By YOLANDA PERDOMO

The group Sones de Mexico is up for a Latin Grammy tomorrow night. The band's CD "Esta Tierra Es Tuya," or This Land is Your Land, is nominated for best folk album. Most of the band members are Mexican immigrants now based in Chicago. Yolanda Perdomo has their story.

*******
In a small rehearsal studio near downtown Chicago, Sones de Mexico's founding member, Juan Dies, is surrounded by an assortment of instruments.

DIES: "Yes, multi-instrumentation is a requirement for being a musician in Sones de Mexico."

There are your standard band instruments...guitars, fiddles, drums, a couple of saxophones, an accordian. There are also things like a deer antler, and tortoise shells, and a conchero guitar, a mandolin-like instrument made from an armadillo shell.

DIES: "And then we have the marimba. The marimba has these resonators at the bottom, that have a piece of skin that makes a vibration like that. It's a buzzing sound. This instrument is made from granadillo, which is a really hard wood that grows in Chiapas."

This is "Tabasco Suite," a style of Mexican music known as son de marimba that can usually be heard in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

Overall the group plays more than 70 instruments. Dies says all of them are necessary because Mexican music is so different from region to region.

DIES: "A lot of people associate Mexican music with mariachi and banda, which are some of the better known styles. And part of our mission as a cultural group is to bring some of the lesser known styles to become known by the people."

"During the colonial period, the natives of Mexico were not allowed to play their music. They were taught in the church to play church music. This was the music of the baroque. It was something that Victor, our music director, noticed when he was in his car, driving with a friend from Veracruz, and they were listening to Johann Sebastian Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #3, and the friend from Veracruz said 'this sounds like a zapateado from Veracruz.'"

Lorena Iniguez was a professional dancer before she joined the group. Here she's dancing a zapateado. Wearing shoes with tiny silver nails tapped into the heel and toe, she dances on a tarima, a wooden box in the shape of a dresser drawer.

INIGUEZ: "The idea came from the small towns, the traditional son is party music for fiestas. What they would do is hollow out the ground and put wooden boards. So when the townspeople would come and dance on them the sound would resonate for miles and miles away."

But the group's music director, Victor Pichardo, says Sones De Mexico is not just about Mexican music. In the festive song "Los Panaderos," the Bakers, the group blends in another folkloric dance song...this one from Puerto Rico.

PICHARDO: "Because we have a very good relationship with Puerto Ricans here in Chicago. They are a big community. Several times we have played together. So we decided to include some Puerto Rican plena at the end of the song."

The lyrics go: "What a beautiful flag, this Puerto Rican flag."

Sones de Mexico also uses folk instruments for songs that you wouldn't think have any connection to Mexican music. Aztec instruments including a conch shell, ayotote seeds sewn on leather ankle straps, and a skeletal donkey jaw are used to put a new spin on the Led Zeppelin classic, "Four Sticks." Juan Dies says the group was invited to perform the song for a Led Zeppelin tribute concert in Chicago.

DIES: "I think it may have been a joke to see what we would do with it. But this is what we came up with. It was so well received so much that we ended up recording it."

And then there's the CD's title track "Esta Tierra Es Tuya," This Land is Your Land.

DIES: "The situation that's going on in this country with immigrants has affected our friends, our families. And this song came to mind during the protests in May of 2005. It made so much sense for what was going on that we decided to do it in Spanish."

As with all their songs, the members of Sones de Mexico have their own take on this one. They've added some original verses. "In this world," they sing, "there lives a poor people, and others who are rich. And then we have many travellers in search of opportunity."