Colombia has always been on top of my list as a country to visit in South America. For now though, this interactive musical map is as good as it gets. Not only does it offer a musical demographic tour of Antillean music and where one should visit but also it is educational. Colombian music is indeed not all based on Vallenato and Cumbia. If fact it is . . . . go ahead and take a look. In a nutshell, this map will take you back not only to the golden era of the record music production (i.e. Fuentes Records) but will allow you to rediscover unrecognized musical gems that came from that era as well. Check out the music (videos) from Cali and San Basiilio Palenque. Enjoy! Soundway’s Musical Map of Colombia For close to ten years now Soundway’s mission has been to present the lost musical gems from around the world: Obscure a-sides, b-sides and album cuts that have remained unavailable and unreleased outside of their home countries – if at all. In 2008 Soundway turned its attention to Colombia, a country where music is impossible to ignore, with the release of ‘Colombia! The Golden Age of Discos Fuentes. The Powerhouse of Colombian Music’. As this journey of discovery grew, four more Colombian compilations followed as well as a handful of singles and EPs. From the oddball Afro influenced champeta of ‘Palenque Palenque’ to the swinging descarga and cumbia of ‘Cartagena!’ and to the eagerly awaited 55 track new release ‘The Original Sound of Cumbia’, Soundway continues to unearth the music of one of the most musically prolific and exciting countries in the world. This map goes in part to highlight the regions of Colombia that the different styles originated from and that the musicians, labels and recording studios were based. Rare video interviews with Curro Fuentes and Michi Sarmiento feature alongside performances from the likes of Lucho Bermudez and of course, some of the fantastic music that have featured on these compilations. Hover your cursor over the map of Colombia to begin your journey. Further information on the tracks can be found below the map.
1. Santa Marta, Magdalena Department: ‘La Samaria’, performed by Orquesta Nunez and written by Roberto Lambrano, is a tribute to the women of the coastal city of Santa Marta (known as ‘Samarias’). This medium-tempo carnival-style cumbia includes some great clarinet work, clearly influenced by Eastern European styles and testament to the wide variety of influences that come together to create Colombian music. 2. Baranquilla, Atlántico Department: Cassimbas Negras’ song ‘Bumurumbumbum’ is a great example of 1980s champeta music. Heavily influenced by various forms of African music being imported into Colombia, you would often find champeta being played over huge sound-systems called picos. ‘Bumurumbumbum’ was recorded in Baranquilla in 1986. The accordion is synonymous with Colombian music, but it wasn’t always so. Before the instrument became popular, as part of música costeña culture, it was seen as second-class instrument, used mainly by the rural classes. In the 1940s and 1950s, some musicians began to utilise the accordion to create new sounds and the instrument’s position within the Colombian sound began to be cemented. One of these pioneering accordionists was Anibal Velásquez, born in Baranquilla on 3rd June, 1936. He performs a blistering vallenato in the video here, the style of Colombian music that relies on the most on the accordion. 3. Valledupar, Cesar Department: Alberto Pacheco y sus Conjuto – Sembrando Café (The Original Sound of Cumbia: The History of Colombian Cumbia & Porro As Told By The Phonograph 1948-1979) A related form to the cumbia is the vallenato, a raw sound from the rural region of Valledupar, typified by the pronounced use of the accordion. 1968 saw the inaugural ‘Festival Of Vallenato’ in the city of Valledupar, a celebration of the musical style, which annually crowned one performer ‘accordion king’, based on their talent and proficiency. Alberto Pacheco won in 1971, beating hot favourite Luis Martínez to the title. Here is his early interpretation of Cresencio Salcedo’s ‘Sembrando Café’, a song which details the way coffee is cultivated.
