Chico de Oro

Posted on Saturday, July 31

 

Definitely not your parents´ cumbia! Chico Trujillo´s Chico de Oro

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Quiero un sombrero de guano, I want a straw hat,
…Quiero una guayabera … and a tropical shirt
¡Y un son para bailar! I want a sound for dancing!
“Sombrero”, from Chico de Oro Barbes 2010

The cumbia has certainly had its ups and downs over the years. The original afro-colombian-panamian genre emerged several hundred years ago from the Guinean dance rhythm “cumbé” – a West African term translating roughly to “party” (a meaning the cumbia has always taken to heart). In the early twentieth century, big-band orchestral cumbia became Colombia’s signature sound, which in the 1940´s was transplanted with enormous success to Mexico, thereafter taking its much beloved place in the soundtrack of all of Latin America. Over the decades, the cumbia has fallen into disfavor only to resurface again in different formats in different countries. And today once again, after a few years of being relegated to the Latinoamericano oldies section, Chico Trujillo from Chile builds upon its engaging rhythms to create a pan-latino dance sound for the current millennium.

Created ten years ago by members of the Chilean ska-punk band Lafloripondio, Chico Trujillo has become an institution in that country. With their latest, Chico de Oro, the group adds a psychedelic and just barely punk tinge to the venerable Latin American genre, guaranteeing that even hard-core roqueros can pull out the CD with no fear of shame. Although Chico Trujillo´s big band arrangements do reference the cumbias of the past, their self-denominated “Chilombian mix” is a unique take on the genre. Blending in rock and ska, slinky reverbing guitars, top of the lungs vocals, blaring horns and swinging accordion riffs along with a few other idiosyncratic touches (for example, the occasional vibrophone), they serve up an energetic, up-tempo rhythm that is an irresistible lure to the dance floor.

A closer look at just one song from the album, “La Pollera Amarilla” (“The Yellow Skirt”, composed by the Colombian Diego Espinosa Soto), gives a sense of the pan-latino musical history that Chico Trujillo recaps with their own particular twist. In the sixties, one of the most popular versions all over South America was played on the organ by a blind Venezuelan musician, Tulio Enrique León. The seventies brought about numerous versions of the song, including one by a previously maligned, now cult-favorite Mexican group, “Acapulco Tropical.” In Argentina in the nineties, it became a quadruple platinum hit in the voice of “Gladys la Bomba Tucumana”, a blonde bombshell who ably shook many a skirt in the process.

Chico Trujillo´s “La Pollera Amarilla” surfs the tune happily into the sound waves of 2010. Like many of the other fourteen tunes on Chico de Oro, Pollera is replete with a series of satisfying sounds that surprise the ear: the slinky twangs of a guitar trading off with hard-hitting horns, vocal call and response by a salsa-reminiscent chorus, percussive segues in and out of afro-inspired grooves – and all of it driven by a relentlessly ska’d up cumbia beat!

With an unmistakably tropical Latin sound, Chico Trujillos’ Chico de Oro shares some of Chile’s post-dictatorship energy: loose, wild and happy with not much political agenda other than freeing up the dance in your step.

Catalina María Johnson, Ph.D. is a writer, as well as host and producer of “Beat Latino” (Latin music programs for Public Radio)