Petronio Alvarez Festival Highlights Afro-Colombian Music

On Saturday, a few minutes before midnight, at the Petronio Alvarez festival in Cali, Colombia, the sound system stopped working while La Herencia de Timbiquí was on stage. The crowd, estimated at 45,000 by the festival team, barely missed the beat and continued singing for several minutes.

It’s no surprise that the audience, a mix of Colombians and visitors from the United States, Europe and elsewhere, is familiar with the band’s repertoire. They are one of the few bands from the Pacific coast of this South American country, rich in music and at the heart of the “Petronio” event, to reach tens of millions of streams on Spotify. But outside of Colombia, even as Latin music gains more and more followers worldwide, relatively few fans are aware of the rich diversity of Afro-Latino music that comes from Colombia’s Pacific coast.

The Petronio, named after Petronio Alvarez — a railroad worker and composer of a song that has become an anthem for the region, “Mi Buenaventura” — could help address that problem.

The event, which concluded its 28th edition on Monday, is taking place in Cali, the city with the second-largest black population in Latin America, after Bahía, Brazil. Many black residents immigrated here from the coast, driven by the drug war and other violence. They brought with them a rich cultural and musical heritage that includes genres steeped in folklore, such as copper chirimia and the marimba Wrath.

But these genres never had the notoriety of others, such as vallenato, cumbia or even the contemporary hybrid of rap and reggaetón.

Each year, Petronio has gained international notoriety. Municipal organizers have estimated that the 2024 festival will attract up to half a million attendees, after starting in 1997 with just five thousand locals in the stands. And this year, the visit of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, both of whom spoke from the stage as guests of Colombian Vice President Francia Marquez — the country’s first black female vice president — has cast a new light on the event.

Markle spoke in perfect Spanish from the stage and the royal couple not only danced and listened to Pacific Rim music, but also attended events focused on the challenges facing people in the historically marginalized region.

Yet the question some are asking is: What will it take for the Afro-Colombian sounds of the Pacific coast to reach a global audience?

One of those drawn to music is Inma Grass, founder of Spanish music company Altafonte, which was acquired by Sony Music in January.

La Herencia de Timbiquí is among the artists in Altafonte, and Grass came to Cali both to “think about” a campaign to celebrate the group’s twenty-fifth anniversary and to meet and listen to new artists. On the way to the airport Monday, Grass said Billboard She said her 12-day stay was her first visit to Colombia. “I am impressed by the musical richness (of the Pacific coast),” she said. “It has global potential.”

Among the musicians who offered special performances outside the five-category event’s competition format was Nidia Góngora, also from the Pacific town of Timbiquí. Góngora has toured for years in Europe and the United States, and is known for her innovative collaborations with English electronic producer Quantic, as well as her roots music recordings with her band, Canalón de Timbiquí (the group was nominated for a Latin Grammy Award in 2019 for the album From the sea and the river.)

When Quantic, whose real name is Will Holland, first talked to Góngora about collaborating in 2017, she initially asked him to visit her home country. “I was worried it would be an extractive relationship,” she said. Billboard on the second day of the festival, sitting in an adjoining room of the Viche Positivo seafood restaurant she runs in Cali (viche is a liqueur made from sugarcane). Góngora took Holland to her family’s home on the coast. “He came back with more respect,” she said, explaining that he “committed” to the marimba and percussion of his roots.

The result: Curacaoa six-track album that has each been streamed over a million times on Spotify, in which “two sounds come together without one distracting from the other,” the singer said. The name refers to a traditional mix of viche and herbs.

Such musical mixes are increasingly found at the Petronio in the “Free” or Open category of the competition.

The six-day festival also included evening events, such as one by Alexis Play, a singer from the Pacific Coast who fuses chirimía brass with electric guitar, congas and rap. Still, his concert included a brief chirimia preliminary presentation, as if to remind the public of the artist’s musical roots.

Many musicians and others at the Cali festival feared that these roots and their creators would be lost without attention and support. One of the highlights of the festival was the first night’s concert, led by marigold Hugo Candelario, who assembled a 26-piece ensemble including a handful of marimba masters, The oldest of them, Genaro Torres, 87, and his young parents. Candelario founded Grupo Bahía, which won the first “Petronio” in 1997.

The musician from Guapi also spent several days during this year’s Petronio talking to anyone who would listen about the need for everything from video recordings of masters He has explained his techniques, tuning and other musical knowledge to music schools along the Pacific Coast to preserve traditions and develop future talent. His audience included representatives from the Colombian government and a delegation from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival.

“The danger is that the ancient magic and wisdom will go to the grave with the masters“The festival is not a panacea,” he added, meaning it cannot solve these problems on its own.

Yuri Buenaventura has told more than once the story of his penniless youth in Paris and the sale of more than a million copies of his album. African heritageincluding a salsa version of Jacques Brel’s song “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” Now living in Cali and working on projects through a foundation he founded that includes recordings by Pacific Coast musicians, he worries the festival could become “a caricature of itself” if local musicians aren’t given the means to learn the ins and outs of the music industry, including issues like production, marketing and songwriting royalties. That lack of knowledge also puts the music at risk, he said.

Grass, from Altafonte, discusses the tension between preserving musical and cultural traditions and reaching a global audience. “A lot of musicians are reclaiming their roots and mixing them with genres that young people are listening to,” she said. “You can’t be a purist,” she added, citing the example of Spanish flamenco, which has sparked much debate for decades, only to see artist Camarón de la Isla merge the traditional form with other contemporary sounds, achieving great success.

“I think we have to keep the traditional bands and sounds, but at the same time, I like how music is always evolving,” she said. “If it doesn’t, it won’t be able to reach the new generations, mixing trap, rap, jazz, reggaeton, everything that they feel in their world.”

One category of the festival lent itself particularly well to this kind of fusion: the “Open” competition. On Monday morning, after midnight, Chureo Callejero, a group of young musicians from Tumaco who mix marimba, rap and snare drum, was announced as the winner of this category.

A few hours after the victory, an Italian visitor to the festival wrote a comment under one of the band’s rare YouTube videos, with just over a thousand views: “We want your music on Spotify! Long live Petronio! Long live Colombia!”