Selection Genre: World
Ten Colombian cumbia tracks
The running order ignores the years and follows the melody instead, instrument by instrument. Cane flutes and drums first, then an accordion that crossed an ocean by mistake, then a brass section. One title turns up twice, at number one and at number seven.
Prende la Vela opens this list on cane flutes and drums. At number seven it comes back with an orchestra behind it and clarinets out in front.
The version that sounds older is the later of the two, and the writer credit carries a single name, which belongs to the bandleader of that orchestra, Lucho Bermúdez.
So the order here follows the melody rather than the calendar, instrument by instrument, from the things you blow and hit to the things you plug in. We played the two Prende la Vela back to back. It took us a while to accept they were the same piece.
Cane and skin
Totó la Momposina, Prende la Vela. Gaitas and drums. Nothing tempered on top of them. This is the sound people reach for when they say the word original, and the recording you can hear is from 2002, which is the joke at the heart of this list.
Listen while you read
The accordion, which arrived from the far side of an ocean
Andrés Landero, La Pava Congona. From La Fiebre, 1972, and Landero is one of the names Discos Fuentes brought out of the coastal villages and into a catalogue that reached the rest of the continent. It travelled.
Aníbal Velásquez, Remolinos. The accordion isn’t accompanying anybody. It runs out in front. It sets the pace and the others follow.
Alfredo Gutiérrez with Los Corraleros de Majagual, Festival en Guararé. From 1968. This is the moment a village instrument walks into a city band and stays for good.
How the accordion got to the Colombian coast is a story told the same way every time, and nobody confirmed it to us twice over, so take it as reported rather than as established.
The City Paper in Bogotá writes that a shipment meant for the tango trade in Buenos Aires ended up by mistake in the port of Barranquilla, late in the nineteenth century.
That’s how the paper prints it. That’s how we’re passing it on.
The horns of the savannah
Pedro Laza y sus Pelayeros, Cumbia Cienaguera. No accordion. The tune goes to the horns, and underneath it you get the same drums that carried the first track on this list.
Los Corraleros de Majagual, Los sabanales. The Corraleros sit among the acts Discos Fuentes lists as its own launches. They turn up twice here.
The orchestra
Lucho Bermúdez, Prende la Vela. Clarinet in front, section behind. Same melody as the one that opened everything, and hearing it arrive in a room full of music stands after hearing it on flutes is the whole argument of this list in a single side of vinyl.
Pacho Galán with Emilia Valencia, Ay Cosita Linda. From Merecumbé Internacional, 1965. The band pushes the tune along in unison underneath the singer, which is one way of telling a dance floor what to do without anybody on the stand having to raise their voice about it.
Clímaco Sarmiento, Cumbia Sabrosa. From Bombo y Maracas, 1961, and Sarmiento is one of the names that keeps coming round across the label’s compilations. He is everywhere.
The electric band
Rodolfo Aicardi, La Colegiala. Electric bass, keyboard, backing chorus. Everyone at the desk here turned out to know it. None of us could say where from.
Where they were made
Antonio Fuentes was born in Cartagena in 1907. He opened a radio station in 1932 and started Discos Fuentes two years after that, which made it the first record company in the country.
The studio he used for the rest of his working life sits in an industrial district of Medellín and has been there since 1960. When Sound on Sound went to look, the Scully lathe for cutting lacquers was still standing. So were the Westrex cutting amplifiers.
Six of the ten names above sit in the roster that company claims for itself. Landero, the Corraleros twice over, Pedro Laza, Lucho Bermúdez, Clímaco Sarmiento. Six out of ten.