Chicha Libre To Return To NYC After 10 Years at Baby's All Right
The concert will take place on June 20th.
Chicha Libre, North America's psychedelic cumbia pioneers will return with their first NYC show in 10 years on June 20th at Brooklyn venue Baby's All Right. Venezuelan band Los Crema Paraiso will join them to play their own brand of electric Joropos, with Yayo Serka (Angelique Kidjo, Lila Downs) opening the show.
Back in 2008, Chicha Libre launched the first psychedelic cumbia and chicha wave in North America with its debut album Sonido Amazonico (Barbès Records). The album was a tribute to 70's Peruvian musicians from Lima and the Amazon and their eclectic mix of tropical rhythms and psychedelic sounds. The album followed the release of the compilation The Roots of Chicha (also on Barbès Records) which first documented Peruvian cumbia and chicha outside of Peru.
Sonido Amazonico garnered great reviews - from Pitchfork, NPR, The Village Voice, El Commercio (Peru), Rolling Stone (Argentina) and MTV - who called them "One of the world's preeminent tropical psychedelic bands." With Canibalismo, their follow-up album, Chicha Libre kept forging its own path with a deeper psychedelic sensibility and a freeform approach to cumbia that integrated even more heterogenous elements. The band toured around the world and proved particularly successful in Chile, Argentina and Mexico.
Chicha Libre mostly stopped touring in 2016, playing just a few shows in Mexico and Colombia. Eager to start playing again, they released the EP Tequila y Aguardiente in the summer of 2024 - featuring collaborations with their friends Son Rompe Pera, from Mexico, and La Sonora Mazuren, from Colombia. They followed up with a West Coast tour with the obligatory stop at Seattle's KEXP and shows along the coast including two memorable performances with Los Mirlos in Los Angeles and in San Diego.
Syncretic and cosmopolitan, Chicha Libre's new lineup includes musicians from Mexico, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, France and the US and incorporates their various backgrounds into the new arrangements. The music is more adventurous than ever, with hard edge percussion providing the polyrhythms and a healthy dose of improvisation courtesy of keyboardist Joshua Camp and NY veteran guitarist Stephen Ulrich (of Big Lazy and This American Life).
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