Cumbia is catching fire at Tubby’s in Kingston

Rick Omonte, aka Shaki. (Photos by Rokosz Most)

“And then you have bands like Los Mirlos, Juaneco y Su Combo. Absolute masters of Peruvian cumbia Amazonica.” – Shaki

On the right Midtown stretch of Broadway, the midnight raver out looking for a revel at any hour might be caught and held by the rhythm- a ch ch ch, ch ch ch, ch ch ch – floating out into the air from the opened front door of Tubby’s, the unquestioned beating heart of Kingston’s live music and nightlife. And then a low bass.

The bass and the rhythm are sacrosanct but from there all bets are off. Choppy accordions. Sopping guitars. Woodwind or brass. Whatever it’s called, it’s danceable.

“In the last two years, I’ve heard more people say the word Cumbia than in my entire life,” says Rick Omonte aka Shaki, DJ for the Saturday night 4/20 celebrations at Tubby’s. Omonte sports a handsome mustache, possesses a lively head of hair and wears tortoise-shell rimmed aviators indoors.

“People who can’t say quesadilla can somehow say Cumbia.”

Experiencing another wave of popularity – for the South American import has been with us on the planet for at least 300 years – the amplified melodies and rhythms of Cumbia are heard more and more frequently out of the bars, clubs and radio stations in the Hudson Valley. Just precisely which South or Central American country is responsible can be hotly disputed, but once national pride has been mollified, most aficionados agree to make a truce between Panama or Columbia.

Shaki, who’s name is pronounced like an intermittent burst of electricity, says it was Colombia where the music came from, but he’s willing to say that those saying it’s from Panama or Nicaragua are not wrong, they’re just not exactly right.

“Why it gets complicated,” he says,” is that Cumbia is sort of a blend of African rhythms and indigenous folk music from Colombia. Colombia, in my opinion, is the birthplace of Cumbia, but it would not exist if it were not for all of these Caribbean islands, because the slave ships leave West Africa and they go across the Caribbean, dropping slaves off at all the islands.”

Shaki says there are people who take it further back than that, who say the original Cumbia melodies were bird songs.

“Melodies and rhythms that people would hear in the jungle so often that they translated it to maybe zampoña, which is like a pan flute. And then little by little, they transpose to the gutted string instruments, the charango you know, and then by that time colonization is happening. You have the African rhythms smashing into the indigenous rhythms, smashing into the rhythm from the Selva.”

Selva is the word for jungle or rainforest and everyone can agree that the primeval seed of the music sprouted and flowered first there. What we have now is the mutated pollen. As just a smattering of examples of what musical pollen can do, the Dominican Republic and Haiti gave the world the Bachata and the Merengue. Cuba introduced the Son Clave and the Salsa. For the purposes of this article then, with help from abducted Africans, the Cumbia is claimed by Columbia.

And so blown on the wind, the pollen takes root and blooms wherever it lands. Hibernates, and blooms again. Shaki himself lives in New Haven. His father is from Peru and still claims a ton of family in the mountains in Huancayo, in what is called the Montaro, the central Sierra of Peru.

“Last year, I called up Cory who organizes everything [at Tubby’s], and I was trying to book myself a little DJ tour,” Shaki says. “I just had it in my head I wanted to play only Peruvian records and stuff that bordered on folk music. And I called him. I was like, ‘Hey, man. I got this weird one. I just want to do Peruvian folk and cumbia.’ And he was like: ‘Done’. And then I came here and people came out. It was wild. There was a whole Peruvian family here making requests that I actually had.”

For Cory Plump, an ownership partner in the bar, it was kismet.

“My wife and I fell in love with Cumbia while we lived in Mexico City before relocating to Kingston, NY,” says Plump. “We became friends with a DJ crew playing cumbia, and cumbia rebajada and it was pretty much all we listened to every night.”

That Cumbia is having a resurgence in the cities of America is already recognized. Now it drifts to the suburbs and exurbs. That is, after decades of gestation, the seed has crossed the blood-brain barrier to American, non-spanish speaking audiences.

