On a brick plaza in this walled colonial port where slave ships once dumped human cargo, a young black man cries out a Spanish verse over the beating of his tambor drum.
With two whacks on the stretched animal skin, the musicians flanking him let loose a percussive hailstorm that settles into a cumbia, a dance reverently performed by young Afro-Colombians. A musical mating ritual that came about in Colombia’s colonial era, it begins with a line of barefoot women in period dress, baskets balancing on their heads, sashaying toward male partners.
Now the folk rhythm has fused with such postmodern styles as electronica and hip-hop into a musical sensation in dance clubs from San Francisco to New York to Buenos Aires to Paris. African drums, native wind instruments and maracas are often replaced by guitar, bass and deejays, whose audiences favor Day-Glo sneakers and strobe lights to the more colonial attire.
Until just a few years ago, “cumbia digital” or “nu-cumbia” was only mentioned on obscure music blogs. In July, it was a hit at the Latin American Music Conference in New York, where it was declared the latest global dance craze.
