Carlos Vives performs in Orlando, Florida, in September 2018.John Parra / Getty Images
Carlos Vives (Santa Marta, Colombia, 1961) recalls that the composer José Barros, teacher of Colombian popular music, settled in an interview any doubts about the origin of the cumbia: “La cumbia es Andina”.
"And when he said Andean, he meant indigenous," the Colombian singer clarifies in the promotional video for his fourteenth album,
Cumbiana
.
Vives, who speaks in torrent during an interview with EL PAÍS, is competing for six Latin Grammys on November 19.
Five nominations are for this work, in which he explores the sounds of northern Colombia - he also has a sixth for a song with the Puerto Rican artist Kany García.
“The cumbia gathers that indigenous influence;
then come drums from Africa and Spanish forms.
It's the perfect mix of being European, being American and being African, ”he says from Miami.
Since his interpretation in 1993 of
The Cold Drop
, that Colombian anthem that says that "he takes me, or I'll take him / so that the pod is finished", Vives has insisted on raising the vallenato, the cumbia or the joint to the top of the most listened to song charts.
This time he has summoned musicians such as the Panamanian Rubén Blades, the Spanish Alejandro Sanz, the Canadian Jessie Reyez or the Jamaican Ziggy Marley to record 10 songs with bases of popular music and modern arrangements.
He intends to "recover", he assures, "a lost magical world", that of the settlers who inhabit the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta.
Question
.
Why did you want to pay attention to that territory in the north of Colombia?
Answer
.
It is a place where I grew up.
I've been there a thousand times to go from Santa Marta to Barranquilla.
There is like a highway, which was a great engineering error, which caused terrible ecological damage because it is built on the delta [of the Magdalena].
That road covered the intersection of fresh water with salt water, which promoted mangrove species, which attracted fish and birds ... And we damaged it.
But for a long time there was no awareness of that.
One from his ignorance, from not knowing where he lives, went around all the time.
We saw the people who lived in the water, they were fishermen.
My father took us there, he had friends there because he is a doctor and he supported the people of those towns.
Sometimes they invited us to pay my dad, and pay back his love and work.
They invited us to eat fish, we went with great joy, they made us music, they played cumbias for us ... You keep getting that in your life and when you start working with this music you start to connect all this.
My music always pointed out the territories to me.
P
.
He called it
The Land of Forgetting
[in a 1995 song]
R
.
25 years ago I started thinking about all this.
I called it
The Land of Forgetfulness
because we really forget who we are and who gave us everything.
We have abandoned those towns and they have had to suffer all kinds of violence: historically political violence, from one side, from the other side, from the left, from the right, drug trafficking, common crime.
As the river began to be forgotten because the planes arrived and the roads began to forget them, we impoverished them.
It is very difficult to be successful with music, to take all this from them, and not think about how I give back to my culture, to my country, to the peoples that have given me all that.
Today that I have more recognition I do not want to make free music I want to do something that contributes.
The musician Carlos Vives during the interview.
P
.
Is cumbia Colombian?
R
.
All the rhythms with which I have historically worked to make new songs, to invent my pop and rock, and not take it from other parts, are born in that territory and have an indigenous origin.
That is the culture that is in the foundations of the cumbias and in what is born of the cumbias: the vallenato, the porros, etc.
The cumbia is born in this amphibious territory of the Rio Grande de la Magdalena [in northern Colombia].
The first thing the industry records are these traditional songs.
Later, the cumbias leave for Mexico and Argentina and thus they reach two very important places that radiate music to the whole world.
There were songs back and forth: the corridos and the Mexican rancheras reached the peasants of the Andes… Mexico bathes us and music movements are born within the country inspired by what Mexico brought us.
Colombia sends the cumbias there and Mexico makes its cumbias inspired by what Colombia gave it, with its northern influences, with its Jarocha influences, the vallenatos also reach the most humble neighborhoods of Monterrey.
P
.
How did you convince another reference in Latin music, like Rubén Blades, to interpret together that mixture of cumbia and salsa that is
Song for Rubén
and that competes for Best Song?
Because his is the sauce ...
R
.
We always crossed paths with Rubén at many festivals, but whenever we saw each other we looked at each other and we knew that there was something we had in common because he knew the history of Colombia and I knew that of Panama.
Until one day he told me: "My dad is from Santa Marta."
I'm from Santa Marta!
I said, "Let's record something sometime."
And one day I wrote
the song
for
Cumbiana
, I sent it to him and told him that I would love to record it, a song called
Canción para Rubén
.
He says to me: “But how am I going to sing a song that talks about me?
That is not right".
And I say: “Yes, you are my inspiration and I am not going to change the name.
But it does not mean that we are going to record it exactly as I wrote it.
I send you the idea and you add things to it ”.
Singer Carlos Vides during the interview, from Miami.
P
.
In that song he says that he misses "those singers who sing with structure / who have voices with a lot of height", but also that "the classical is a note that always continues to sound".
Do you think cumbia, popular sounds, has a future in the industry?
R
.
Yes, they are more future than past because they are directly connected to the ecosystem.
The future will depend on how we have the territory.
If we pollute the rivers, if we continue to advance with the disappearance of this delta, then we understand that this territory and cumbia have much more to do with the future than with the past.
P
.
He has 30 nominations for the Latin Grammy since he began his career, he was the first Colombian artist to receive one and since
Los classicos de la Provincia
, his first album, he has never stopped spreading these genres.
Why do you keep doing it?
R
.
Because it is my essence, it is what I am.
I'm into music out of affection for some minstrels that my dad brought home when he was a child, I'm into music because of my dad's friends who sang beautifully and loved me very much.
I'm out of affection because the music I listened to made me fall in love, because when I was a child I picked up a guitar and sang.
And when you also discover a path in your music and that your people gave you and those people send you an SOS [a call for help], you can't say no.
It is affection.
Find yourself in what you are going to find connected in what you do for affection.