influences too?
Well, in some tunes you could...maybe the bass guitar is the who gives more...maybe jazz or funky or something. But all the music we do is traditional. The melodies have ----.
So you don't write anything...
No, we just take the melodies....what we do is ensemble, because originally the music we play, it was played in the villages just by one solo musician, so that's one thing. One man could play the tabor...the three hole flute and tabor and then we listen to that. We go to the village we do research in the village. Then we go to Madrid, because this is a three four hour ---- long from Madrid...three hours from Madrid, and then we work on that and we think what instrument we could add to that solo musician. So that's what we do...we build on. Or perhaps we just ask to an old woman she sings something for us and whether we like the melody, but we don't sing so we take the melody without words and we play from our instruments so we put it all together.
When did you start doing this?
We started 8 years ago, 8 9 years ago. This is the 4th tour in the States. And we were 5 people during the first 5 years and then we changed and now we are 4 people coming here. We started coming here in 1992, was the first time we come here to the Mucky Duck., to Houston and then we came again
Your agent says that about half the interviews you were doing were with Spanish language stations.
Yeh, we had some on the phone with the Spanish language.
Do they play you on Spanish language stations?
I don't know. I don't hear American radio....I guess some of our interviews were in Spanish.

write: gennett at gorge dot net

The Columbia Gypsy