Cumbia Wave Catches Chuck Prophet as Style Reaches an American Audience

Chuck Prophet remembers the day he started listening to cumbia, the Latin American musical style that forms the backbone of his new album Wake the Dead.

It was probably 10 years ago, and Prophet was playing a gig at the Make Out Room, a club in his neighborhood in San Francisco, with a bunch of special guests who were in town for the annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. The venue was full, the band was cooking and everybody was having a good time through the end of the show—right at 9 PM, the deadline Prophet always seemed to run up against when he played there. “It’s like, come on, guys, we’re packing this place, the bartenders are making money—what’s the problem?” Prophet says in his bemused drawl. “They’re like, ‘Yeah, well, it’s cumbia night.’”

After Prophet and his band packed up their gear and settled into the club’s Naugahyde booths, a DJ started playing cumbia records and a new crowd began to gather as the distinctive repeating basslines rattled through subwoofers. Before long, his drummer, Vicente Rodriguez, was teaching basic dance steps to Stephanie Finch, Prophet’s wife and bandmate, and the evening seemed to blossom in a different way. “I was like, ‘Oh, man, this is fucking cool. I want this night to go on forever,’” says Prophet, who liked what he heard so much that he became a regular at cumbia night and began collecting vinyl from Latin America.

The roots-rock veteran spent much of the initial COVID-19 lockdown listening to cumbia, a style that originated in Colombia and spawned regional variants across Latin America. In addition to his growing collection of cumbia records, Prophet went online to watch videos of cumbia acts from the ’60s and ’70s, when performers from Peru and other places blended the traditional “tune-ticka-tune” rhythm with psychedelia, surf rock and other more modern touches. When Prophet was diagnosed with stage 4 lymphoma in 2022, the music took on new significance for him. “It saved me, because it helped me to get out of my head,” says Prophet, who started writing his own cumbia-style songs.

As COVID restrictions eased, Prophet’s manager tipped him to ¿Qiensave?, a quintet from Salinas, a few hours south of San Francisco (the name is a play on the Spanish phrase “quién sabe,” or “who knows?”). Prophet got to know the group, which draws on Mexican cumbia, and started jamming with them, often stopping in Santa Cruz to surf on his way to Salinas. “I did a lot of that when I was going through chemo, because as bad as chemo was, I still had a couple weeks of the month where I felt pretty good,” says Prophet, whose cancer is now in remission. “At first, they learned some of my songs, and they were so, like, upside down, I couldn’t relate. And then I tried to teach them an Eddie Cochran song, and then eventually it just started clicking.”

Playing together led to a couple of gigs, and then Prophet brought ¿Qiensave? into the studio with some members of his band, the Mission Express, to make Wake the Dead, a collection of 11 songs. Most of them feature that trademark cumbia rhythm, accompanied by drums, percussion and accordion, along with guitars and vocals. Prophet deviated from typical cumbia song structure, but there’s no mistaking the influence. “I’m definitely a classicist, so I like choruses and shit like that,” says Prophet, who got his start in the ’80s playing guitar in the country-leaning indie-rockers Green on Red before turning to a solo career in 1990. “A lot of the cumbia stuff is just one chord—but nobody’s bored.”

Prophet’s foray into cumbia comes as the style grows in visibility in the United States, spurred in part by an ongoing cumbia renaissance in Bogotá, Colombia. This year has brought Colombian groups to the U.S. on tour, some for the first time, as well as new music from acts including the Meridian Brothers, whose sprawling, experimental album Mi Latinoamérica Sufre came out in July; and La Sonora Mazurén, which released the fiercely rhythmic Magnetismo Anímal earlier this month. Those groups often fuse cumbia with other sounds in what’s broadly known as música tropical—a catch-all term for music that developed in Spanish-speaking areas of the Caribbean through close contact among enslaved Africans, indigenous communities and Spanish colonizers.

“This blending is very interesting for the whole 20th century,” says Eblis Álvarez, leader of the Meridian Brothers. “If there’s a universal culture of music, it’s this African diaspora, because from this seed comes all the styles: New Orleans, the blues, Cuba and all its lines of development, then the music of the Colombian and Venezuelan coasts.”

