The Original Sound Of Cumbia Rar
Simone Whitmeyer
This list is a primer to some of the amazing cumbia LPs that have been made over the years, focusing on Colombia as the heartland of the style, but with a handful of foreign takes showing its remarkable journey.
Colombian musicians such as Andrs Landero and Los Corraleros de Majagual were much in demand in Mexico where cumbia found a second home, starting a Mexican imitation called cumbia sonidera. Born in northern Mexico, the style changed much over the years but at first it was played with a beautifully laidback languorous beat with an accordion hyper-ventilating over the rhythm, as can be heard on this fine debut from Los ngeles Azules.
The digital cumbia boom that began in Argentina made its way to Peru where producers there saw an affinity with ayahuasca rituals and Andean folk songs. There are a number of fine electronic music producers working in Peru (especially in Lima) but none have had quite the impact as Dengue Dengue Dengue! whose industrial, haunting IDM sound, always driven by that unmistakeable cumbia beat, has won them fans the world over.
Cumbia refers to a number of musical rhythms and folk dance traditions of Latin America, generally involving musical and cultural elements from American Indigenous peoples, Europeans and African slaves during colonial times.[1] Cumbia is said to have come from funeral traditions in the Afro-Colombian community.
Cumbia's background came from the coastal region of Colombia.[7] To be more specific, its dance came from a coastal traditional culture, as cumbia had multiple ethnic influences that originated from this region. One of the biggest factors of its heritage is the African influences that was brought over by the African slaves imported from the colonization of the Spaniards. The influence came from the costeo[8] dance. Another influence was the integration of Spanish people. The Spanish folksongs with influences from the indigenous caused the fusion of races and the elements of their cultures were likewise fused.[9]
The history of cumbia has evolved throughout the years, known as a street dance but had a period of transiting into a ballroom dance.[10] Cumbia is commonly known for having many subgenres from different countries which contributes to the different dance styles known. Cumbia can be referred to as a folk dance while also being known globally as a street dance. To better understand what the dances of cumbia resemble it's better to know the basics of the dance. Cumbia is danced in pairs, consisting the amorous conquest of a woman by a man. This is crucial since the dance from the Atlantic coast[11] has the woman holding a candle in her right hand. This serves as two narrative functions; one to light the way for the dancing woman and the latter for a more serious motif. The latter can be portrayed in an imaginative sentence as a weapon by which the woman defends herself against the advances of her partner.[11]
Since the 1950s, cumbia has been an art form that is stylized, orchestrated and lyricized, contrary to the traditional form. This has diverged through the years and the world-known genre even had a brief period in the 1970s where it lost its popularity.
As the genre evolved, it expanded throughout Latin America. The expansion has led to the creation of new variations on the form, and international recognition of the genre changed public perceptions. Cumbia almost disappeared in Colombia in the 1970s after the introduction of salsa. Although that was detrimental it could be argued that cumbia found stability in Central America, Mexico, and Peru.[12] The transformation of cumbia in other countries to better align with the taste of populations with very different aesthetic traditions from the strongly African-derived coastal culture[13] from which it originally emerged.
Representing cumbia being perceived as expressing the harmonious outcome of racial and cultural blending, this socially affected the public views on the region's highly discriminated mestizo working class. Socially and economically some changed their views on mestizos due to cumbia being a large factor in shaping their perspective - except in Argentina, where it's still largely seen as vulgar and offensive by much of the middle class and has thus mostly helped reinforce lower class stereotypes.[14]
The Original Sound of Cumbia: The History of Colombian Cumbia & Porro As Told By The Phonograph 1948-79 (Soundways Records) is out on the 5th of December. You can buy the album from soundwayrecords.com/catalogue/the-original-sound-of-cumbia.html.
Sounds and Colours began its life in 2010. Back then it was a simple blog looking at underground culture in South America. Since then it has become one of the world's #1 sources for information on culture from Latin America and the Caribbean, printing specialist books, starting a record label and maintaining this website, with collaborators based around the world. Find out more about Sounds and Colours here.
