His effort is part of a decades-long mission in Bogotá to mine coastal music pioneered by artists such as Ivan Benavides, once a member of Carlos Vives; Richard Blair, a British expatriate who founded his group Sidestepper with musicians from Bogotá; and Bomba Estéreo, whose keyboardist and programmer Simón Mejía recently premiered ‘El Duende’, a short documentary about a family of African descent who make marimbas and live on the Colombian Pacific coast.
“Meridian Brothers and El Grupo Renacimiento” has a stripped-down aesthetic, which is the essence of salsa itself – an uptown, urban genre born after the decline and fall of the flashy big band Palladium Mambo era, just as punk emerged in the wake of pompous British progressive arena rock. Álvarez focuses most of his attention on a dubby, echoing psychedelic electric guitar and tinny keyboards, complemented by a synchronized rhythm section of timbales and congas. You’ll hear hints of West African highlife and Congo-derived soukous, a hybrid of Cuban rumba.
With his skanking guitar marking time in the middle of the riffs, Álvarez’s lyrics comment on police brutality (“La Policía”), the purity of roots salsa (“Poema del Salsero Resentido”) and concern about nuclear weapons (“Bomba Atómica”). ‘Descarga Profética’, which presents a salsa jam from Bogotá as an ancient Greek algorithm with African influences, riffs dizzyingly on the Cuban classic ‘El Manisero’ from the 1930s.
In the mockumentary, Artemio Morelia says his bandmates’ interests ranged from vallenato to Italian ballads, but that he felt compelled to play the kind of lo-fi, roots salsa practiced by the 1960s Venezuelan group Federico y su Combo. (who recorded a song called “Llegó la Salsa”, one of the first to mention the term, in 1967). He also cites Ray Pérez, legendary Afro-Puerto Rican bandleader Rafael Cortijo, and, most importantly, Brooklyn’s Lebrón Brothers, a group central to the creation of salsa that grew out of early experiments with Anglophone, Cuban-derived boogaloo and his stride. liked. with “Salsa y Control” in 1969, but saw little commercial success.
“I identify with the rejection that the Lebrón Brothers experienced in their day,” Álvarez said. “I was attracted to their way of playing, their aggressiveness, but also their slowness, their introverted nature.”