A moveable fiesta

>> Los Troubadores' hit-and-run hootenannyi

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Their new CD is called Mariachi Soul, and they do have a propensity for sporting sombreros, but bordertown chicken-scratch is hardly the defining element of Los Troubadores' music. Note that founding member and guitarist Matt Lipscombe, former bassist of Me Mom & Morgentaler, has always had a penchant for mix-and-match. "Me Mom was always an idea of fusion, mixing calypso, reggae and Latin rhythms with punk, ska, rock 'n' roll. This is very much the same thing--only we're in our thirties now. It's much more mellow."

There are echoes of Me Mom in the melodies and song structures, but Lipscombe has traded the massive productions of yore for a stripped-down, decidedly nomadic approach. The theatrics of Me Mom remain, in a way, in Los Troubadores' unique form of musical unterrorism--what they call "drive-by musical happenings," familiar to patrons of café terrasses up and down St-Denis.

"This guy Andrew Skenezi, who plays on the CD, was talking about the idea of drive-by musical shootings, of keeping it moving and not expecting anything in return, not even explaining what's going on and playing two songs and being gone before they even know what happened. Amazing things happen--people come up to us and pull out fine bottles of wine and nice crystal. Others bring us food or invite us places."

Sometimes they'll slap you with a $500 fine, as happened to the band last year. But that doesn't get them down. "We gotta bring those back," says Lipscombe. "I figured with summer back, we'd start again," says Joni Dufour, of Los Troubadores' auxiliary vocal trio Las Chicas Angelicas. "We did play the gazebo up on the mountain, but that wasn't so much drive-by as, 'you can drive by us.'

"There's also calling up someone's answering machine and doing a random act of music that way," she suggests.

The same "hell, why not" sensibility can be found all over Mariachi Soul, a self-produced home recording that sounds remarkably good, considering the degree of improvisation and low-tech involved. "What we were trying to capture," says Lipscombe, "was the spontaneity, the freshness and the energy which is so often lost on records. We did this to the detriment of slickness. This is a low-budget recording, we're not gonna get Quincy Jones out of this. Let's go for something different, let's try and capture a moment, the idea of performing as a moment." :

CD launch at l'Escogriffe on Friday, July 28, 10pm, free