Peru Negro
Town Hall; Sat 21

Who said rock has a lock on the sympathy-for-the-devil thing?  “Son de los Diablos” (or better, “Song of the Devils”), the one tune you might know by the folkloric troupe Peru Negro – it’s on the great 1995 Luaka Bop comp The Soul of Black Peru – makes it clear that hellhounds own escapists purists like music making and dancing just about everywhere.  “Every year we appear around carnaval time,” the chorus of diablos sings, “to entertain the people with out infernal rhymes.”

Actually, statesiders shouldn’t have much trouble understanding why those rhymes (and the rhythms that accompany them) were one thought of as the devil’s music among Peruvians: The sounds are descended from the country’s African slave population.  Peru Negro’s late founder, Ronaldo Campos, was trying to change the perception when he launched the song-and-dance group in 1969, and judging by its current status as an institution at home, it seems as if his perseverance paid off.  Both PN’s bright costumes and the sunny disposition that pervades its latest album, Jolgorio (Times Square), may seem a long way from what we associate with hell-raising here in the States, but the rhythms of the cajon, a boxlike Peruvian drum, have definitely started their share of riotous parties.  Tonight, the carnaval makes its New York debut.