From Sombreros to Striped Shirts

[Note: The header graphic was generated at my request by AI; the words that follow are all mine. Sorry about that.]

One of the attractions that led Debbie and me to retire in the Texas Hill Country is the wide variety of live music that we have continuous access to. Of course, alert Gazette readers know that we’re always on the lookout for dancing opportunities, but we’re also happy — or at least willing — to sit and listen in a concert setting.

Last weekend, we experienced a bit of musical whiplash as we attended two shows that featured music that landed squarely at the opposite ends of the musical spectrum.

On Saturday night, we drove about twenty miles to Spicewood Vineyards where the Spicewood Arts Society‘s penultimate concert of its 2024-2025 season featured a performance by Patricia Vonne (with David Perales) and another by Del Castillo.

On the following afternoon, we listened to the reconstituted version of the folk/pop legends, the Kingston Trio. This sold-out concert was a project of the Horseshoe Bay Cultural Enrichment Society, and our drive to the venue was less than five miles, always a plus.

Read on for my take on each of these performances…

Patricia Vonne (with David Perales) — Singer, Songwriter, Actress, Filmmaker, Condessa of Castanets

Reading Vonne’s bio on IMDB.com is like drinking from a firehose, a seemingly endless list of awards and achievements, almost none of which relate to her musical skills. (I suppose that’s understandable given that IMDB is, well, a movie-centric website).

Vonne (née Rodriguez) is a native of San Antonio, spending eleven years in New York City before returning to Texas around 2001. She’s the sister of Austin-based filmmaker Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids, Sin City, Desperado, From Dusk to Dawn, etc.).

Accompanying Vonne was the accomplished violinista, David Perales. Perales, also based in Austin, is something of a ghost on the internet; if he has a website or a presence on social media, I couldn’t locate them…but that apparently hasn’t prevented him from being in high demand, and he certainly added another dimension to Vonne’s sometimes high energy/sometimes sensuous vocals and guitar playing.

I mentioned castanets in the heading above. At one point, Vonne exchanged her guitar for castanets, and invited Rick del Castillo to join her and Perales on the stage. Rick is the co-founder, along with his brother Mark, of Del Castillo, the band that would perform later in the evening.

Now, I’m far from being a castanet expert but I’d have to say that Patricia Vonne has some of fastest fingers in the world. In any event, they were too fast for my phone’s camera. Fortunately, someone else in the audience that night was better equipped. The following video showcases her performance of Traeme Paz (“Bring Me Peace”). This song was featured in Robert Rodriguez’s movie, Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

I’m not sure how best to characterize Vonne’s musical style, but perhaps something like Tex-Mex roots rock wouldn’t be too far off the mark. That eminent and well-known music critic, ChatGPT, also suggests that she’s a “spicier Linda Ronstadt.” Okey-doke.

Regardless of the specific genre, Vonne is theatrical, entertaining, and talented, and her performance was very well received.

Del Castillo — Guitarristas trascendentes

We first encountered Del Castillo in Fredericksburg (TX) in the summer of 2012; I documented that experience here. Since then, we’ve caught their performances in various venues and in various combinations of players, including as a trio. A couple of the members have changed over the years, but the founding brothers, Rick and Mark del Castillo remain the glue that keeps the music together.

Their lead singer, Danny Ortiz, was a member of the Grammy-winning (Best Tejano Album, 2004) group, Jimmy Gonzalez Y El Grupo Mazz. Ortiz was a childhood friend of the del Castillos and he joined the group following the departure of longtime lead vocalist Alex Ruiz. Ruiz was a dynamic performer (you can hear him and the rest of Del Castillo on this version of Malagueña Salerosa that was featured in Quentin Tarantino’s gentle ode to mayhem and bloodbaths, Kill Bill Vol. 2), and there has been absolutely no dropoff in energy and talent with Ortiz.

Del Castillo’s music falls squarely in the broad category of guitar-driven Latin rock, but there’s much around the edges of that genre, including flamenco.

If you think you’ve seen the best guitar players in the world, but you haven’t seen the del Castillo brothers in concert, then you might need to rethink. Here’s a short snippet that I recorded from their performance. I recommend watching this on YouTube to get a better look.

The concert venue was small — perhaps 200 in attendance — and it made for an intimate experience. The only downside for us was that the sound levels were simply too high for such a small room. I know, I know: if it’s too loud, you’re too old. But I’d estimate that the average age of the audience was more than fifty years, so it wasn’t just us. Besides being loud (or because of the loudness), the vocals were sometimes muddy-sounding and hard to understand.

Despite that irritation, it was a great evening of music and we’d jump at the chance to do it again. Plus, we had barbecue catered by Spicewood’s It’s All Good BBQ, and they lived up to their name.

The Kingston Trio: Stories and Music from Last Century

Less than 24 hours later, we were sitting in a ballroom at the Horseshoe Bay Resort, along with another 200-strong audience of even older people than the previous night, awaiting the appearance of the newest incarnation of The Kingston Trio.

I was five years old when the original trio emerged on the Californian folk music scene. At one point in their career, they were the biggest-selling musical group on the planet.

The original members of the trio were Dave Guard, Bob Shane, and Nick Reynolds. Their breakthrough hit was Tom Dooley in 1958, and their musical influence was far-reaching.

Dave Guard left the Trio in 1961 and was replaced by John Stewart, who remained with the group until it disbanded in 1967. The pop musician experts among you might recognize Stewart as the writer and performer of the 1979 hit, Gold. (Stewart would later stop performing the song, saying that he only did for the money. D’oh. Or, dough.)

It’s hard to imagine, given the mellow stylings of their music, but they had some fierce critics in the “old establishment” of folk music. Interestingly, the Trio never claimed to be folk singers…that was the label that Capitol Records placed on them because they didn’t know how else to pigeonhole the Trio. OTOH, the Trio did take several traditional songs from the folk catalog and put their own spin on them, so it’s somewhat understandable that traditionalists would object…both out of righteous indignation, but also a bit of jealousy over their success.

Regardless of how you classify their music, it was inarguably influential on a massive group of famous musicians to come, among them: Steve Martin, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Steven Stills and David Crosby, Jimmy Buffett, John Denver, and the groups Abba and the Bee Gees.

So much for the history…

The current lineup consists of multi-instrumentalists — all play banjos and Martin guitars; Woodward also plays the ukulele and the conga. Marvin had a special relationship with the original trio, in that he was taken under Nick Reynolds’s wing as a teenager and practicallly grew up with the group, gaining an invaluable education in how the music business worked.

Our seats for the concert weren’t ideal for picture taking…there were no significant obstructions, but the angle was terrible. Sorry about that.

I confess that while the musicians were quite talented and their stories — oh so many stories — were, on the whole, interesting and often quite amusing, many of the songs were unfamiliar to Debbie and me. However, as I looked around the room during some of those songs, more people were singing along than not, and they were rapturous in their applause. What a difference ten years makes in one’s birthdate.

That’s not to say the music was totally lost on us. We were happy to join with the throng on tunes like Where Have All The Flowers Gone, the aforementioned Tom Dooley, Greenback Dollar, and their arrangement of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land. And, at the end of the night, we had to admit that it was an enjoyable, entertaining evening.

And the music wasn’t too loud.