Smiling, he eagerly awaits guests to whom he will explain the significance of music in his life and the living history that he embodies. He is in the patio of his home, sitting atop his marímbula, a rectangular box instrument with metal keys that he explains came to Palenque from Cuba. Rafael Cassiani Cassiani, one of the town’s most legendary musicians, af rms this strong connection. In this Colombian town, drumming is about communion and connection: with the ancestors, spirit-energies, dancers and singers. The drum beat is the pulse of Palenque de San Basilio it is central to birth, death, marriage and other celebrations. It then dawned on me that many evenings, spent deciding whether I was going to play Mehmet Topal or Gokhan Inler in the heart of midfield of my İstanbul Başakşehir team that was going to take on my friend Toby’s Atalanta side, would be accompanied by the Fifa 20 soundtrack, featuring a sample of Curura on Major Lazer's, and reggaeton superstar, J Balvin’s Que Calor.Benkos Bioho statue in the central square of Palenque de San Basilio, Colombia. Listening to the latter I realised that I had heard the rhythm before and was wracking my brain as to where. Arguably the two most famous tracks on the album are El Pescador, composed by legend José Barros, which people unfamiliar with Latin music may well have come across and Curura. ![]() The album features a subtle shout-out to their Andean brethren across the continent with the use of the panflutes in both Dame La Mano Juancho and La Acabacíon, both of which are still fundamentally cumbia tracks due to the percussion. This Cuban influence is also apparent on Malanga and is rather fitting when one considers how close the Cuban musical experience is to the Afro-Colombian one, considering that they share a similar confluence of continental powers due to colonialism and slavery. My favourite song La Sombra Negra is a Cuban son track its core, sounding like it could easily fit into the back-catalogue of greats such as Ibrahim Ferrer. Yet this is not simply a monotonous traditional cumbia album without much variation or experimentation. Though in some senses cumbia is the music of more than half the world due to its ancestral roots, its inherent link to the North of Colombia should not be forgotten and thanks to Totó La Momposina’s work in carrying forward the baton of spreading the music of her proud Afro-Colombian culture it won’t be lost any time soon. Whilst I personally certainly appreciate these successful efforts to modernise and keep the genre fresh, at its essence part of the beauty of the genre was its association with one particular region where the craft was honed and perfected over many years. It comes in a variety of unique forms from the rock and roll cumbia fusion of Los Lobos in the United States to the young Argentine generation’s cumbia boom with hip-hop cumbia fusion acts like Sara Hebe at the precipice, even to the global popularisation of electro-cumbia superstars Bomba Estereo in its birthplace Colombia. ![]() Nowadays, cumbia has taken on a life of its own with its own fusion styles being disseminated and popularised all over the Americas.
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