Introducing Martin Solis Conjunto Los Primos 1955 Club Card Tejana Latin Jazz

Very good-corner stress. Born 1929 in San Antonio, TX, Martin Huron Solis, Jr. and his family came to Michigan in 1942 as migrant farmworkers and soon settled in the Detroit area. The Solis family was part of a wave of migration during the 1940s that brought thousands of Texas-born Mexican-Americans, along with their culture, north.

Though he played guitar from an early age, Solis eventually fell in love with conjunto music, a South Texas style defined by the combination of accordion and bajo sexto, a Mexican twelve-string bass guitar. He taught himself to play the bajo sexto and joined up with accordionist Manuel Rivera, playing for tips in bars around Southwest Detroit, the heart of Detroit's Mexican-American community. In the late-1950s, he and his cousin Willy Huron, a saxophonist, formed Conjunto Los Primos ( The Cousins ), at the time one of only a handful of conjuntos in the Midwest. Solis became a favorite in Detroit based on a vast repertoire of songs he compiled by following