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Locally Global
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New York Press, Locally Global >>
AMONG THE MANY talented artists from around the globe that make up the sixth edition of GlobalFest—New York’s largest world music showcase, which takes place at Webster Hall every January— is Brooklyn’s own Chicha Libre, a band put together by Olivier Conan (one of the coowners of Barbès in Park Slope) as a way to spread chicha, a psychedelic musical genre he discovered almost by chance while traveling in South America.
“It all began when I went to Peru a few years back on vacation, looking for music, and people started telling me about chicha, which I had never heard of before, so I started buying a lot of that music and brought it back here and started Chicha Libre just as an exercise in playing the music that I liked,” Conan tells me. “But it turned into one very quickly, so [the band] just began playing more, adding more to the repertoire, writing some of our own stuff and covering music mostly out of the chicha realm but doing it in the way that would have the same approach that the original chicha guys were doing.”
Conan adds, “People responded as well to the standards as to the new compositions, so we kept at it and released our first CD [Sonido Amazónico] six months after that.” Chicha (which is also a name of a local fermented drink) is a fusion of sounds from traditional Colombian cumbias with the pentatonic scales of Andean music, psychedelic elements and surf-rock-inspired guitars. On the band’s debut, Chicha Libre blends original material inspired by the 1960s and ‘70s music that Conan researched and released in the 2007 compilation The Roots Of Chicha.”
Though general audiences have yet to be introduced to the genre, Chicha Libre is doing its best to get the word out—the band has toured constantly around the country—including an appearance at Celebrate Brooklyn! during the last edition of the Latin Alternative Music Conference last summer, opening for The Brazilian Girls.
“We did an East Coast tour with our friends from Dengue Fever and we played at the jazz festival in Montreal in front of 30,000 people pretty much all dancing, it was a lot of fun,” says Conan. “We’ve been pretty much everywhere. It’s dance music and people respond very quickly—except in New York where people sometimes don’t dance.”
Conan has also released a full-length CD with music by Juaneco Y Su Combo, one of the genre’s pioneers of the late ‘60s. “I know I will never recoup my money on that one, but I believe it’s an important record as far as pop records go, and I think people should know about it,” he says.
Other groups included in this year’s GlobalFest lineup are Caribbean legend Calypso Rose, Brazil’s funk revivalist Marcio Local and New Orleans’ Hot 8 Brass Band, which innovated the Crescent City marching band scene with its blend of hip-hop, traditional jazz and funk. The six-hour showcase is not for the faint of heart, as the bands play simultaneously in the venue’s three stages between 6 and midnight.Those attending repeatedly walk up and down Webster Hall’s staircase in order to catch their favorite acts and, in the meantime, also discover music they might not be familiar with. “[GlobalFest] is pretty exciting, I’ve been going every year,” explains Conan, who is actually performing at the festival for the first time. “It’s probably one of the most interesting events in the world music scene.”With the addition of Chicha Libre, how could it not be?
--Ernest Barteldes 01/07/09 >> go there
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