BOMB 110/Winter 2010
ON NEWSSTANDS NOW
ON NEWSSTANDS NOW
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Photo by Juan Felipe Rubio.
To stumble into Lower Manhattan’s Santos Party House on a Thursday night, when Uproot Andy and Geko Jones host monthly “Que Bajo?!” parties, or into a Queens nightclub where sonidera DJs are blasting a bizarre mix of Colombian-Mexican folk and standard-fare techno, is to peek around some corners of a mushrooming music scene that most New Yorkers have passed without noticing. Not many American hipsters find their way to cumbia parties.
But in the packed clubs of Buenos Aires, young porteños at Zizek Collective parties are rejecting tango’s rigid Eurocentrism and flocking to roots-based electronic cumbia the way American suburbanites embraced hip-hop a generation ago. As with any popular music that rises from poor, rural areas and is later embraced by the middle class, cumbia is a resilient form that has allowed for experimentation without obliterating its sources. At its root, it is both a musical style and a folk dance with origins based in the Colombian coast. Its spread began in the ’50s, and Latin American variants began to crop up in the form of Peruvian chicha, Argentine villera, and Mexican sonidera, among others. With cumbia, context is everything. While a large segment of the South American and Mexican music industry has been un-distinguishing itself by embracing generic Anglicized rock, a few innovative musicians, producers, and DJs have been quietly (yet noisily) firing cumbia shots across the bow of the ongoing debate of what constitutes Latin alternative music.
Ch-ch-CH (as opposed to reggaeton’s THUM-th-thum-thum) is the signature of the constantly morphing sound of the new cumbia that continues to spread, slowly but definitively. That a genre anchored by the minimal scrape and click from a guacharaca and a woodblock would become the blank canvas for so much new music is surprising, to say the least. The panoply of cumbia forms—the most traditional and folkloric, electronic dance, near-pornographic shantytown villera rap, and dubby remixes are exploding globally and yet still feel satisfyingly underground, up here in the North and also in Colombia.
Mario Galeano Toro, leader of the Bogotá band Frente Cumbiero, is well versed in the variegated history of cumbia, from its Afro-Caribbean origins to its modern electronic manifestations. He is one of a relative handful of producers who are spreading cumbia in multiple geographical directions. Holding tight to a music that many of his compatriots had abandoned in favor of rival forms like vallenato, Galeano has sought to present his own experimental cumbia to diverse audiences in Europe and elsewhere, working with master remixers such as Mad Professor, who was able to collaborate with Frente Cumbiero thanks to a British Council grant. While the alternative music scene in Colombia has re-embraced the form, Galeano hopes that this process ends with a re-popularizing of cumbia among the Colombian general public. An avid collector of (now rare) vintage cumbia on vinyl, he has started a label, Salgaelsol, whose mission is to digitize and reissue recordings that are being rapidly lost from circulation.
Marc Nasdor Let’s start by talking about your first band, Ensamble Polifónico Vallenato. Was that already 10 years ago?
Mario Galeano Toro It was. Ensamble Polifónico Vallenato only lasted about a year and a half, but it was a very new approach here in Bogotá. Cumbia is coastal music, from the Caribbean coast, and we are here in the mountains of Bogotá, a very different atmosphere. Towards the end of Ensamble Polifónico Vallenato, new generations of musicians from Bogotá—bands like La Mojarra Eléctrica or Curupira—started reinterpreting Caribbean music. We were like 20 years old, just having fun.
MN I listened to some tracks and it was more experimental than I expected—almost noise.
MG That was the idea; vallenato is a close cousin of cumbia. It’s mostly major keys. In the ’90s there used to be cheesy commercial vallenato that played on all the buses in Bogotá—here we have music on the buses all the time! So we just put it into another context. Sure, we were having fun, but in the end it was a serious proposal.
MN Vallenato is also close to champeta, with the major chords, but champeta can be a lot faster. All the major chords make it a very happy music; it’s very upbeat.
MG Yes, though champeta has a lot of influence from African music—soukous and highlife and mbaqanga—and all of these styles that were huge in the ’80s in Cartagena and Barranquilla. Soukous is the main influence behind it and also sound system music, so it’s really meant to be heard through the sound systems they have on the coast. It’s made for dance.
MN Let’s move on to the subject of cumbia, your specialty. Here in New York, there’s a non-Colombian audience that has definitely become interested in cumbia.
MG Yes, that’s been happening over the last two or three years, also in England.
MN Let’s talk about what cumbia is in terms of its rhythm, because it has a very distinctive one that comes from the guacharaca.
MG Cumbia is composed of many different rhythms; I would say around 30. They’re all part of one big family called cumbia, but each has its own groove. The guacharaca with that ch-ch-CH rhythm is really the thing you notice first when you hear cumbia.
MN Sometimes I hear the emphasis on the third note of the triplet, and on other songs I hear the emphasis on the first note.
MG Well, that’s an interesting thing about the internationalization of cumbia. It was exported to Mexico and Argentina, but they couldn’t export the more Afro stuff because there’s only a small black community in Mexico and people find it easier to dance on strong beats instead of upbeats, so they started making sort of a fusion cumbia in the ’60s that removed the heavier, Afro-syncopated rhythms to make it more international, easier to digest.
