Los Lobos revisit past

How does a legendary Chicano rock band from East Los Angeles celebrate their 40th anniversary? If you're Los Lobos you head to New York and play a couple of stripped back semi-acoustic shows and record them for posterity as Disconnected.

Saxophonist and keyboardist Steve Berlin says the band set out to make a live album that was markedly different to those they'd previously put out.

"There's quite few songs that fans have asked us to play that for one reason or another had fallen off the set list, so we just decided that we would play songs we haven't played for a while at these shows," he begins.

One of the songs that has never been on their live albums is their most famous song, the mid-80s hit La Bamba.

Berlin says Los Lobos had been playing the song live since their early days as a tribute to the man that made it famous, the legendary Ritchie Valens.

"We've always been close to the Valens family because Ritchie's parents and brothers and sisters were good friends of ours and have been for 30 or 40 years," Berlin says.

He said when the family sold the rights to Ritchie's story to the producers of the highly successful 1987 biopic La Bamba, one of the clauses was that Los Lobos would provide the soundtrack.

"That was the first time we heard about the movie and obviously it turned into something a lot bigger than anybody had anticipated going into it," Berlin says.

"Our world pretty much aligned with that song . . . people knew who we were after that point."

Berlin is also well known behind the scenes for his production and session credits.

Having worked with everyone from Faith No More to Paul Kelly, one of Berlin's many recent projects was nominated for a Grammy Award with Neko Case's The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You picking up a nod for best alternative album. Berlin provided flute and sax throughout the record.

"She reached out to me for her 2009 album Middle Cyclone," he says. "I went down to Tucson, Arizona, where she was making that record and we had a great time.

"The new one she did here in Portland so it was literally done straight from my house."