By YOLANDA PERDOMO

By the time you read this story, the six members of Chicago's Sones De Mexico will have traveled from the Windy City to Sin City (Las Vegas) as Latin Grammy nominees. The event, to be televised on Thursday, Nov. 8 on Univision, celebrates performers in a wide range of Latin music styles, such as rock and regional Mexican. Sones De Mexico is nominated for "Best Folk Album," competing against groups from Cuba and Colombia, as well as a vocalist from Portugal.

The group, featuring four members from Mexico, one Mexican-American born and raised in Chicago, and one Venezuelan, can be categorized as folk, but their music covers everything from classical to classic rock. The six members play a total of 70 instruments.

"A lot of the music that we play is dance music, it's festive music. And the dancing is done on a wooden surface," says Juan Dies, who founded the group in 1994. "So we bring the son jarocho, son tarima, son huasteco and give these styles more visibility and appreciation because they're just as exciting and complex as any of the other style of Mexican music."

There are many styles of instrumentation needed to perform Mexican music. The group uses a variety of horns, drums, and guitars, but there are also things like a skeletal donkey jaw, a mandolin-like instrument made of an armadillo shell, a conch shell, as well as hollowed out gourds and seeds used as percussion instruments.

Another item, the tarima, is a small dresser drawer-sized wooden box used by Chicago born Lorena Iñiguez. She was a professional dancer for many years and first met the members of Sones De Mexico in 1996, when the group played the music for her company's recital. She dances on the wooden box with black Mary Jane-style heeled shoes which have a silver heel and toe, made from tiny little silver nails tapped into the shoe.

She says performing a "zapateado," a music style featuring her dancing on the box, came from the countryside where people hollowed out the ground and put wooden boards across the hole so they could dance on it. The sound could be heard from miles away, announcing that a "fandango," a party, was underway.

"I believe only a couple is allowed at a time. They've got their roles as to when you get on the tarima. It's not a dance floor," says Iñiguez, who's been with the group for four years. "In a dance company, there's choreography, there's a lot of interaction with your partner. As opposed to being a soloist dancer."

But the group doesn't just interpret Mexican folk songs. On their Latin Grammy nominated CD "This Land Is Your Land," the group remakes a Woody Guthrie classic, along with other non-Mexican songs including Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #3 and Led Zeppelin's "Four Sticks." Dies says all of the songs have a personal connection to the group.

"Four Sticks was something that we experienced as an invitation to be part of a Led Zeppelin tribute here in Chicago (at the Old Town School of Folk Music), The Brandenburg Concerto happened out of a car drive with Victor (Pichardo, the group's music director) and his friend from Veracruz," says Dies, who connects the music of the baroque to Mexico's indigenous music, adding that while they have performed all over the United States, they hope to one day go to Mexico to perform their version of Mexican folk music.

"I think the day that we're able to do that will be a wonderful, wonderful experience. We want to go." For now, a Grammy award nomination (and possible win) may be a dance worth celebrating.

The 8th annual Latin Grammy Awards will be televised on Univision Thursday Nov. 8 at 7 p.m. For more about Sones De Mexico, check out their Web site www.sonesdemexico.com