Josh Cheuse
“You’ve really got to check out Cumbia,” Joe Strummer insisted, his intense stare burning a hole through me after one too many pints.
“Cumbia?” I wondered. “What the hell is Cumbia?” I didn’t dare ask, but in those pre-internet days, I didn’t even know where to look, or if I’d even heard Strummer right. In some of our first meetings, already almost a decade before, he’d turned me on to everything from Charlie Parker and Woody Guthrie to dub reggae, but that music was relatively easy to find in my local record stores and library. But Cumbia?
The next time I ran into Strummer at the East Village watering hole we frequented during weekday afternoons, he pulled a cassette out of his leather jacket pocket. It was covered with his own fantastical song titles and artists in his unique, exclamatory scrawl, and with hand-colored artwork by the man himself. When I got home later that sunny afternoon, I listened well into the night. I was trying to make sense of what I was listening to, and why Strummer wanted me to hear it. The blend of Latin sounds, rhythmic and enchanting, featuring flutes, horns, maracas, accordions and percussion, behind vocals that blended Latin, African, Native American and European stylings, was unlike anything I’d ever heard. It was both beautiful and chaotic, much like Strummer himself.