Why Mexicans don’t admit to playing the slide trombone

I went into the excellent and apparently men-only Cantina La Fuente in Guadalajara, Jalisco this morning and ordered a beer. An aggressive-looking youngish guy further down the bar started mouthing off loudly about gringos, so I went over to see what his problem was, and it turned out he was a frustrated sysadmin looking for his next drink rather than for a fight.

So what do you do, he asked. Various shit, I said, including music. In fact, I said, I play the trombone, toco el trombón. And the whole bar straight away started screaming with laughter. Eh, I said, so the paralytically drunken doctor leant against the wall on the other side of Mr Windows 2003 came round and showed me on his cellular a fascinating clip from the title of which I inferred that tocar el trombón (or la trompeta) is a Mexicanism for giving a blowjob–try miming if you don’t get it.

The strange thing is that I haven’t seen slide trombones in action anywhere in Mexico; maybe valves make sense in a country without many pavements for a push-me-off-the-pavement specialist.

(Mainly thanks to MP3 goddess, Madu D, I’ve listened to a whole lot of music here. I already knew a bit of banda stuff–banda is souped-up norteña with New Orleans/Dirty Dozen-type instrumentation–and I love some of the new things, but the most interesting tracks I’ve heard have been from a wild bunch called Nor-Tec aka Nortec, who mix new norteña in general and banda sousaphone licks in particular with kind-of screwed up techno.)

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