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 cross-pollination. 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.”
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.”