Cumbia’s turn in the spotlight comes after previous surges of interest in bossa nova, mambo, salsa, even reggaetón. “There’s been cycles of 20 years with all different kinds of Latin music coming back, disappearing and coming back,” says Olivier Conan, who runs a record label, booking agency and Brooklyn bar, all called Barbès, that specialize in music by bands from Latin America and other parts of the world, including the Meridian Brothers and La Sonora Mazurén. “Maybe cumbia is one of those cyclical things that has taken on a different incarnation.”

This time, the cycle is repeating amid changes in technology and within the music industry that help it easier for American listeners to connect with music from outside the English-speaking world. For one thing, the spread of digital streaming services had made it far easier to encounter music that aficionados like Conan used to have to dig through crates of vinyl to find on trips to Bogotá or Lima, Peru. Also, simply phasing out the term “world music” makes a difference, says Edo Mor, who booked a string of cumbia bands to perform this past summer in Western Massachusetts through a community-supported music venture called Secret Planet.

In the past, being categorized as “world music” “created a kind of glass ceiling for bands coming out of Africa or Latin America,” Mor says. “When a band coming from Mexico City is tagged as being ‘indie/punk’ rather than ‘world,’ it really broadens the listenership and the age diversity of who comes out to see the band.” Many younger bands in Latin America are approaching cumbia with a punk-like mentality as they push back against the musical hegemony of the United States and England. Embracing a style that was, for a while, thought of as music for hicks from the countryside is a way to reclaim cultures that were often pushed aside in favor of English-language music from abroad, which was seen as more cosmopolitan.

“It’s us taking what is ours, maybe because we’ve been so overwhelmed and exposed to American and English culture, music, that we forget to look at our own music and our own expressions,” says Nicolás Eckardt, the bassist for La Sonora Mazurén. “There’s a band from Mexico, Son Rompe Pera, that says that cumbia is the new punk. I think it’s the other way around: punk is the new cumbia. It’s what cumbia has always been doing. It’s an expression against an oppressive system.”

By its strictest definition, cumbia is a rhythm, and many bands include it in their repertoires alongside other tropical styles, including chicha, guaracha, champeta and vallenato. (La Sonora Mazurén do a relentlessly catchy version of the mambo classic “Lupita” interpolated with “Cumbia Árabe,” for example.) Adding electric guitars, Farfisa organ or clavinet and other rock ’n’ roll instruments is a longstanding practice dating back more than 50 years. Younger bands have contributed their own updates, bringing to cumbia the influence of indie-rock, punk and metal—innovations that have also helped the genre find an American audience.

“However you renovate or redecorate or change an old style of music is what is going to make it relevant or not,” says Conan, who also plays in the bands Chica Libre and Combo Daguerre. “I mean, that was true with early rock ’n’ roll in many ways, the Beatles being the best example: they mixed it up and went from Greek music to whatever weird shit they found. As long as you can do it in a natural way, and it’s not something that is imposed by some fancy producer or a major label, I think that’s what’s going to change the perception of the music, and that’s what’s going to make it stick for longer.”

Though cumbia is an outgrowth of various sociopolitical conditions, including slavery, colonialism and cultural encroachment, there’s nothing complicated or fraught about the idea at the core of the music. It’s about connecting people with each other on a basic level by getting them moving. That sense of connection is what captured Prophet’s attention a decade ago at the Make Out Room, and it’s what La Sonora Mazurén seek every time they go onstage. “Music is such a fucking powerful tool for doing that. It’s like, we did move these people, we made those toes free for an hour on the dance floor,” Eckardt says. “It just breaks borders, and it just breaks economic systems, and it just breaks the fucking system in our minds. Anything that we can use to connect us again is the purest revolution we can do.”

Eric R. Danton has been contributing to Paste since 2013. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe and Pitchfork, among other publications. He writes Freak Scene, a newsletter about music in Western Massachusetts and Connecticut.