Jorge Ben Jor Live

[Rojo Scherer]

AustinCity Limits is thrilled to announce that we will be live streaming our upcoming Season 49 taping with global music powerhouse Jorge Drexler in his ACL debut on July 31 at 8pm CT. The celebrated superstar swept the 2022 Latin Grammy Awards with a record seven awards, including top honors of Record of the Year and Song of the Year. ACL offers fans worldwide the unique opportunity to watch this taping live in its entirety free here on our ACLTV YouTube Channel.

Join us here on July 31 at 8 p.m. CT for Jorge Drexler; the broadcast episode will air on PBS this fall as part of our upcoming Season 49. Tune in to your local PBS station on Saturday nights for fan-favorite encore episodes of Austin City Limits; watch live on PBS, or stream anytime at PBS.org.

As a native of Cuba, fully bi-lingual and a life long resident of Long Island, currently residing in Huntington. He still remembers the first time he visited Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum on a school trip and now is only a stone throw away. Jorge has a strong work ethic, is available 24/7, while focusing on the pertinent details to meet his clients expectations.

In his free time, Jorge is an avid golfer and competes in local golf tournaments as well as enjoying foreign films and good food. Jorge feels lucky to live in a place where all of his hobbies are within arms reach!

Is that the further you get away from the center, the more you romanticize it, seeing a lot of the imagery of a handsome astic man holding the beautiful lady with the bubble, uh, you know, volcano behind them. All those images that I saw in Colby has, and then the side vans and, you know, tattoos and everywhere.

I always kept going like, wow, the women are, are just the object of desire and they're the price or the they're never, the war are the warrior women. A lot of this stuff is mythology. Why are there no more women? And so I looked into a lot of the myths, especially the Aztec warrior is such a huge part of Mexico.

It's in the money. It's in the soccer teams, it's everywhere. So I said, I think, I think we should have. Mythology. And I'm going to create this warrior princess and it's going to be a metaphor for it today. And it's going to be a metaphor for the history of, of the women in Mexico, who don't get credit for being warriors and just be married to a Mexican man.

You're already a warrior. You already, already deserve a medal. So all the, all the women in my life, my grand mom, my mom, my wife, my sister, I mean the lives they live, these are warrior women. So I wanted to honor them with the show.

Oh, that's beautiful, man. I think that's incredible because like we were talking about it a little bit before, uh, storytelling is so much more than entertainment, you know, I think if we want a lot of these societal issues to, to shift to a more harmonious place, the storytellers have a huge responsibility. The stories we tell shape our future. So I'm super stoked to see that, uh, I hear is going to have a soundtrack that includes a lot of metal music.

Oh, hell yeah. Is, uh, Gustavo and he's working with, uh, another composer named Tim Davies from Australia. And, you know, we start with was very much a part of the nineties sort of rocking Hispaniola era of music that I was in high school and all those things happen.

I joke with them that. I lost my virginity to his soundtrack. Uh, when I would tell him that he, he, he would like just shake his head, but all that influence obviously. And so there's metal cause to me, you know, there's a lot of metal bands and especially in south America that were huge. So all that made it into the show and all those ideas.

Yeah, it sounds like, I mean, in a, in a lot of your work, I can see this, but it sounds like in my end, the three, there's going to be a lot of, kind of mishmash of Mexican American pop culture, indigenous folklore, all kind of meshed into this story.

Yeah. I mean, that, that was another big thing that I, you know, in book of life, Some people were a little shocked to see our main character, seeing a Radiohead song in the middle of a bull fight in 1910 in Mexico. And I said, if I, if I used an authentic song of that time, no one would know it. But by taking things that I lived through and remixes them right.

Basically you're appropriating the soul of what those songs meant into the context of the movie. Then you, you, you get to introduce him to a whole new generation and you get to introduce the duality of honestly, the border. Right? Cause I heard creep sang by mariachis and I said, look how great that song is.

It went somewhere else. And I remember at the time I didn't know any better. So I put it in the script and , who's a producer said, you're not going to get the song. They denied the song to fund. So quite often they denied me the song. There's no way in hell you're going to get the phone. So I wrote, I wrote the band and we sent them a video of the moment in the movie.

