Daniel Valdez and the music that helped drive ‘Zoot Suit’  

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In this first of two articles, Daniel Valdez recounts his work on the landmark film, ‘Zoot Suit.’

Star and musical director of the landmark film “Zoot Suit,” and musical director of “La Bamba,” Daniel Valdez’s performing career began humbly when his older brother, El Teatro Campesino founder Luis Valdez, dressed him up as Elvis Presley in the second grade.

“He put sideburns on me,” Daniel said, “and I pantomimed singing the song ‘Teddy Bear.’ I couldn’t play anything. But I dug it. I really loved the idea of performing for people. So, it stayed with me.”

At 15, he was getting paid gigs playing with a band. It did not last.

Describing himself as “unruly as hell,” Valdez started to get in trouble with the law and his parents sent him to live in Delano, where Luis had formed El Teatro Campesino as an adjunct to Cesar Chavez’s labor organizing.

“It changed my whole life,” Valdez said. “I was exposed to the Theatro and I became an actor. The thing that served me was my guitar playing. I could take my guitar with me and we used my music in the group, so I became one of the players.”

The 1978 play “Zoot Suit,” was a major breakthrough for Luis, as playwright and director and for Daniel, who took on the major role of Henry Reyna, as well as writing music for the production.

“We put together the first draft of ‘Zoot Suit’ for a 10-day festival in Los Angeles,” Valdez said. “We had already been playing with the idea of a story about pachucos. I considered it just another show but it took on a life of its own.”

Pachucos originated in Texas in the 1930s as a Chicano subculture. Adherents were known for wearing zoot suits, high-waisted pegged trousers and long coats with wide lapels. 

In coming up with a soundtrack for the production, Valdez found he had to depart from the way El Teatro had used music while performing for farmworkers in Delano, which consisted of a song or two sandwiched in between spoken performances. 

“It became kind of a formula for us,” he said. “When we started working on ‘Zoot Suit,’ we asked ourselves, ‘How do we make it a musical?’ I mean, you can’t tell a story about the 1940s without invoking music.”

All in the family

The task facing Valdez was deciding how to introduce a pachuco slant to the music—a mix of 1930s and ’40s jump blues, jazz and swing—needed for the production.

“I didn’t know exactly how to approach that,” he said. “I started researching period songs. I was always a fan of the 1940s anyway, so I already had some knowledge of the period. But there was nothing Latino that I could find.”

Valdez contacted a Los Angeles ethnomusicologist he knew through his attendance at Teatro productions. He was told, “You’re digging into something that nobody’s really gotten into—pachucos are pretty specific.” 

But he did have one lead for Valdez.

“He said, ‘I do have a recording of one guy,’” he said. “‘He sings in Spanish and has these weird words in there that I’ve never heard before. I’ll send it to you.’ I put it on and hear these pachuco songs with slang and thought, ‘Who the hell is this?’”

The musician was Valdez’s uncle, Lalo Guerrero. The songs on the recording, which were from the exact era in which Zoot Suit was set, came from one of Guerrero’s ventures into a rather obscure musical genre.

“Everything connected,” Valdez said. “Lalo was a big name in our family. When I was 12 years old, I got to see him perform in a white tuxedo. I mean, he looked incredible. The orchestra played music like I’d never heard before. It was unbelievable.”

Valdez asked his parents about the recordings. They said Guerrero had performed in all the old farmworker towns and the “young kids were always asking him to write something about them.”

Playing with slang

Valdez began working with 10 of the songs but had concerns about them fitting in with the production. “The Spanish was already hard for some to understand,” he said. “But if it’s in slang Spanish, it’s even harder. Slang became part of the actual fiber of ‘Zoot Suit’—you can’t tell the story without the slang.”

Valdez began with one of the songs, “Chicas Patas Boogie,” which he renamed “Zoot Suit Boogie.”

“We started playing with that,” he said, “and it gave us a vision of what could possibly be if we used it on stage. It was a performance piece. So it was also choreographed. It was music. It was dance. It was all those things that we needed to have.” 

Starting off with 15 songs, the libretto was whittled down to four, which Valdez said became the driving pieces of the play. He went on to compose the rest of the soundtrack himself. 

