Fela Comes To Colombia

"Shakara" Becomes "Shacalao"

Welcome back! I was gonna take more time off, but I have many things I want to write about, so here we all are together again. Thank you for being a subscriber (and welcome to the literally dozens of new subscribers since my last newsletter), and I hope 2024 is treating you well so far.

Book news: It’s done! In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor has been sent to Wolke Verlag, and I expect it to be available in physical and ebook formats this summer. The next thing I share will be the cover, which features an amazing painting by Martel Chapman, who’s done album covers for Victor Gould, Hassan Ibn Ali, and Nduduzo Makhathini.

In the meantime, if you haven’t read my previous book, 2022’s Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century, you can get it from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, Wordery, and plenty of other places. It’s a collection of short profiles of over 40 current US and UK jazz musicians, offering a broad collective portrait of the state of the music at the moment: traditionalists, avant-gardists, and everything in between, with enough recommended listening to keep you busy all year. Check it out, won’t you?

Lisandro Meza died just before Christmas, on December 23, 2023. He was an accordion player, born in 1937, who gained great popularity in his native Colombia and gradually all over South America and other parts of the world, beginning in the 1960s.

Meza was a member of Los Corraleros de Majagual for many years, but had a concurrent solo career that eventually became his primary thing. It’s hard to categorize his music, at least partly because all the accordion-based styles in South America tend to blend together but also because, like many musicians, he did whatever was popular, so on a Corraleros album like 1967’s Nuevos Éxitos! (New Hits!) it’s possible to hear charanga, merengue, and boogaloo songs all side by side and all fulfilling the same purpose — to get drunk partiers dancing and singing along.

That omnivorousness is what inspired this post. Because when I read about Meza’s death, one of the songs that was linked in the post was something called “Shacalao.” Click this link and check out those clattering polyrhythms and the pulsing low-end horns, and listen to the way the accordion isn’t dominant at all, but comes slowly forward from the back of the mix:

You know what that is? That’s a Spanish-language cover (with altered lyrics making reference to Colombia) of Fela Kuti’s 1973 track “Shakara.” Here’s the original, all 13 and a half minutes of it:

If you click through to YouTube, you’ll see that the first comment on this video reads: “To our brothers from the African continent we want to inform you that in Barranquilla Colombia this music is danced as if it were ours.”

That’s not the only Colombian version(ing) of “Shakara” out there, either. The studio-only project Wganda Kenya, which I wrote about in this post in 2022, recorded a nearly eight-minute version called “Shacalaode.” This one is even wilder than Meza’s, subjecting the horns to some serious electronic processing:

And finally, we’ve got a more stripped-down, slower version by Cumbia Moderna de Soledad. They were a group founded by Pedro “Ramayá” Beltrán, a reeds and flute player and sometime percussionist. Their music started out pretty traditional — nasal, whining reeds, heavy percussion and call-and-response vocals — but over time they added modern elements like guitar, electric bass, and horns. Their version of “Shacalao” begins with congas and shakers, before we get a little bit of gaita (the reed instrument), just as an introduction. After that it’s mostly percussion and vocals, giving the song an almost ritualistic feel. At one point, Beltrán even begins discoursing in English!

What accounts for the popularity of this song in Colombia? How did it become part of the pool of material that so many artists drew from? Well, this undated compilation may have the answer. Music of Fela — Shakara (Shacalao) was released by the Odeon label in Colombia, and it splits “Shakara” in two like an old James Brown single; the first half kicks off side A of the LP, and the second half kicks off side B. You also get radically edited versions of other Fela songs like “Lady,” “Black Man’s Cry,” and “Chop and Quench.” (It’s interesting to note that about half the album comes from Fela’s one collaboration with Ginger Baker.) I’ve never heard this album, but I’d kind of like to, just to see what the producers did to get these songs down to three or four minutes.

Anyway, this is just a particularly fascinating manifestation of the much broader embrace of African music in Colombia, something which has yielded a bumper crop of fascinating records from the 1960s right up to the present day. A lot of this material has been reissued in the last few years on the Vampisoul label, so if you’re looking for an entry point, their Bandcamp page is where you want to be.

That’s it for now. See you next week!