Quetzal’s new album weaves together Eastside memories and arts icons

“Do I romanticize the past?

Do we re-create our lives?

Do we narrate or improvise?”

Those questions seem to come to mind more often as we age, and they’re the essence of the heart-tugging new album “Memory and Return,” a collaboration between the LA band Quetzal, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos and the beloved nonagenarian artist Ofelia Esparza. 

The project started a few years ago when Quetzal bassist Juan Perez obtained what is known as a “Turbo Diddley” guitar.

“It’s made out of a cigar box with a metal resonator,” Quetzal singer Martha Gonzalez explained, “and the resonator is [often] an aluminum lid of a pot, and so there’s something like a voice of history in those two things — they’ve had other lives before coming together in this instrument.”

Gonzalez and Pérez began writing songs, some inspired by Pérez’s mother, who suffered from dementia and had recently died.

“The sound [of the Turbo Diddley] feels like a warm blanket to me that sonically allows for your thoughts to fly,” Gonzalez said. “It’s very easy to write lyrics and melodies to a sound like that.” 

The songs took shape as “an urgent battle against forgetting — el olvido,” band leader Quetzal Flores said in a recent interview, sitting at the dining table in his and Gonzalez’s El Sereno home. Adjacent is ostensibly the living room, but it’s mostly taken up by a baby grand piano and an assortment of guitars.  

The members of Quetzal had long wanted to work with Hidalgo, the master multi-instrumentalist from Los Lobos. “Kiko,” Los Lobos’ 1992 album, is described by Flores as “the crown jewel of Chicano music.” On “Memory and Return,” Quetzal diverges from its Mexican folk traditions for a more experimental sound reminiscent of the Latin Playboys, a Lobos side project spearheaded by Hidalgo and bandmate Louie Pérez.

Hidalgo eagerly came on board for “Memory and Return,” and they then invited Esparza, the 93-year-old altarista and poet. The collaboration brought together their decades as artists with talented young musician Sandino Gonzalez-Flores, the newest member of Quetzal and Gonzalez and Flores’ child.

“It’s a weaving of four generations of East LA artists and their memories,” said Flores, who produced the album. 

Indeed, East LA and Boyle Heights are the spiritual geography for the project. Each of the collaborators has deep roots there, providing “all these ways of coming at the same things from different generations,” Gonzalez said. She described Boyle Heights as a “deep creative space” that has spawned and nurtured so many artists. “It’s where I came into consciousness through art and culture.” 

Flores called the album  “an articulated offering from the Eastside to the rest of the world.”

That’s evident in all eight songs, starting with the opening track “LA River Flora and Fauna,” in which Hidalgo’s plaintive vocal describes the waterway as the place “where hopes and memories wash away / into the sea eternally.”

Hidalgo’s own memories are reflected in “Él,” a song about his older brother, Elmo, who had memory issues in his later years. Gonzalez  recalled a recording session where Hidalgo began talking about his brother, who had been a fighter pilot in the Korean War. One day, his family took Elmo to an air show, and his memories came to life as he described the aircraft and their uses. And that inspired the song’s lyric “Él voló y se acordó” — “He flew and he remembered.”

Esparza’s spoken word memories are interspersed throughout the album. On the final cut, “Truth and Dreams,” she describes the place that was home to three generations of her family: “The old adobe building with its mysterious history stood, decaying, giving way to imagined and invented happenings.”  

So, as the lyrics of the album’s song “The Past” ask: Do we romanticize the past? Do we re-create our lives? Do we narrate or improvise?   

The simple answer is: Of course we do. As Flores said, recalling a line from poet Roger Reeves: “It’s not the memory itself, but the desire to stay in it.”

“Memory and Return” can be heard on most streaming services, and vinyl copies can be ordered here. The album will be performed on Thursday, Oct. 30, at 7 p.m. at USC’s Bovard Auditorium. Admission is free. RSVP here.