My Colombian Music – 2009 Folklife Festival- Un Mundo Musical

Jorge Arévalo Mateus

I recently attended the opening weekend of the 2009 Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C., which was especially gratifying for me on both personal and professional levels. Having spent nearly two decades researching, investigating, and playing Colombian musics (soon to culminate in my doctoral dissertation at Wesleyan University), I have observed and documented Colombia’s musical heritage as it develops and takes its rightful place among the world’s great music cultural expressions. While young Colombian artists such as Shakira, Juanes, Carlos Vives, and Fonseca have risen to remarkable heights within global popular culture, I am so pleased that musics which once were limited to local or subcultural spaces, marginalized as archaic “traditional” or “roots” music, have also filtered, or rather, are infiltrating their way, into the worlds of academia, major cultural organizations, even national institutions (like the Smithsonian). A major portion of this year’s festival program, appropriately titled Las Américas: Un mundo musical/The Americas: A Musical World, featured three exceptional Colombian groups.



It amazes me, still, because I can recall, when, as a child, there were no other Colombians to be found, not at my parochial Catholic school; not in my neighborhood; not anywhere. Learning English, at that time, seemed like a matter of life or death—often resolved in more than a few after school street fights; and, when the only kids I could understand were a few Puerto Rican kids and one Cuban boy who communicated in Spanish. Looking at my Colombian homeland from the North demands a certain acceptance that—while my own identity is ineradicably linked to that of the Colombian nation—my study of Colombia musical culture requires as much cultural distancing as it does complete immersion—a tricky feat of identity leaping, which my own assimilation and enculturation—agringado, we call it—in this regard, actually helped.

In any case, given the stunning diversity of musics that Colombia proffers, it makes perfect sense that musicians often guard traditions closely, even while sharing them on world stages. Back at the Folklife Festival, the Colombian groups included Grupo Cimarron, representing the regional music culture of los Llanos (the eastern plains that run along the Orinoco River in Venezula); Las Estrellas del Vallenato, from the Atlantic coastal region of Guajira (a peninsula that juts out into the Caribbean); and, Las Cantadoras del Pacífico, currulao musicians from the southern Pacific coastal areas of el Cauca.


Las Cantadoras del Pacífico perform currulao, cantos de boga (river chant), jugas, bundes.

These festival artists were drawn from the Smithsonian Folkways Tradiciones/Traditions recording series roster, and it was wonderful to observe intracultural and intercultural dialogue in play. For example, while Paraguayan and Mexican harp traditions met and melded in a unique Central American crossing, a bass taller (workshop) demonstrated how electric and acoustic bass functions in vallenato, Dominican merengue, and música llanera (i.e. joropo). Hence, the Colombian bassists exchanged performance practice methods with their Caribbean counterpart as well as each other!


Taller del bajo.

Moreover, Colombia audience participation was revealing, confirming the strong regional allegiances mentioned above. At one point, Las Cantadoras agreed to perform a chirimía as an audience request; one clearly made by a Chocoano (person from the state of Choco), who was thrilled to hear their music represented, although not in a “traditional” manner. The Cauca musicians in Las Cantadoras nevertheless seemed happy to comply, playing a currulao version of a chirimía!

In yet another example of Latin intercultural exchange, Cumaco (a conflation of the terms cuero, madera, costa), the Afro-Venezuelan ensemble accompanied Las Cantadoras, performing a juga de arullo (a Christmas eve song). Interestingly, when asked how they learned to sing currulao, a tradition that, as women, they were denied, Ana Hernández simply replied, “by watching, listening.”

Grupo Cimarron members Carlos Rojas Hernández and Ana Veydó and Estrellas del Vallenato singer Isaac Carrillo were panelists in a lively conversation about the process of recording for Smithsonian Folkways Records, specifically the Tradiciones series. Recordings Director Dan Sheehy led the discussion, wherein the artists shared ideas and concepts around which they participated in their respective recording projects. While the taller could have turned into a living Folkways marketing infomercial, each of the musicians were frank about the obstacles they confronted with their projects—especially given the authenticating brand that the Smithsonian label confers on the musics produced. “The recording studio affects the way of playing…musicians have to recapture the feeling of playing ‘live’,” indicated Carlos Rojas, who both played and served as co-producer for several of the recordings. Thus, the challenge of producing a recording that captures the energy of live performance with a recording that captures a cultural and historical artifact poses an ongoing challenge to both artists and Folkways. For Ana Veydo, she expressed her joy at the opportunity to see women in traditional music, recording and creating a space for themselves. In her interpretations of música llanera, Veydo’s performances exude cojones, that is, she emulates and reassigns to the hypermasculine vocal style of men’s singing her own feminine strength.


Ana Veydó’s raw vocal delivery crosses gender boundaries of the joropo tradition.

As Colombian musics work their way into academic programs (Columbia University’s gaita ensemble, for example), my own workshops (Wesleyan University), and Colombian scholars, both in Colombia and in the US, develop curriculum inclusive of these musics, surely one of many benefits will be to present a new image of a country to the world that, as Dan Sheehy sympathetically noted, “has been through a lot.”