And I explained how that song was basically my, my war cry as a teenager when I didn't think I belonged and how much it meant to me. And, uh, how, as a kid in the corner, that was literally my little flag that I. Um, and Tom York said, yeah, you can use it based on that. So I am eternally thankful to Radiohead.

that's incredible. Yeah. It seems like just having grown up at the border and crossing the border, I'm sure on the way to school and on and all that, it seems like a lot of that, the bright and wild, colorful vision that you see at the border are very influential in your work. And I know in this book of yours that I have right here, border bang, you shout at the border. And like all the border vendors who we've spent a lot of time talking to and their creativity and entrepreneurial spirit, how, how they're like they seize on pop culture and taking on the zeitgeists, you know, and any characters, movie stars, rock stars, and kind of make, make them their own and are able to make a living off of them Support their families. It seems like this mish-mash kind of like culture is fluid, like you said, has very much influenced your work. Can you tell me about like how, how crossing the border if that's accurate?

So literally, uh, you know, as a kid, as a nine-year-old crossing that border, you know, two hours every day to go to school, You're a sponge and I would absorb everything that the vendors had. So seeing Tupac next to SpongeBob next to Bob Marley, next to Scarface. Next to chapel, the Lord show. A lot of times, I didn't know who the people were. And I, I would sort of decipher, like, why is Mickey mouse next to the Virgin, Mary? Like all those images got tattooed on my, on my eyes and then the borders alive.

Right. So I remember when, you know, when Kurt Cobain passed away immediately, all this Kurt Cobain stuff started popping up. It's almost like the border honored him with the bootleg. The like were laying down for him. And I remember it, you know, same thing with saline. Uh, was murdered. All the Salinas stuff started coming out.

You would know who, what teams are doing well, because all their stuff was selling. It was like the border was alive and who they chose to to honor. And who, by the way, who they chose to vilify. Right. So in Halloween, have you saw, uh, costumes? Basically the border were saying, yeah, the president of Mexico is the devil, right?

Like all, I mean, all these immediate reactions that as a kid really informed me really informed. The way I see characters and the way I see color mixing things is in our DNA. I think as border kids, having grown up with one foot on each side, you kind of get used to that back and forth every day and then be able to, to go look at what happens to American culture when it comes down here, but then looking at what happens to American culture when it's recontextualized and represented to an American audience, um, you know, Bart Sanchez from the Simpsons.

That happening. I love all that stuff because to me, culture is evolution. And so grabbing these things and making them your own, your own. That's, that's the one that right. That's that's San Diego. That's the hybrid state we get to live in.

Yeah. It's such a fascinating thing. No matter how many hours I've spent talking about the border, I never get tired of it. Cause it, it has this like paradoxical nature where the fact that there is a border. The artists of this region kind of borderless like your, our imaginations become very boundless, which is such a wild thing that this border creates.

And, you know, I always say be Quanah is the last corner of Latin America, the whole continent, all the, it ends there. The funnel is like everything's funneling through. Right. And the U S probably one of the most influential. Cultures in the world. Again, it was right there. Right? Los Angeles is two hours away where a lot of the music industry, film industry.

So the fact that these two forces are constantly at each other, I think that's where the magic happen. Mm. Yeah. I completely agree. It's a fascinating place. Um, before we continue, I want to go back. Yeah. As I understand it, your dad was born in Tijuana, but he moved to Mexico city to study architecture and you were born there, but then he, for some reason was called back to Tijuana.

Do you remember what that move was like and why, why your dad decided to go back to the corner? Yeah, you know, it was, uh, it was early eighties, uh, 84 and my dad having grown up in the planet and, you know, there was no universities in decline at that time. So he studied architecture in Mexico city started doing pretty well.

Met my mom. They got married. And then he said in Mexico city is crazy. There's too. It's just too crazy. I want to go home. I want to, I want to basically convince my mother to return to the corner. I was nine years old. My sister was 10. It was a huge move. I mean, for a kid at that age, especially Mexico city was, was our home.

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