Las Cafeteras perform in the Rivera Court on Friday night a a tie-in with the Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo exhibition.
Here's a treat at our favorite price: Las Cafeteras, a popular fusion band from the El Sereno neighborhood on Los Angeles' east side, performs at 7 and 8:30 p.m. Friday in the DIA's Rivera Court.
The open-seating shows in the Friday Night Live series are free for residents of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties as part of the no-cost museum admission policy.
Denise Carlos, whose parents came from Mexico in the 1970s, dances the Zapateado.
The California ensemble blends traditional Mexican music with Afro-Caribbean marimbol and cajón, as well as poetry in English and Spanglish. Instruments include the jarana, requinto and a donkey jawbone. It also sets up a wooden platform called the Tarima to perform a dance called Zapateado.
Original songs "tell stories of a community who is looking for love & fights for justice in the concrete jungle of Los Angeles," their website says. It adds:
Las Cafeteras are immigrant children who are remixing roots music and telling modern day stories with what LA Timeshas called a “uniquely Angeleno mishmash of punk, hip-hop, beat music, cumbia and rock. . . . . Live, they’re magnetic.”
The band flew in Thursday, it says on Facebook. The Mexican Consulate of Detroit helps underwrite the performance.
-- Alan Stamm
