Atzlan Roars

Fortunately, Aztlan was met with an equal and opposite reaction from some encouraging places. "Other people would say, 'I love your sound! You guys are unique.' And we would hear this, believe it or not, from my cousins from Mexico. When I'd go down there, I'd take my guitar, and I'd play some stuff that I thought would be Mexican enough for them, and they would absolutely love it because they heard the blues influence. They heard the jazz, and they loved it," Pecina says.

Grupo Aztlan features three additional members on percussion -- Pat Conway, Mike DeLeon Jr. (whose father played in Mambo X) and Victor Velasco. Ironically, this new instrumentation not only allows for the salsa, meringue and rock to blend but also more accurately captures the sound of those old bolero records. "We've never had percussion behind us as a trio," Pecina explains. "But if you listen to the traditional trio records, they always do. Even when we perform as a trio, we often bring along with us two percussionists, so they fill in the background, and it sounds beautiful."

A large part of Aztlan's audience has continued to push the band to try new things. "At the restaurant, we were always bombarded," Pecina says. "People would ask us to play Lynyrd Skynyrd for them or Van Halen. If they asked for the Beatles, boom, we would play a Beatles song for them. If they ask for funk, we throw some funk at them. We play some Santana now. We've realized our horizons. We've realized that we can expand."

But Pecina insists Grupo Atzlan will always return to its bolero roots. "I have been resisting going into salsa because the bolero for the trio is what we created," he says. "It has been our bread and butter for ten years. But I love playing salsa and meringue. It's the first time for me, as a Mexican, to be playing these Caribbean sounds, and it's enticing."

That enticement is what makes Grupo Aztlan special for its fans and for the musicians themselves. "Latin Americans happen to be some of the luckiest people on the earth, because we can listen to U.S. music and the beautiful Latin American music that we have in our own cultures, and we can appreciate both worlds," Pecina says. "That's what I'm doing now. I'm just eating it all up."