“It grew very slowly,” he said. “The first attempt was to try to recreate those original recordings. I brought in four musicians and we started laying tracks to see if we could do it. It was very  elementary really: basic drums, bass, piano, maybe horn.”

As the pieces evolved, Valdez had to adapt Guerrero’s work to serve the production’s purposes. 

“The music kind of grew,” he said, “just like the play. When we first started working, we had an opening scene and that was about it. I dissected sections from the songs and they became a musical underscore that I laced throughout the film.”

One classic piece from the film is a Valdez composition called “Handball,” which he wrote specifically for a prison scene. Handball was a popular game in the 1940s but Valdez could not find any music that really fit.

“I took an idea,” he said, “and I went to the piano, messing with chords and came up with a sequence that was a bit too much pop but it worked out really well on stage. The whole idea was that every piece of music is there to help you go from one scene to another.”

‘Primitive’ beginnings

Valdez said that playing one of the main characters gave him an advantage in composing for the play.

“I knew dramatically where things were going,” he said. “So I was able to adapt each scene based on what I knew about the scene. For example, if it was an emotional moment, a down moment, I could use a slow version of the music underneath it.”

The first version of the soundtrack, which Valdez describes as “primitive,” was recorded in San Juan Bautista, based on the Teatro workshop performances.  

“I recorded it on a four-track,” he said. “It was basic but it had the foundation of the piece. Based on that workshop, I knew that the music worked well with the pieces because it allowed for performance to happen.”

Using a recorded soundtrack for the play’s debut at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles became critically important because of the play’s complexity.

“Dance and live singing became a real part of the thing,” he said. “Ideally, we would have had a band but there was no way we could afford it. So I had to create the soundtrack without voices and leave it open so they could perform it live.”

Valdez did not realize that his pre-recorded tracks were part of a new performance genre which is commonplace today. 

“That was an amazing thing,” he said. We were actually reinventing how music integrated in theater so it wasn’t just background. It was music that actually demanded action on stage. The Taper had never seen it. No one had ever done it before.”

The play and the songs presented a common obstacle: Because of the obscurity of the source material, there was little chance that an audience would be familiar with the 1950s slang being used. 

Success

“We were really clever,” Valdez said. “We put a glossary of all the pachuco words on the back of the program. So these lines would come off stage and you hear the ruffle of programs. And there would be a delayed laugh. It was wonderful.”

The play was an immediate success, selling out its entire run within two days. What had been intended as just part of a 10-day festival became a phenomenon.

“Going to the theater was not something Chicanos did,” Valdez said. “They had never seen pachuco life portrayed on stage with real Latinos. There was a tremendous response and an embrace that was unbelievable.”

At the close of the performance, Valdez was satisfied that the show had seen a good run and was surprised when the Taper asked the company to return for another nine weeks. 

“We came back three months later, sure we could sell those weeks,” he said. “We decided to re-record the soundtrack to get the performance level we needed. I got a budget and was able to bring in some high-class musicians.”

The second production sold out again. The demand was so great that the production was moved to the Moulin Rouge on Sunset Boulevard, where it continued for 11 weeks. Having made $3.5 million at the door, the play attracted the attention of the Shubert Organization, which led to its staging on Broadway.

“The play had a profound impact that was more than just the historical value,” he said. “It had culture. It was an older generation that was teaching a younger generation what it was like when they were growing up.  

By the time “Zoot Suit” was made into a film, the soundtrack budget had risen to $125,000 and Valdez was able to hire some industry heavyweights to make the music bigger and “beefier.”

“We had Ray Brown on bass,” he said. “I got to work with Shorty Rogers, a tremendous artist. We spent two and a half months in the studio rewriting the entire soundtrack. It was a hell of an undertaking, man. It was an amazing experience.”

Valdez said the success of the film solidified El Teatro’s long-held belief that the Latino audience was real and not just limited to the United States.

“We are talking about Mexico,” he said. “We’re talking South America, Latin America and Europe. It touched a lot of people and I think the story and the music have allowed it to become a universal film.”

In the second part of this series, Valdez will discuss his work on the “La Bamba” soundtrack with Carlos Santana and the music of Ritchie Valens performed by Los Lobos. Valdez will be honored with an Icon Award for his work in film during the Poppy Jasper Festival’s México y Tú Celebration on April 14.

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