Oak Cliff, 5.17.2024

As a teenager on Long Island in the '70s, I had a nodding acquaintance with salsa music. An influx of Puerto Rican kids whose families had moved out to the Island from NYC was actually the catalyst in stopping the aggro between Black and white kids in my high school (a truism of life in America is that the new arrivals always get it from everybody else). Salsa was in the air in the same way as doo-wop was in the German-Irish-Italian neighborhood where I grew up. The record store where I worked as a teen sold a few Fania All-Stars LPs, which is like having a record collection with one reggae album: Bob Marley Legend. Ansonia Records, home to the likes of Arsenio Rodriguez, Frankie Figueroa, and countless others, was as strange and exotic to me as some of the conjunto labels my friend Hush Puppy likes to bend my ear with today. 

But when Ansonia reactivated a couple of years ago, after 30 years of dormancy, the first act they signed was Meridian Brothers, brainchild of Bogota-based polymath Eblis Alvarez, designed as a laboratory to combine experimental electronica with Colombian traditional music. Alvarez started releasing small-batch cassettes under the Meridian Brothers moniker in 1998, and formed a live band in 2007, although he continues to play everything on the records. Among recent Meridian Brothers recordings, Cumbia Siglo XXI (2020) applies modern drum machines, synths, and software to '80s coastal cumbia with its funky basslines; Meridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimiento (2022) dives headlong into '70s salsa, with socially conscious lyrics; and Mi Latinoamerica Sufre, due for release on July 12, blends syncopated guitar sounds from Congolese rumba, Ghanaian highlife, and Nigerian Afrobeat with tropical Latin rhythms.

In 2022, Meridian Brothers -- Alvarez on vocals and guitar, Maria Valencia on winds, keys, and percussion, Mauricio Ramirez on drums, Alejandro Forero on keys, Cesar Quevedo on bass, and sound engineer Alejandro Araujo -- played The Wild Detectives on the hottest day of a very hot year. This time, they had perfect weather for an outdoor event attended by a large, dancing, grooving audience. A warm-up set by DJ Elkin Pautt put everyone in the mood to party. It was a nice mix of folks from across the Latin American diaspora, along with Black, white, and Asian listeners. Meridian Brothers are a band with deep roots in a particular community, but live, they create community wherever they take the stage. You don't have to understand Alvarez's lyrics to respond to the joyful explosion of rhythm in his music.

My wife was feeling a little under the weather, so we hung out on the steps in back, which meant that we heard a lot more of the band than we saw, but the sounds of cumbia, salsa, and rumba were irresistible. Ramirez plays more like a timbalero than a conventional trap drummer, and the mix of electronic and acoustic sounds percolated with life: tumbling polyrhythms, burbling bass, arpeggiated guitar patterns, synth blasts. Alvarez ran the show from behind a Fender Jaguar, singing, growling, and making announcements. At times it sounded as if he was using some kind of vocal processing, as I heard what I took to be a child's voice and saw him at the mic. When the band finished their set, the audience demanded an encore, then the sound tech shut things down with recorded jams, to avoid noise complaints from the neighbors.

It was nice to see Epistrophy Arts impresario Pedro Moreno, up from Austin, for a brief moment, and Texas Theatre's Jason Reimer for the first time in years (we'd been on similar guitar journeys during the pandemic lockdown). A more upful night of music would be difficult to imagine. Now I need to preorder Meridian Brothers' newie.