Dos Santos' pan-Latin brew

Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orquesta

“When it comes down to it, the story of ALL music is one of change, of hybridity, of a diversity of experiences and encounters. So, when we talk about crossing musical borders, there needs to be the recognition that music has always been crossing cultural, social, and expressive borders. This is its history—one of multiple crossings. We shouldn’t try to fix music (or its audiences) in place, that is, construct borders around it.”

If you've read any number of this blog's articles over the past year, you might assume that I wrote that. I could have. It sounds like me. But it's not.

The above quote comes from Alex Chávez, guitarist, organist and songwriter for Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orquesta, a stripped down, rocking electric cumbia group that's been playing all over Chicago for the past year. They are celebrating their first anniversary with a show next week at Beat Kitchen. I discovered Dos Santos about the same time I started writing this blog, and in fact I devoted a paragraph to them in a post about a festival in my neighborhood.

It may seem like I'm cribbing my Border Radio posts lately from stuff I've written for the Afro-Latin organization Agúzate, but I guess that just means that my passions and those of Agúzate are well aligned. Which is a way of saying that I interviewed Alex Chávez and the members of Dos Santos (who have roots in Panama, Mexico, Puerto Rico and the U.S.) to learn more about the band and why they play, of all things, cumbia.

My introductory comments are reproduced below, but to read the far more interesting stuff the band had to say, click on through to the original Agúzate post.
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Last summer, I went to the Celebrate Clark Street Festival in Rogers Park and stumbled across a band whose musical style was simply described as ‘psychedelic cumbia’ on the festival website. I was intrigued by this description as well as the group’s name: Dos Santos Anti-Beat Orquesta. I subsequently learned that the band had only recently formed and that this was one of their first gigs, but the tightness of their sound suggested a group that had spent years getting to know one another. The farfisa organ and fuzzed out wah-wah guitars that Dos Santos employed resonated with my rock n’ roll youth, while at the same time the deep cumbia rhythms compelled me, and a lot of other people, to dance.

They were playing what I identified as chicha, a Peruvian variant on a traditional Colombian sound. It’s a music that sprung up in the 1960s and 70s when Caribbean rhythms, Andean folk melodies, rock instrumentation and a strong dose of the mind-altering indigenous corn liquor called chicha mixed together in Peru’s newly urbanized environment. It’s a sound that only recently came to the attention of North American audiences through a handful of reissued recordings from that period. Dos Santos pretty much blew me away that day, and I’ve been keeping track of them ever since.

Click here to read the rest. But you might want to watch this first.

Colombia Three Ways

Nope, it's not the lastest chef creation from Las Tablas Colombian Steakhouse.

It's three bands back to back at the Celebrate Clark Street Festival on Saturday. One stuck to tradition, while another applied psych-rock riffs and traced cumbia's migrations to other parts of Latin America. A third incorporated ska and delivered power to the people anthems worthy of the Clash. All three made for an exhilarating (and exhausting) two and a half hours of dancing in the streets.

Dos Santos Antibeat Orquesta - Cumbia may have originated in Colombia, but like reggae it has spread throughout Latin America. As things do when they arrive in new regions, the original chemistry is altered in accordance with local customs. When cumbia arrived in Peru in the 1960s, it was adapted by local musicians and renamed chicha, after the mind-altering corn liquor favored by indigenous locals. At once traditional and modern, it became a psychedelic sound when surf guitars, wah-wah pedals, farfisa organ and other western rock elements were added (not to mention that corn liquor). Dos Santos specializes in this with both original songs and vintage covers. They also explore what happened to cumbia in Panama and other destinations, and I love that their full name is a sly tip of the sombrero to Fela Kuti's African rebel music.  I'm told that the band has only been together a couple of months, but they were remarkably tight, and I'm very eager to hear what they do as they write more songs.

Los Vicios de Papá - These guys are local favorites of mine. Their brand of cumbia is heavily flavored by Jamaican ska filtered through 1970's England and the greatest punk band of all time, the Clash. At least that's the way I hear it. Ska was introduced to England by Caribbean immigrants, and it's sound was adopted by what were known as 'two-tone' bands because they very deliberately included both blacks and whites in their membership when racism and nationalism were flourishing under Margaret Thatcher. No band better represented this anti-racist, anti-colonialist stance than the Clash, who soon turned their insightful gaze on the rest of the world, including the U.S. interventions in Southeast Asia and Latin America, adding a world of rhythms to the original rock and ska. Los Vicios is the sound of Latin America reflected back, and between the irresistible dance rhythms and shouted choruses of "lucha y libertad!" and "pueblo resiste!", it's party music of the highest order. 

Beto Jamaica Rey Vallenato - And finally, the traditionalist, albeit one with an extremely funky electric bass. Beto is an absolute master of button accordion. I think he's right up there with Tex-Mex wizards like Flaco Jimenez and Esteban Jordan. The stuff he was doing, cranking out two or three melodies at once like an accomplished jazz pianist, was mind boggling. Vallenato, for lack of a better term, is country music from Colombia's interior ranching area, and Beto calling himself "Rey", or King of this sound, isn't much of a stretch. In addition to that funky bass player, his band is mostly made up of traditional percussion that churns along at almost superhuman speed. Hearing them after bands with their modern take on tradition was revelatory, and the number of dancers per square foot (and the waving of Colombian flags) certainly attested to the deep appreciation the crowd felt for this taste of home.

And, hey, that's only day one of the festival.