Chicha Libre is a band from Brooklyn, New York that plays a psychedelic brand of cumbia music that was invented by the Indians in the Peruvian leg of the Amazon rainforest in the late ‘60s. Chicha mashes up the melodies of Peru’s Native American population, Columbia’s cumbia, Afro-Peruvian guitar styles, Cuban guajiras, garage band Farfisa funk, and the twangy resonance of American surf and spaghetti Western guitar. It’s a hybrid that sounds at once familiar and alien to American ears. Once you’ve heard its strange angular syncopation, you’ll never forget it, but if you’re wondering how a group of American musicians came to be playing a music that was born in the Amazon jungle, you’re not alone.
The Amazon rainforest is almost the size of the continental United States, a portion of the Earth that includes some of its last unexplored territory. If you were exploring the upper reaches of Amazon in the late ‘60s, you might have been surprised to hear the oddly familiar sounds of chicha floating over the water. In the late ‘60s, there was an oil boom in the Peruvian Amazon, and the international community of oilmen that went to work in the boom towns of Iquitos, Moyobamba, and Pucallpa brought along cassettes of international pop music. The Amazon Indians that worked for the oil companies suddenly had disposable income and they “went electric,” grafting the sounds of Farfisa organs and electric guitars onto their indigenous dance music. They also heard cumbia, a Columbian groove that sounds like a sharp Latin cousin of Jamaica’s ska, American rock ’n’ roll, and Cuban dance bands. They were already familiar with Creole music, the genre known in the United States as Afro-Peruvian, and combined them all into chicha.
When portions of the Indian population moved into Lima, chicha went along, but “respectable” Peruvians ignored it, much the way they had ignored Afro-Peruvian music decades earlier. Chicha was dying until Olivier Conan, owner of Brooklyn’s world music hotspot Café Barbes, heard the music on a Lima sidewalk. “I love hearing music in its real-life setting,” Conan explains via phone from his Brooklyn apartment. “I was looking for Creole music, but I ended up listing to chicha’s peculiar style of crosspollination. I love Colombia’s cumbia and the Mexican style of cumbia, but this Amazonian cumbia was amazing. A guy selling bootleg CDs on the street played it for me and he told me middle-class people never paid attention to it. The people who played it for me were street vendors or people who lived in the ghettos. They were very nostalgic about the music. It was the music of their grandparents and they trace it back to the Incas. The word chicha is the name of a fermented corn liquor the Incas made and people still make at home. Chicha de Hore is a carbonated soda you can get all over Peru and even in Latin stores in San Francisco and New York.”
I made a CD mix-tape of the best stuff and started playing some American songs chicha style with some of my friends, trying to figure out how the music worked.
Conan brought hundreds of chicha CDs back to Brooklyn and his musician friends were stunned. Here was a style they’d never heard that combined acoustic guitars, rock, Cuban and indigenous Indian drumming, surf guitar, and electric organ—all the elements that contribute to today’s international pop sound. “There’s no bass and no drum kit,” Conan says. “They borrowed congas from Cuba, and filtered it through the traditional rhythms and melodies they’d always known. I made a CD mix-tape of the best stuff and started playing some American songs chicha style with some of my friends, trying to figure out how the music worked. We had no idea about starting a band.”
The chicha compilation CDs Conan played at Café Barbes, his sixty-seat world music club in Brooklyn, created a demand for the music. Conan already ran a small indie label, also called Barbes, and so he decided a “real” compilation was in order. “I tried to get in touch with the people who played the music originally. International phone calls are cheaper than they used to be and the Internet helps as well.” Conan tracked down Infopesa, the label that put out a lot of the music, and found intact masters of many tunes. “I got in touch with a few of the guys who played in the first chicha bands and they were excited. Angel Rosado, who started Los Hijos del Sol, called the local newspaper and told them he was starting a new career in America. I felt like an imposter, because the label is so small, but I was glad to get him some recognition. The guitar player from Los Hijos lives in LA now, and he contacted me too.”