4. Cartagena, Bolívar Department:
Saxophone maestro Michi Sarmiento honed his skills in the port of Cartagena during the 1950s. It was in Cartagena that Michi would record his first LP, ‘Los Bravos’, for one of Colombia’s most well known labels, Discos Fuentes. Michi Sarmiento y sus Combo Bravo specialized in rumbling guaguancós, descargas and hot covers of early salsa and boogaloo hits. When Antonio Fuentes moved his label Discos Fuentes from Cartagena to the emerging industrial city of Medellín in the early 1950s, his brother, Curro Fuentes, stayed behind to manage a record store. Moving into the old Discos Fuentes studios, Curro began recording his own music, forming his own label, Discos Curro, which had a slew of hits, including Antonio Maria Peñaloza’s massive carnival hit ‘Te Olvidé’. Soundway’s Miles Cleret and Will ‘Quantic’ Holland were lucky enough to meet Curro, in Cartagena, and interview him in this film shortly before he sadly passed away. 5. San Basilio de Palenque, Bolívar Department:
San Basilio de Palenque was the first free-town to be set-up in Colombia by escaped African slaves in the 16th Century. Son Palenque, formed in Cartagena in 1979 by Julio Valdez, had links to San Basilio de Palenque with Valdez’s father Ataole, tambour player in the band, having grown up there. Their African heritage would play a big part in their sound. During the period, Son Palenque, along with other bands such as Cumbia Siglo XX and La Cumbia Moderna de Soledad recorded some thrilling songs that re-adapted Afro-beat rhythms within the styles of the Caribbean coast. They were considered pioneers in 1982 when their first record came out for the label Orbe, as most of their songs were sang in Palenquero, the Afro-Hispanic language that has been preserved in San Basilio de Palenque. 6. San Pelayo, Córdoba Department: San Pelayo, some miles away from Montería, is widely considered the spiritual home of porro, a musical style with links to cumbia. It is here that dozens of groups come together annually to compete in the National Festival of Porro. The complex interpolation of porro and cumbia is no better illustrated than in Pholy Combo’s ‘El Porro es Hermano de la Cumbia’ (Porro is brother of the cumbia). 7. Montería, Córdoba Department: Montería, the arid capital of the department of Cordoba, like nearby Sincelejo, has a long legacy of brass bands. We can hear the original porro style in these bands, a style that has its roots in the rural tambora style. You’ll often hear these brass bands playing in the rafters of the city’s Corralejas, the stadiums which host a unique ‘have-a-go’ style of bullfighting where anyone is welcome to jump into the arena and take on the raging bulls in what is a drunken and often bloody spectacle. The surreal disorganisation of these events are illustrated well by listening to ‘La Cachona’ by Banda 11 de Enero de Murillo. 8. Rio Magdelena:
The Rio Magdalena runs the length of Colombia, beginning in the south-western reaches of the Colombian Andes and seeping out 950 miles later into the Caribbean Sea adjacent to the port city of Barranquilla. In likeness to the great Mississippi Delta region of the United States, traditional song and dance accompany its majestic journey towards the Caribbean. It was somewhere beside the mangroves and lagoons of the Colombian Caribbean that the first echoes of cumbia sounded across the water. As with the Delta blues, cumbia’s origins are awash in myth, romance and folklore, immersed in the cosmic depths of South American indigenous culture. If the blues is universal, cumbia is intergalactic. 9. Medellín, Antioquia Department: The Colombian label Discos Fuentes came into its own during the 1960s and began to firmly establish itself as the heavyweight of Colombia’s recording industry. Set-up by Antonio Fuentes in 1934 in the port city of Cartagena, it made a name for itself by challenging the elite order, which favoured classical European music, instead choosing to record rural and folkloric cumbia, porro and mapalé styles. In 1954, the label moved to the interior city of Medellín, where it would begin to cement its position as Colombia’s leading label through its use of Colombia’s best musicians and its utilisation of the latest technologies, such as the electric bass. One group that recorded during this period were Los Corraleros de Majagual, who consisted of leading cumbia and vallenato musicians, namely Alfredo Gutierrez, Lisandro Meza, Eliseo Herrera and Calixto Ochoa and who benefitted from the arrangements of Discos Fuentes’ legendary in-house musician and composer Climaco Sarmiento. 10. Colombia’s cold mountain cities of Medellín and Bogota: Lucho Bermudez (Lucho Bermúdez y Su Orquesta)
Derided by white high society in the early 1940s as low-class music, Lucho Bermudez’s arrangements of jazzy gaitas, porros and cumbias were a hit with the youth of Colombia’s Caribbean coast - La Costa. As the dark-skinned costeños (people of the coast) began to move to the interior cities to look for better jobs, the stage was set for música costeña to capture the attention of the nation and begin heating up the scene in Colombia’s cold mountain cities of Medellín and Bogota. Lucho would go on to become one of Colombia’s most famous big-band cumbia leaders, alongside other leaders such as Pacho Galán and Clímaco Sarmiento, and by the early 1950s was internationally famous, touring Cuba, Mexico and the USA. He would also go on to compose Colombia’s national anthem! 11. Bogota, Cundinamarca Department: Like his brother, Curro Fuentes would also eventually leave Cartagena for Colombia’s interior cities, choosing to move to Bogota in the late 1950s to escape Cartagena’s continual water and electricity shortages. Once in Bogota, Curro became involved in the newly established Philips label where he would continue to play a big influence on the Colombian music scene. The track ‘Yolanda’ is taken from the Philips LP ‘Tabaquito’, which was released in 1964, the year that Curro Fuentes was named artistic director at the label. 12. Ibagué, Tolima Department: Los Hermanitos Ferreyra (The little brothers Ferreyra) are a group from Colombia who have had some international fame. Initially from Ibagué, Colombia’s musical capital, they were raised in Sincelejo where they began playing songs in the regional costeño style. They went on to champion the style all over Latin America before moving to the United States where, after changing their name to the more easily pronounced Hermanos Ferrari, they made Colombian history abroad by being the first Colombian group to perform on the Ed Sullivan show. At the time of recording ‘Cumbia del Mar’ for Sonolux, a Medellin based labeled, the youngest of the band’s brothers was a mere seven years old!
13. Cali, Valle del Cauca Department ‘Las Caleñas Son Como Las Flores’ (’Cali Women Are Like Flowers’) by The Latin Brothers was a smash hit in the region when it was released, giving Cali, “the salsa capital of the world”, one of it’s most loved songs. The Latin Brothers were put together by Colombian label heavyweights Discos Fuentes in response to the 1975 success of Venezuelan band La Dimension. This song features Piper Diaz on vocals and the inimitable style of ‘tango’ piano played by Fuentes in-house musicians Luis Mesa and Hernan Gutierrez.
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