LA CONGONA NEW CUMBIA

[Mungo's Hi-Fi flickr photo of Mictlan Dub Festi audience @ Salon Calavera, DF.]

The last couple years have given rise to countless cumbia remixes, which often function like a machine-translated extension of cumbia’s endless infatuation with the cover version. (I admit a fascination with badly sung covers, and have a special folder on some hard drive dedicated to precisely that: people who take a song and make it much, much worse, with all the soulfulness of a voice waaay outta tune.)

New York City’s Cumbiagra just released their first CD, a collection of versions entitled (Under) Covers. Musicians, they are playing many gigs this month. The first track on their CD is “Al Calor de la Cumbia.” Cumbiagra stretch this tune out to seven minutes (!) and the best part is that it’s great the whole time- provided you can deal with guitar solos in yr cumbia. Musicians!

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Cumbiagra – Al Calor de la Cumbia

(Regarding cumbia musicality, you are immediately directed to this excellent interview with Mario Galeano Toro of Frente Cumbiero in Bomb. More on this in a bit.)

For Thanksgiving I was on 3-city tour in Mexico with dub master Adrian Sherwood, and the amazing Mungo’s Hi-Fi; on the road to Puebla we stopped at a place to eat (across the highway from the one pictured below) and I picked up a CD-r because it contained a much older version of “Al Calor de la Cumbia”. (Doug from Mungo’s has a nice photo slideshow from the tour here.)

I lost the CD packaging and don’t know who this is…. but Toy does!

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Grupo Marina Perla – Al Calor de la Cumbia

This song contains a verse I love:

Yo veía el tiempo pasar
Más tú nunca viniste a mí
Cumbia, Cumbia, a orilla del mar.
Que por ella te conocí.

[Mungo's Hi-Fi flickr]

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