Lito Barrientos, In Memoriam

I am reading Peter Wade’s Music, Race and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia, and through a Google search I found out that Lito Barrientos, Salvadorean master musician, passed away on 2 August this year, a fact which remains, as far as I know, unrecorded by most mainstream media.

Barrientos and his orchestra recorded one of the most famous cumbias of all time, “Cumbia en do menor.” Its jazzy, carnavalesque, mamboesque grandiosity, balanced by its funereal-march deep, fat bass and melancholy vocal interjections make of this cumbia an unparalleled example of virtuosity in the universe of Latin American popular music. It symbolizes the union of the rural and the urban, of the sunny coast and the cold hills, the African and the mestizo, the high-brow and the low-brow, the sadness and the joy that, mixed, characterizes Latin American popular culture.

Here at Never Neutral we would like to say “Gracias, maestro,” and put the needle on the groove. Play it loud.