“Loud bass, heavy rhythm patterns. The bass is huge. Huge. Repetition. Interpolations, versions, remixes. Sound system culture. That’s important if you’re going to dance. In Jamaica you have sound system culture. In Colombia you have the picotecos. Picoteco is the sound system.”

In Mexico, it’s called the sonidero.

“A couple of months ago, I was here with Turbo Sonidero and Mex Tape,” says Shaki. “So Turbo Sonidero is a guy that is playing Mexican style Cumbias in the context of how it’s played in Mexico, which is almost like sound system culture in Jamaica.”

For the uninitiated, the key to recognizing the cumbia is its constant ch ch ch rhythm, played on a rasp, called a Guacharaca, or on a güiro, basically a hollow gourd with notches carved in the side over which to rub a stick. In New Orleans the washboard also stands in.

Incidentally the Guacharaca was named after a drab bird of the rainforest with angry eyes, large talons and a colorful fanning tail whose call the sound the instrument resembles.

“So I tend to lean heavily into the Peruvian cumbia but also, because I’m down with my Mexican clique, I brought a lot of cumbia Mexicana. What they call Rebajada. The history behind that stuff is crazy. Many people swear, ‘no, this is how this got started at a party where the turntable shorted out’ and they could only play slow and everybody loved it. Think for example, a 45 played as a 33.”

From 2001, Cumbia Sobre El Rio is a fair sample of that Monterrey cumbia sound, a recording in which famous accordion player Celso Piña is placed alongside hip hop group Control Machete.

The MC parts – shouts and spoken phrases – have been pitched down a couple octaves. They sound like somebody sucking on nitrous oxide has grabbed the microphone. Lord of the underworld gobbling Quaaludes.

In Cumbias Rebajadas, the tempo too has been slowed down, hence the name, and so now has more in common at that speed with the dub music which sprang forth out of Jamaica. So now at a slower tempo, the cumbia cross-pollinates and evolves again.

Melbourne, Australia’s Cumbia Cosmonauts 2012 track “Columbia” combines all of these elements: low octave MC’s, tempos slowed down to dub speed, wet guitars along with backwards cymbal splashes, chimes that sound like they’re from a broken clock, delays and echoes and the songs end up in places every bit as trippy as the places the masters of dub Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry or King Tubby will take a song.

Smuggling in the old Selva patterns, wearing new technological disguises, the variations for cumbia proliferate through every decade.

“You know a heavy shout out goes to Selena, she helped popularize styles of Cumbia just by sort of incorporating the beat in her shows,” says Shaki, “Then a younger generation of kids started to listen to stuff their grandparents were listening to. She called it techno cumbia. So she’s actually a pretty important player in sort of how we get here.”

Queen of Tejano Music, no longer with us, Selena’s influence ripples forward through time.

In the early 2000’s the craze for gypsy trumpets and violins, Bulgarian clarinets and other features of traditional Balkan music hit its peak at Lower East Side clubs like Mehanata, (Ne budi magarac!) where there too it was superimposed over club beats and electronic bass lines awaiting the spark of another consequential cumbia migration.

Bar none, the wildest reimagining of the Balkan and Cumbia styles together is the mash up by Senior Coconut, a German electronic music producer who gave the cumbia treatment to Balkan brass band Kočani Orkestar’s version of an old Macedonian song, Usti Usti Baba, about a wedding party coming to collect both bride and dowry.

“Wake up wake up father. The drums are beating. They’re coming for my sister.”

From the South American jungle to the Eastern European forest and back again.

In Peru, drenched in reverb, flanges, and wah effects, Psychedelic Cumbia showed up in the 70’s, adding surf rock and distorted guitars to the form. A song named Sonido Amazonico, recorded by the Peruvian band Los Mirlos, is a genius representative of the psychedelia genre of cumbia. The jungle can be heard in the music.

