Some collaborations make so much sense, you wonder how they took so long. In the case of Camilo Lara and Eblis Alvarez, their recent project Ruido Tovar took either a decade to make, or a few days.
Lara, better known as Mexican Institute of Sound, has spent the better part of two decades reinventing Mexican popular music, mixing cumbia, mariachi, electronic music, hip-hop and whatever else catches his imagination. Colombian composer Eblis Álvarez, the creative force behind Meridian Brothers, has built an equally singular body of work, filtering Colombian traditions through psychedelia, avant-garde composition and a healthy sense of humor.
They've known each other for years. They'd almost collaborated once before. And they finally got together for a week in Mexico City to make a record called Ruido Tovar, a celebration of the Mexican pop and cumbia icon Rigo Tovar, and of the long conversation between Colombian and Mexican musical traditions.
Alvarez explained the way Cumbia has traveled through Latin America. "Cumbia is perceived very differently from Colombia and from Mexico. In Colombia it’s perceived right now as a national rhythm mostly because of the success outside Colombia. [If you] compare what was cumbia at the end of the 19th century and how it entered the 20th century, it was described as a simple rhythm with a dance. It was danced mostly by Indians, but it was a call to the African. Then there were some masters in Colombia that absorbed the culture of jazz, of big bands, and then they used cumbia and made arrangements like big bands.
Modernity penetrated these ancient and traditional rhythms. So cumbia entered the twenty-first century with computers, sequencers, samplers... and rebuilt the thing into modernity."
Cumbia has survived by absorbing new ideas, new technology, new sounds, new approaches. It also survived because musicians kept believing in it and playing it, even when much of the culture had moved on. Camilo Lara was one of them.
He explained, "We fought for cumbia and cumbia won. Back in the 90s I was DJing at raves, playing traditional cumbia music and people threw bottles at me. It was not cool."
Although their musical and personal dynamic is comfortable and easy, the two musicians work very differently. Alvarez is a classically trained multiinstrumentalist while Lara is a self taught producer who came up through DJ culture. Those differences also shape the way they think about the past.
For Alvararez, it’s everything: "I just listen to very old music all the time. It's totally about nostalgia."
For Lara it’s a bit more complicated. He says, "I kind of have a difficult relation with nostalgia. It doesn't matter if it was made today or a hundred years ago. Culture should be alive."
One artist embraces nostalgia. The other resists the idea. And somehow they arrive in exactly the same place.
Meridian Brothers and Mexican Institute of Sound bring Ruido Tovar to Lincoln Center's Summer for the City this Thursday. You can hear my full conversation with Camilo Lara and Eblis Álvarez here:
