Just before midnight on Saturday at the Petronio Álvarez Festival in Cali, Colombia, the sound system stopped working while La Herencia de Timbiquí was on stage. The crowd, estimated at 45,000 by festival staff, barely flinched and continued singing along for several minutes.
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It was no surprise that the audience, a mix of Colombians and visitors from the United States, Europe and elsewhere, was familiar with the band’s material; they are one of the few groups from the musically rich Pacific coast, which is the focus of the “Petronio,” as it is known, to reach tens of millions of people. streams a SpotifyBut outside of Colombia, even as Latin music gains increasing traction globally, relatively few fans are familiar with the rich diversity of Afro-Latin music coming from Colombia’s Pacific coast.
The Petronio, named after Petronio Álvarez — a railroad worker and composer of a song that has become an anthem for the region, “Mi buenaventura” — can help remedy that.
The event, which concluded its 28th edition on Monday, takes place in Cali, the city with the second largest black population of Latin America, after Bahia, Brazil. Many of its black residents migrated here from the coast, driven by the war on drugs and other violence. They brought with them a rich cultural and musical heritage that includes genres steeped in folklore, such as the brass-laden chirimía and the marimba-driven currulao.
But those genres have never gained the prominence of others like vallenato, cumbia or even the contemporary hybrid of rap and reggaeton.
The Petronio has been raising its international profile every year. City government organizers estimated the 2024 festival would draw up to half a million attendees, after starting in 1997 with just 5,000 locals in the stands. And this year, a visit from the Prince Harry and Meghan Marklewho spoke from the stage as guests of Colombian Vice President Francia Márquez — the country’s first black vice president — sparked increased interest in the event.
Markle spoke in perfect Spanish from the stage and the royal couple not only danced and listened to music from the Pacific Coast, but also attended events focused on the challenges faced by people from the historically marginalized region.
Yuri Buenaventura
Jesse Pratt Lopez
Still, some are asking: What will it take for Afro-Colombian sounds from the Pacific coast to reach a global audience?
A person attracted to music was Inma Grass, founder of the Spanish music company Altafonte, acquired by Sony Music in January.
Altafonte’s catalog includes La Herencia de Timbiquí among its artists, and Grass came to Cali both to “devise” a campaign to celebrate the band’s 25th anniversary and to meet and listen to new artists. On the way to the airport on Monday, Grass told Billboard that her twelve-day stay was her first visit to Colombia. “I am amazed by the musical wealth [de la costa del Pacífico]“It has global potential,” he said.
Musicians who offered special performances outside of the five-category event’s competition format included Nidia Góngora, also from the Pacific village 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 for roots music recordings with her group, Canalón de Timbiquí (which earned a Latin Grammy nomination in 2019 for the album Of Sea and River).
When Quantic, whose real name is Will Holland, began talking to Góngora about collaborate in 2017she first asked him to visit her homeland. “I was very afraid of extractivism,” she told Billboard On the second day of the festival, sitting in a room at the Viche Positivo seafood restaurant she runs in Cali (viche is a liquor made from sugar cane), Góngora took Holland to her family home on the coast. “He came back with more respect,” she said, explaining that he “made a commitment” to the marimba and percussion of his roots.
The result is Girlan album of six songs that have been played more than a million times each on Spotify, in which “two sounds [se] “They come together without taking the spotlight from each other,” the singer said. The title refers to a traditional blend of viche and herbs.
These musical mixes are increasingly found at Petronio in the “Free” competition category.
The six-day festival also included evening events, such as one featuring Alexis Playa Pacific Coast singer who fuses chirimía brass with electric guitar, conga drums and rap. Still, his concert included a brief chirimía performance beforehand, as if to remind the audience of the artist’s musical roots.
Many musicians and others at the festival in Cali were concerned that these roots, and their creators, would be lost without attention or support. A highlight was the first night’s concert led by marimba player Hugo Candelario, who assembled a 26-person ensemble that included several marimba masters, the eldest being Genaro Torres, 87, and his younger relatives. Candelario founded Bahia Groupwho won the first “Petronio” in 1997.
The Guapi-born musician also spent several days during this Petronio speaking to anyone who would listen about the need for everything from video recordings of teachers explaining their techniques, tuning and other musical knowledge, to music schools on the Pacific coast to keep traditions alive and develop future talent. His audiences included Colombian government officials and a delegation from the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.
“The danger is that magic and ancestral wisdom will go to the grave with the masters,” said Candelario. “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 history from living penniless in Paris as a young man, and then selling over a million copies of his album African Heritagewhich includes a salsa version of the Jacques Brel song “Ne Me Quitte Pas.” Now living in Cali and working on projects through a foundation he created, including recording musicians from the Pacific Coast, he worries that the festival could become “a caricature of itself” if musicians from the region don’t have a way to learn the ins and outs of the music industry, on issues like production, marketing and songwriting royalties. This lack of knowledge also puts the music at risk, he noted.
Petronio Alvarez Festival
Jesse Pratt Lopez
The tension between preserving musical and cultural traditions and reaching a global audience was addressed by Altafonte’s Grass. “A lot of musicians are recovering their roots and mixing them with genres that young people listen to,” he said. “You can’t be a purist,” he added, drawing on the example of flamenco in Spain, which generated many such debates for decades, only to see the artist Island Shrimp merging the traditional form with other contemporary sounds, achieving great success.
“I think we have to preserve traditional groups and sounds, while at the same time I love the way music keeps evolving,” he said. “If it doesn’t, it’s not going to connect with the new generations: mixing trap, rap, jazz, reggaeton, everything they feel in their world.”
One category above all others at the festival lent itself to such fusions: the “Open” competition. After midnight on Monday, Chureo Callejero, a group of young musicians from Tumaco who mix marimba, rap and snare drums, were announced as this year’s winners.
A few hours after the victory, a person who introduced himself as an Italian visitor to the festival wrote a comment under one of the few YouTube videos of the group, with just over a thousand views: “We want your music on Spotify!!! Long live Colombia, long live Petronio!”