In 2008 a Brooklyn psychedelic cumbia band Chicha Libre added a keyboard and recorded a gently altered redux and the song re-emerged. Olivier Conan, founder of the band, also recommends cumbia acts to play at Tubby’s.

Shaki says that Chicha is an important word especially in Andean culture, which is the culture of the people in the mountains of Peru.

“It also is this very potent drink that the indigenous drink, that poor people drink. But it’s also a style of music. And Chicha in Peru, in Bolivia, and in Ecuador, Chicha is essentially cumbia and huayno. Huayno is the music of the people, poor people, the migrants, the folks that are the cleaning ladies, the folks that worked the farm for centuries.”

Shaki says the introduction of the electric guitar was the contribution of Peru and that if you hear the Peruvian guitar driven cumbia that sounds ‘a little left field,’ that’s chicha.

“Even though I want to say it’s Peruvian, there’s also chicha in Bolivia. Bolivia has beautiful chicha groups. And in Ecuador. But in Peru, it’s crazy how strong it is. You have people like Chacalón. Chacalón is like a god. When he died, people were crying in the streets. Like voiceless people. All the songs are about being from provincia, poor places that Lima doesn’t even recognize. Shantytowns. Some parts of Lima look like downtown Manhattan or like Upper West Side or Brooklyn. Other parts of Lima are like corrugated rooftops, dirt roads. Dogs.”

On the blessing and the curse for anyone not able to understand the words in a song, where one has no other choice than to relate musically. The blessing is that it’s impossible to be advertised to. The song is just the song, no more no less, and the foul habit of product placement now routine in American pop, rap and country music is rendered impotent. Nullified. I will not buy that Ram truck. I will not wake up in a Bugatti.

A Cumbia DJ party closed Tubby’s 4/20 celebration.

The curse of course is that the words which could describe the earnest feelings of poets, lovers, dreamers, humanitarians and revolutionaries go unshared. But even then, words are often false.

Not so the words of songwriters like Ruben Blades. Old school. Panamanian. Eres mi Corazon.

“He was also a social justice type of dude,” Shaki says. “There’s a really awesome video clip of him talking about waiting for the 6 train- how it’s always fucking late, and how everybody’s waiting, and how we all have to go through it. He’s playing on guitar, and the lyrics, he’s like, ‘I’m just waiting for the train. Literally. I just wrote a song about waiting for the train.’ And in that way, it’s very social because he talked about the condition, the Latino condition. But when he sings the lyrics and plays it, it sounds like the most beautiful salsa song.”

Lastly there are the cumbia Madres to whom one must pay homage. Listening to the song ‘Cumbia Sobre el Mar’, this version recorded by Quantic Flowering Inferno, Shaki identifies the melody.

“I can already tell this is a madre cumbia,” he says. “There’s a few cumbias, like maybe a dozen or so, maybe more, maybe less, that are considered madre cumbias. And they’re considered madre cumbias because all cumbias are born from these melodies. There’s one called Esperma y Rum. Madre cumbia. It ends up in Peru called something else. All these songs right here, these all get interpolated and made into different cumbias.”

Like the cumbia Sampuesana.

“I guarantee you if you just dig even a little bit,” says Shaki, “you’re going to find an 80’s version with synthesizer, guitar, electric bass, and it’s going to sound totally like disco and new wave and Cumbia, but it’s going to have that melody.”

“Un enjambre de estrellas y la luna plateada

Y las olas del mar, con su luz salpicaba

Era Marta, la reina, que mi mente soñaba”

Madre cumbias are the ancient melodies that bloom again and again, and the words to match them, come and go, just as beautiful whether they’re understood or not, because of the melody behind them. And sometimes the words are perfect.

Catch cumbia in Kingston wherever you can whenever you can as often as you can. For now, cumbia DJs come and go through the international musical space station that is Tubby’s, and DJs like Turbo Sonideroero, Mextape, and Shaki are like rare comets that only brighten the stratosphere a few times a year.

Over the summer Tubby’s has four Cumbia shows on the calendar, three of which have yet to be sold out: