Mexican musicians to play tribute to Morrissey

How soon is ahora?

Mexican musicians will re-imagine the songs of mononymic musical monolith Morrissey in a show at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on May 10. Setting music by the morose former frontman of the Smiths — who penned song titles like “Unhappy Birthday” and “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me” — to bouncy south-of-the-border instrumentation may sound like a culture clash, but for many Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, Moz’s heavy lyrics are a light that will never go out, one performer said.

“His music is charged with drama, black humor, irony — we have that in our DNA,” said bandleader Camilo Lara, who lives in Mexico City and also founded electronic music project the Mexican Institute of Sound. “That is why we love telenovelas [soap operas] and lucha libre [Mexican wrestling].”

Lara said his love affair with Morrissey began when he was 6 and his older brother started spinning tunes from British post-punk bands XTC, Bauhaus, and the Smiths.

“I enjoyed those more than ‘Sesame Street,’ ” Lara said. “I think every single band in Mexico … has been influenced by the Smiths.”

This year, he put together Mexrrissey, a supergroup with members from indie Mambo act Calexico, hair metal mock-rock group Moderatto, and punks Tijuana No! The collective translated Moz’s lyrics into Spanish and incorporated traditional elements like Mariachi-style horn sections and the clave — the tightly syncopated rhythmic backbone for many styles of Latin music.

Melding the disparate elements is not a simple task, according to one Latin music producer.

“Some songs, especially English ones originating in the United States, are at times impossible to place in clave,” Salsa producer Sergio George said in the 2008 book “Sounding Salsa: Performing Latin Music in New York City.”

But Lara’s ability to seamlessly weave together English and Latin music is testament to his skill as an arranger, one critic said.

“He’s gotten to be so good at marrying traditional Mexican sounds — whether they’re mariachi horns or traditional rhythms — with a very modern rock form and sensibility,” said WNYC radio’s John Schaefer, who will host a discussion with Lara before Mexrrissey takes the stage on May 10 as part of the station’s annual Radio Love Fest series at the Fort Greene arts institution. “It takes a really keen ear and a really deft touch to pull off that sort of thing.”

For Lara, the biggest hurdle was capturing Morrissey’s voice amid his verbosity.

“He tends to put a lot of words in little spaces,” Lara said. “It was a great exercise. These are not translations — these are adaptations. We didn’t want to make a tribute or a cover band — we wanted to do a band that really re-appropriated Morrissey songs with a Mexican DNA.”

“Mexrrissey: Mexico Loves Morrissey” at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House [30 Lafayette Ave. between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street in Fort Greene, www.bam.org, (718) 636–4100]. May 10 at 7:30 pm. $35.