The following podcast explores the history of the Colombian cumbia with generous examples from the field recordings of George List, who did field research in Colombia's Caribbean coast in the 1960s and who was the first Director of the Archives of Traditional Music. Juan Rojas weaves together musical and historical commentary with musical examples from Colombian popular music and the field recordings of George List. The podcast runs for 28:30 and you can follow along with the transcript below.
Cumbia is one of the most widespread Latin American music genres. It originated in Colombia among Black and working-class populations during the Spanish colonial period. Despite being marginalized for centuries by Colombian elites, by the 1950s it had become a musical symbol of the nation. (2)
During this period, due to growing audiences, music producers successfully introduced cumbia to international markets. As a result, important cumbia scenes emerged in other parts of the Americas, like Texas, Peru and Mexico.
But back in the 1960s, when commercial cumbia songs had just begun moving within international contexts, musical traditions in the countryside of the Colombian Caribbean region were still vibrant. These peasant communities, most of which have strong Afrocolombian and indigenous descent, had been playing this music for generations.
Their contributions fashioned the cumbia sound, which was later taken by producers to the rest of the world. (9)
Around the same time period, Cartagena de Indias, a Spanish fortified city on the Caribbean coast, became the main slave-port in the Americas, hosting thousands of Africans and their descendents (11).
Before the national cumbia craze of the 1950s, when commercial big-band cumbia captivated the ears and bodies of middle and high-class citizens of the major Colombian inland cities, working-class people from the Caribbean coast had been dancing to cumbia and its related musical styles for generations.
George List was a professor of ethnomusicology at Indiana University Bloomington. During the 1960s he conducted research in the Colombian Caribbean coast, and with his tape recorder captured many of the diverse sounds that were part of popular celebrations in towns and villages. Many of the musical samples that we are presenting to you in this podcast come from his field recordings, now cared for by the Archives of Traditional Music, at Indiana University Bloomington.
In his field research, ethnomusicologist George List accounts for the diversity of local musics in the Colombian Caribbean coast. He found out that cumbia was present in many musical traditions, but also, that it was only one rhythm, among many others, interpreted by local groups.
Despite this variety, many musical styles shared aesthetic elements, like the traditional drums, certain styles of dancing, or some rhythmic and melodic features.
List also found similarities in the context in which these musics were practiced: in general, they were performed for communal celebrations in towns and villages for Catholic festivities, like Patron Saint celebrations and the Christmas season. Here is legendary traditional cumbia master Too Fernndez explaining the context of gaita musical practice in an interview from 1964: (20)
However, these musics were also performed for secular events like Carnival, birthdays, weddings, or by contract. Many times, these performances were set as public street dances, where the community participated freely. The fronts and backyards of the houses were also often the stage for cumbiambas, or cumbia parties for days. (21)
Gaita music is a local tradition that was still vibrant in the 60s and that lent stylistic features to the commercial cumbia sound. Gaita refers to the music, as well as to the traditional flute, which is the melodic leader of these ensembles.
But the truth is that during the 60s, as well before and after that, local traditional musicians also borrowed from commercial styles and developed their own interpretations of cumbia in response to music that they heard from jazz-bands, radio stations, or records. (23)
In this process, cumbia was excluded from the vallenato canon, despite the popularity of a big repertoire of accordion cumbias. This exclusion was legitimized in 1968, when a selected group of cultural workers created the Festival Of The Vallenato Legend, institutionalizing this division and segregating accordion cumbia from the folkloric discourse.
However, people at the ground level had different ideas. Here are Vctor Soto, leader of an accordion ensemble, and Colombian folklorist Manuel Zapata in an interview with George List from 1968: (26)
In this journey, we explored from popular styles of commercially recorded cumbia to rural versions of this music.
Cumbia is not a unified concept. Cumbia is part of a complex musical history, that responds to centuries of interactions all over the Colombian Caribbean. Many musics that we call cumbia today were not labeled as such in the past. And musics that were once considered cumbia evolved into what we know now as different genres.