MN When you say easier to digest, do you mean for dance clubs?
MG Yeah, for the dancers. So in the ’60s, the heavy percussion was taken out from behind, and the thing you notice most now is the guacharaca in front. Nowadays, even though Colombian cumbia has so many different rhythms, the only things that matter are just the guacharaca and the llamador, which is the upbeat.
MN Let’s have a slight digression about chicha music in Peru, which has recently become popular. There’s a band formed by the owners of a wonderful world music club called Barbés in Brooklyn—
MG Chicha Libre, right?
MN Yes, and they also released a compilation in 2007 of ’60s and ’70s stuff called The Roots of Chicha.
MG Yeah, of course, I know about this.
MN Among my Peruvian and Ecuadorian friends, some love it and others say it’s a bastardization. People hear Chicha Libre and think, “Oh, psychedelic cumbia,” but in the chicha of the ’60s this term must be completely out of context.
MG In the ’60s, Peru had one of the biggest rock scenes in Latin America, bands like Los Saicos and Los Belkings. The electric guitar got to be the sound of the country. Lima is right on the Pacific coast, and a lot of Californian surfers started to come in the ’50s looking for beaches. Lima is the first city you find coming from the north after Central America, and surf music got really huge; there are a lot of surf bands from Peru from the ’60s that are super professional and really cool. By the ‘70s, things had started changing. Some of the guitarists playing in garage and surf bands in the ’60s were playing cumbia by ’71 or ’72 because they didn’t have any more work as a rock guitarists! So that’s where the electric guitar sound came from, and that’s why people sometimes think cumbia sounds psychedelic. (laughter)
MN And of course the Farfisa organ replacing the accordion.
MG Yeah, the Farfisa sounds quite electric. Some cumbia tunes have a way of using minor keys that sound a bit exotic for some ears, also sort of psychedelic.
MN I’ve been having conversations with a couple musician friends who were saying that this electric cumbia was not about Lima, that it was about the countryside, the poor people; that people from Lima actually didn’t like it.
MG Bands like Juaneco, Los Mirlos—they all come from the Amazon and that’s why the other name of chicha is actually cumbia amazónica. It’s interesting how the relationship between Colombian and Peruvian music evolved together; chicha is like another brother of cumbia.
But back to The Roots of Chicha: a lot of the hipsters in Peru have gotten into it—that’s how things work here; sometimes we need validation from Europe or the US to start paying attention to these things. Narrow-minded people think it’s old-fashioned and cheesy and doesn’t have international value, but when some guy from New York says it’s great, people catch up with it.
MN It’s similar to how, in the late ’70s, the Ramones had to go to England to be validated. (laughter) But let’s get back to the spread of cumbia through Mexico.
MG Okay, well, it happened in the ’60s. There’s this record label called Discos Fuentes, the first and biggest record company of Colombia. Actually, yesterday they were celebrating their 75th anniversary.
MN Yes, I see you posted it on your Facebook page. (laughter) They’re everything, right? From the most commercial to indie and more underground music.
MG Everything. They bought the catalogue of all the smaller labels on the coast, so now they own everything you’d want to find of Caribbean music, tropical music. So these guys started connecting with other labels from Latin America and sharing content. Fuentes was strong with cumbia, porro, puya, merecumbé.
MN Can you define those styles?
MG They’re all sort of relatives. Porro was strong in the ’50s, and that was what caught the attention of the Mexicans. From the ’30s through the ’50s Mexico had a strong cinema industry and they made a lot of musical movies where they are playing cumbia. On YouTube you can find some Mexican movies from the ’50s where they’re just playing live cumbia and porro! It was sort of the opposition to what Cuban music represented, because the Cuban music scene was about the mambo and the cha-cha-cha and all of these other rhythms.
MN In Cuba you had salsa and sol and all the other related forms.
MG And it’s very evident, the difference between the two families of Colombian cumbia and Cuban music. After the ’60s, the middle class became the main consumer of cumbia. Then a lot of tropical bands emerged in Mexico that started playing live cumbia because it’s not so syncopated and it’s easier for the people who haven’t incorporated the upbeat thing to play. By the late ’60s, cumbia was established in the middle class in Mexico City. But north in Monterrey, there’s a quite different story: there the people who liked it were the lower classes.
MN Around which years are you talking about now?
MG This is around ’75 onward. They loved Colombian music; they started to get really into it, to the point that today, all the people who listen to cumbia in Monterrey call themselves Colombians. (laughter) They say the people around them from the higher classes talk down to them, say they’re crazy for being so into the culture. I was doing a residency in Mexico and I went to Monterrey for a month. They have this bizarre conception of what Colombia is: at the bars where they play cumbia, they paint the Colombian flag on the wall and wear the typical hats of the coast. They’re very proud of it; they’re Colombians, Colombians, Colombians! It’s an amazing example of the appropriation of culture.
MN It’s interesting that this would happen in Monterrey, an industrial city in the north, not near the coast.
MG Yeah, only three hours away from the US border. It’s funny, all the gangsters in Bogotá, or in most cities, have this really urban thing happening; they get in touch with hip-hop, right? But in Monterrey—a really big city and super close to the US—they’re not into hip-hop at all. They’re into cumbia and vallenato! That’s just crazy, man.