Conan’s compilation, The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru, got great reviews in 2007 and drew people to Café Barbes to hear Conan’s band playing their version of Amazonian psychedelica. “We started doing covers in that style. Like reggae, it has a strong rhythmic foundation, so anything you play in that style becomes chicha. In the beginning, we rearranged classical pieces and top-forty hits like ‘Indian Summer,’ which was a big hit in France in ‘72. We did the ‘Summertime’ movement of Vivaldi’s ‘Four Seasons’—music that’s familiar to anyone who’s ever been on hold on the telephone. We wrote Spanish lyrics for it and called it ‘Primavera en la Selva.’ Since I own the club, it was easy to play regularly, and when we began to pick up fans, it was time to make a record.”
Chicha Libre includes Conan on Venezuelan cuatro, a guitar/ukulele hybrid that’s the main rhythmic instrument in Venezuelan folk music; Vincent Douglas, co-owner of Barbes on twang-heavy lead spaghetti guitar; Joshua Camp on Horner Electrovox, an electric accordion/organ hybrid that sounds like a cheesy Farfisa; Nicholas Cudahy on bass; and Greg Burrows and Timothy Quigley on congas, bongos, and various other percussive instruments. “We play a music we didn’t grow up with and make a lot of mistakes doing it,” Conan says. “But it’s not unique to take on an unfamiliar music and make something new of it. [The record was] a collective effort, with room for improvisation, but we tried to stick to the dance format. We’re serious about the music, but it’s there to make people dance and have fun. It was music to celebrate weddings, funerals, and parties, and we want to keep that aspect of the music.”
“Chicha is a very accessible kind of world music, especially to American ears,” says Electrovox player Camp. “It references ‘60s AM radio psychedelia and surf guitar, then brings in indigenous melodies and the cumbia beat. And people love the sound of the Electrovox, which is a Farfisa in the housing of an accordion. It’s all electronic. There are no reeds in it. It was designed so the poor accordion players out of world could play electrically after the rock guitar wiped out their livelihood. I like it because of its limitations; it makes me play simpler and keeps me from getting too jazzy or Ray Manzarek. I use a wah-wah pedal and some echo effects. It’s my chance as a dorky accordion player to take some rock guitar solos.”
Chicha Libre had been playing every week for a year when they went into the studio to lay down ¡Sonido Amazonico!, so recording went quickly. The whole band played live, together in one studio, waxing originals by Conan and Camp and a few selected covers. “It’s a bit more than we can do live,” Conan says. “We went for a ‘70s sound, and while we amped it up a bit, we tried to capture the live vibe. We put some sound effects here and there and added a bit of Farfisa on top of the Electrovox to stretch out a bit.”
The music on ¡Sonido Amazonico! will have you up and grinning from the first note. The title track, a hit by chicha greats Los Mirlos, has an undulating, Arabesque guitar line, eerie Electrovox fills, and sparkling timbale, conga, and bongo accents. “The Hungry Song” is a list of things the band loves from hamburgers to white socks that rides a galloping carnival sideshow rhythm while Vivaldi’s “Primavera” from “The Four Seasons” gets a twangy makeover that’s part spaghetti Western, part Amazon Indian garage. The playing, especially Camp’s Electrovox and Douglas’s twang-heavy guitar, is always light and humorous, but the groove is serious. It’s a celebratory record with a universal vibe that’ll get any party moving. In a few years, chicha will probably be as much a part of the rock vocabulary as reggae is today. Conan and Camp are already writing tunes for Chicha Libre’s second album, and they’re planning a second volume of Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru as well.
“When I first Googled chicha, or Amazonian cumbia, or individual band names, nothing popped up,” Conan concludes. “In the past few months, clips of the old bands have come up on YouTube. Now in any corner of the world, if you have access to the internet, you can find chicha.”
By: J. Poet
07/14/08 >> 
