The Roots of Chicha: Interview with Olivier Conan
With the new CD “The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru,” the man who compiled the music, Olivier Conan, might just be giving American popular culture a chance to hear some music that has slid under the radar for decades.
Chicha is the sound of one style of Peruvian pop music that is derived from Cumbia, a form of Colombian music, and popular in the poor, urban neighborhoods, where Conan was introduced to it.
In the 1960s, Chicha bands were borrowing sounds and ideas from English and American music and melding these with Cumbia — electric guitars and bass, Moog synthesizers and Farfisa organs all crept in. The first group of these bands came out of the Amazon — bands like Juaneco y Su Combo, and Los Tigres de Tarapoto.
In the 1970s, large migrations to Lima saw the form reach a wider audience, with Lima-based bands like Los Destellos, Los Hijos del Sol, and Los Diablos Rojos further popularizing — and tinkering with — the sounds.
As Conan says in the liner notes of the album “They didn’t travel to London. No discourse was elaborated around the music. It never became popular with the Peruvian middle class. Art students didn’t embrace it. Critics and intellectuals didn’t write about it. As a result, the music was scorned nationally — and largely ignored outside of Peru.”
Conan hopes to put out further releases by the bands included on the compilation, as well as maybe getting at least one of them on tour in the United States.
Conan is known for forging some unique sounds in his own right as a founding member and cumbia player of the band Las Rubias del Norte, and also as owner of the lively Brooklyn bar and performance space Barbes and its record company, which released the collection of Chichas.
SB: What was your exposure to Chicha was prior to putting together the comp?
OC: I had absolutely no prior exposure to Chicha before listening to it in Peru. I was familiar with a lot of Peruvian Criollo music — waltzes, polkas, and Afro-Peruvian Festejos. This is one of the reasons I went to Peru, to look for more music, but found a lot more than I was expecting. The variety of musical styles in Peru is amazing. And most people have a genuine interest in music — not just their own, but a lot of different kinds. The best New York salsa radio I heard was in a Huaraz, a small town in the Cordillera Blanca. I also heard a lot of contemporary Andean music, which was really interesting — Huaynos played on synthesizers, marching brass bands. A little bit of everything.
SB: How did music come to your attention when you were down there?
OC: Chicha, I heard because street vendors made me listen to it, and I was immediately into it and started looking for more of that music— especially the early Amazonian stuff, which is probably my favorite. The fact that I had never even heard of it did pique my curiosity. It is both amazing and comforting to think that all over the world, they are musical styles, sub-cultures that we have never heard about and are as exciting, as worthy of our discovery as anything else we might be excited about.
SB: Your trip to Peru sounds like an exciting musical safari — did you go to many clubs?
OC: I tried to see music every night — which wasn’t hard, there’s music everywhere. Lima was the most exciting. Great street music, great peñas with Criolla music, which is what I was there to see originally — the club Rompe y Raja, in Barranco, comes to mind — and tons of “folkloric” bands who mix up Andean music with a little bit of everything else. A famous club in Lima showcases the music every weekend — Las Brisas de Titicaca. I also saw small town bands, working bands doing small club gigs, brass bands competing to play parties after Sunday church services. I didn’t see any Chicha. I only heard it from vendors talking about it and playing me old recordings. I have seen DVD footage of modern Chicha since, but still have to make it to a live show, which I hope to do at some point next year.
SB: Did you get any sense of how the Chicha movement started?
OC: I don’t know that much about the clubs or radio stations in the Amazon. By the time the bands were actually recording, starting in 1968 or so, most of the music was being produced and released by a label called Infopesa, which was based in Lima. All bands, even the ones based in the Amazon, would go to Lima to record. And play. I don’t have specific names of places at this point, but Lima — being the only really big city in Peru — was the center of dissemination.
SB: What was the process of deciding what went on the comp?
OC: Back in New York, I made people listen to the music and decided to start a band to pay tribute to it. It seemed like a fun idea and that’s how Chicha Libre, which now plays regularly, was born. The 
reaction was so positive that I decided to track down the original bands and see if I could license tracks and put a compilation out. It turned out to be a little more time-consuming that I was expecting, but I did finally put it out.
SB: When you began to formulate the music with Chicha Libre, what parts of the music were you focusing in on in order to reproduce the sound - which were the most important parts? Were you determined to be totally faithful to the sound or did you have ideas to either Americanize or modernize it?
OC: We imitated the sounds but took liberties. It has since evolved into a band with its own identity and borrowings form everywhere — in a way, it is faithful to the spirit of Chicha, which itself borrowed from all corners of the world. We’re just as syncretic and trying to be just as much fun.
SB: Has it gained a following? Has it built an awareness and appreciation for Chicha?
OC: We just started a Monday thing at Barbes on the beginning of the month, so it’s a little early to tell, but we have built up a very mixed audience. Barbes regulars, Rubias fans, surf music fans— quite a few Peruvians who genuinely like the music and don’t seem to begrudge us the liberties we take. In general, a lot of Latin Americans, who all seem to have a wide scope of musical appreciation — and dance.
March 26th, 2008 at 7:03 am
[…] (electric guitars, organs) and combined them both with cumbia and traditional Amazonian music. In an interview, Conan describes how Chicha Libre pays homage to those […]