On Sunday the Mariachi Divas de Cindy Shea will be up for best regional Mexican music album at the 59th Grammy Awards, where the all-female group has been nominated seven times, winning twice. On Thursday, the band played a concert to celebrate their latest nomination at a place they’ve been playing live for 14 years, the Disneyland Resort.
“Lucky for me I was a friend of Cindy (Shea) when she was at Cal State Fullerton with my son Jason,” said Stan Freese, who was the director of talent booking at the resort back then.
Now retired, Freese said he was so impressed with the group’s founder that when he heard that she and a few others had formed an all-female mariachi ensemble, he was intrigued.
So, after booking them for a few gigs at a Los Angeles street fair, he decided to try them out at Disneyland in 2003.
“They have wonderful arrangements,” he said. “They bring the musicianship to great arrangements.”
Shea and a few others founded the group in 1999.
“Back when we first started in 1999, it was very, very unique to be an all female group in any genre of music,” Shea said.
It was even more unusual in that Shea has blonde hair and blue eyes, decidedly not of Mexican heritage. But she fell in love with mariachi as she learned to play the trumpet, and pursued it with a passion. She joined an all-female group in the early 1990s, but when it broke up in 1999, she and a few others got together to form the Mariachi Divas.
“When I started the group there were many mariachi groups with one token girl in the band to come out and sing one song per hour,” said Shea. “I thought that if there’s such a great response from this one woman – what if we put all of us together?”
In 2009, they became the first all-female mariachi band to be nominated and receive a Grammy. They received a second in 2014 and are nominated this year for their 12th album, “Tributo a Joan Sebastian & Rigoberto Alfaro” – a celebration of two legends in Mexican music.
Besides recording mariachi music albums, they still perform regularly at the Disneyland Resort, including Saturday evening performances at Tortilla Jo’s in Downtown Disney.
During their live performances they play a variety of mariachi music, and put their own mariachi spin on some Disney classics such as “It’s a Small World” and “Let it Go” from the movie “Frozen.”
“It depends on what generations are in the crowd,” Shea said.
The group will be performing live Sunday during the pre-telecast online at grammy.com, which will start around noon Pacific time.
Contact the writer: meades@scng.com or follow on Twitter @markaeades
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