In 2019 I saw the film “I’m No Longer Here” on Netflix and got hooked on cumbia music. I thought the film was good but like many other people, it was the rhythm of the music that really grabbed me as well as the devotion that these misfit kids had to it. Since then, I feel I’ve only scratched the surface of this world with all it’s sub-genres and variants (the kids in this film are actually devotes of variant known as cumbia rebajada which takes traditional Columbian tracks and remixes them, slowing them down dramatically) but something about it continues to fascinate me.
At the start of the year, maybe as a way to cleanse the Christmas music from my pallet, I began digging more into the cumbia music I could find on Bandcamp. Below are some favorite examples from traditional to remixes of the familiar, all centered on that simple double-beat shuffle that’s the infectious heart of cumbia. But what I might love most about the result is seeing how a relatively rare and niche genre can spread across the world.
So, let’s start with a collection of traditional cumbia from the source, Columbia.
From Germany, my favorite modern collection – cumbia remixed for the dance club.
For a taste of the cumbia rebajada, here’s a compilation from a Swedish label.
As a wonderful illustration of how the love for this Columbian music has spread, original new cumbia music from Japan.
And finally, folks who have read my music posts know that I am a huge fan of Run the Jewels. So what could be better than a Run the Jewels cumbia remix!
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