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Dancing in the dark

New cumbia in the new Colombia
It's 3pm on a crisp autumn afternoon in Bogotá, and the mist that hangs like an undertaker's smile over the city melts away as the sun peeps over the Andes and warms the whole town up.


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Dancing in the dark – New cumbia in the new Colombia


It's 3pm on a crisp autumn afternoon in Bogotá, and the mist that hangs like an undertaker's smile over the city melts away as the sun peeps over the Andes and warms the whole town up.

Right on cue, Pernett and The Caribbean Ravers take the stage in the street outside the national library. Pernett, in a white tuxedo and skin-tight flares bounds up to the mic.

A speaker stack the size of a juggernaut hums with energy as the amps kick in. Then the music starts; a bassline from Berlin, a kick drum from Chicago, and a load of kit you've never seen before from Barranquilla, the tough port town on Colombia's Caribbean coast: flutes, cornets, and weird reed instruments crashing through the mix.

The crowd start to dance and as a sinuous, insistent bassline wraps itself around the rig, Pernett swings his hips like John Travolta meeting a carnival queen, his vast, natural afro bobbing to the cumbia rhythm.

You wouldn't think there was a war on. But somehow, through the grief and misery of 40 years of fighting, Colombians have kept their sense of humour and a steely determination not to live on the dark side, and nowhere is this more visible than in its vibrant arts and music scene.

It's a scene that is rapidly gaining acceptance and influence outside Colombia, too. One of the country's hottest cultural exports right now is cumbia, a ghetto music that throbs with life, tropical energy and wit.

"I like all music, from avant-garde stuff Phillip Glass and Manuel Göttsching to Jean Michel Jarre, Björk and of course Caribbean carnival music," says Pernett wiping the sweat from his head after the gig. "We are mixing all the elements of modern club music with our traditional instuments, the past the present and the future," he beams. "It's like a sancocho (stew), we throw it all together and see what comes out."

The mixing of cultural influences and styles is typically Colombian, with its rich diasporic roots.

Cartagena, on the northern coast of Colombia, was a major slave-trading centre for most of the Americas in the 16th century. Portuguese and Spanish merchants bought slaves from West Africa and sold them here, and inadvertently transplanted the rhythms of Guinea and the Congo with the slaves who were forced to work in the sugar, tobacco and emerald industries.

Through cumbia, slaves maintained their musical traditions, and as they spread through the country, they blended their musical heritage with local Amerindian instruments, producing a mix of sounds still heard today on Latin, and increasingly, North American and European dancefloors.

From its colonial days of slavery until modern times, Colombia has seen more bloodshed and pain than many countries in the world. And it's still a deeply divided and unequal society with little social mobility, rampant malnutrition and widespread unemployment rubbing up against vast wealth and injustice.

The war's roots are tangled and old now. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia started out as a peasant army summoned by Manuel "Sureshot" Marulanda in 1964, in a Marxist-inspired struggle for land reform and wealth redistribution and murderous death squads targetting liberals. At its height FARC commanded 17,000 fighters, who could close major roads and kidnap people of power and influence seemingly at will.

However, it lost favour and support in the late 1990s when its strengthening links with the coca trade stained its communist ideology. Through the 1980s, brutal paramilitary gangs formed by wealthy landowners to protect their property and livestock from the FARC - and strong-arming in on Colombia's 600-tonne-a-year coke trade - rampaged through the country, spilling the blood of thousands and displacing millions. Colombia has more internally displaced people than even Sudan.

With the election of hardline rightwing President Alvaro Uribe, in 2003, came the "democratic security" policy - a US-funded $6bn counterinsurgency and anti-drugs campaign that dealt crippling blows to the guerrillas, who now number just 9,000 and who are severely weakened and contained mainly in the jungles near Ecuador and Venezuela.

Drug cultivation, though, is up 27 percent according to latest UN figures, despite the endless, Sisyphean efforts of the state to tackle the drug problem at source.

Then this year, the FARC lost its highest-profile hostage, French Canadian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, as Colombian soldiers tricked her captors into thinking they were an NGO helping the guerillas relocate her. This followed the death of the founder Marulanda, and an unprecedented series of hits against the FARC's top commanders - three were killed within a month.

This tightening of security has allowed a burgeoning music scene to flourish and disseminate its sounds across the country and the continent, and the sound of cumbia - whether vintage originals or the more digital sounds of Bomba Estereo, can be heard on every corner soundsystem and block party in the country.


Bomba Estereo's sound is more rocky, and at times club-oriented than the original cumbia sounds, and when singer Li Saumet, a Tasmanian devil in stilettoes and fishnets, took to the stage at a recent gig in Bogotá and the 4/4 cumbia beat struck up, the whole crowd responded instinctively and swayed as one.

"Cumbia is in my blood," says Angelica Segura, an art student at the Bogotá gig. "You can't escape it."

Colombians themselves are proud of their hottest export. Laura Camargo, who manages Bomba Estereo, believes the armed conflict has encouraged creativity.

"Colombia has shown the ability to survive and create art and music beyond our tragic political situation. Around the world and through history, wars have encouraged artists to express themselves and develop arts to a new level, Colombia is no exception," she says.

"The thing is that war is made by a few, the rest of us are working for a better country, and that includes musicians. We are working to demonstrate that Colombia is about more than drugs and wars."

In a crowded basement off London's Oxford Street as winter starts to bite, the dancefloor is buzzing as Frankie Francis of London's Sofrito DJ crew drops another vintage cumbia 7" on the deck. The needle hits the wax and crackles before a mambo-inflected track bursts into life through the speakers.

At once, the crowd settles into the tight groove and throbs along as the lyrics of love and loss soundtrack a city night.

Few here know the roots of the music, but they don't need to. This is the musical equivalent of laughter in the dark, partying against whatever poor hand the day dealt you. Even here it makes perfect escapist sense.

Mike Power



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