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Discovering the music of Abelardo Carbonó is the kind of adventure you wish to anyone who travels looking for the unknown, and some good music on the way. And like many adventures, it starts right around the block. I first stumbled on Abelardo Carbono’s music in Paris in 2003, as I was working on a documentary on salsa singer Hector Lavoe. After a trip for a filming session in Colombia, and while editing I found this odd-looking record in a pile of leftovers at my friend Ben’s. “It’s some tropical-Colombian stuff”, My friend said. ”As a matter of fact I didn’t really get it...sounds crazy...But since you just spent a month in Colombia may be you’ll like it. Keep it.”

The record had gone from hand to hand. The man who brought it to Paris, Lucas “Champetaman” Silva, the ambassador of Colombian music in Europe back then, had given it to the guys at Crammed records, who didn’t really like it, then passed it on to Ben, who passed it on to me. I took the record home, played it and, to be honest, the first 3 songs were not very easy to grasp. It was fast paced, the accent was hard to understand, no horns, just funny choirs, a delayed psychedelic guitar and a frantic chucu-chu... Back then, european ears were not that used to the classic cumbias you can hear all over now, so you can imagine how unexpected this psychedelic kind of tropical garage sound was. Ben was right, though. Arriving from Colombia,

having heard such unexpected things as Nidia Gongora’s Socavon ensemble, or Alfredo Guttierez’s accordion, it was possible to relate too, through that experience, to that unexpected music from Barranquilla. Then like a plane hitting the soundwall, the record reached “Carolina”. Suddenly, everything around was light, shiny, green, and despite the parisian winter, It felt extremely warm. Days passed and it was impossible not to listen to that music over and over, every detail of it. And, to be honest, systematically skipping the first three tracks.

My flatmates were a bunch of cameroonese girls and their friend from Cote d’Ivoire. The man was only on his 15th day in Paris. As the music was sounding that day he popped out of the bathroom, all wet with his towel laced hastily, screaming “C’est la musique du pays !” (my country’s music !). The man couldn’t believe this wasn’t Ivorian late 60s music, and he was right. The deep guitar, the fake dog barking, the improbable mix of cumbia guacharaca, harmonica, congolese polyphonics, sometimes pop music and psychedelic guitar...

W r a p p e d together in a unique blend of sadness, e n e r g y , tenderness and force. The all

too rare essence of the blues ripped

me off to ribbons listening to “Palenke”.

A few years later, finally living in Cali Colombia, I hooked a friend, Will “Quantic” Holland, on Abelardo’s music, which he immediately loved, as he bought all the Abelardo records he could find on his next raid to Barranquilla’s warehouses. For both of us, exchanging views on that music and its context was a good starting point for the next trips to the costa. That same year somewhere between christmas and new year’s eve, stuck in the cold altitudes of Tunja, Boyaca, on the way to the snow capped Cocuy mountains for a trek, I was wondering where to go after that for a nice new year’s night. It was time to give Barranquilla a try, hoping Abelardo Carbono would still be around. I spent a whole afternoon in a phone shop making calls looking for the man, who, according to the most recent elements, had gone from musician to policeman at some point. After calling all the police offices around town, I was about to abandon when a random look at the yellow pages on the internet made his name appear. The phone

rang and “The” voice answered. Simple as that. The man couldn’t believe, after so many years, that a journalist from Europe would even know about him.

A week later, after an epic trip through the Santander Mountains, my own little myth became reality, flesh and bones. On that new year’s eve he played several concerts throughout the night as a sideman to Anibal Velasquez, and we partied the whole night through, diving deep down into the costa idiosyncrasy. At times, like at this old declining family’s house, they’d play unplugged. Sometimes they’d have a huge soundsystem by the pool in order for all the blocks around to be aware of how rich were the hosts of the party ! Abelardo was on the bass, Anibal’s music was extremely tight, no wonder some european labels and festivals came for his music later on.

By that time, the music had travelled back to my friends back in Paris. The same ones who had handed me the music, were now asking: “How did you find that treasure?”. I was tempted to reply : “Under your desk, or on the other side of the world, may be both...” . Abelardo later came to Cali, where he recorded several songs at Quantic’s Sonido del Valle studio. Some of this great material - one can easily imagine how good the music resulting from the meeting of those two musicians can be - was supposed to come out. And It will -hopefully- in a near future, produced by Silva’s Palenque Records. Images were filmed but still, it seemed pretty obvious that those who haven’t had a chance to heat the older material needed a summary of his past works. After a few months looking for a label, finally Madrid’s Vampisoul made it happen : a whole compilation of the godfather of Colombian-made psychedelic tropical sound, Abelardo Carbono. Here it is !

A portrait of Abelardo Carbono.Abelardo Carbono, the godfather of champeta, was born in 1948 in Cienaga, a small town between Santa Marta and Cartagena, stuck between the slopes of the 5800 m-high Sierra Nevada de Santa Martha, and the huge Cienaga Grande marshes. The motherland of cumbia, porro and vallenato, it stands at the crossroads of the endless mestizo lowlands and the kogui, arhuaco and kankuamo territories up in the mountains. It is also very close to Aracataca, where Garcia Marquez found inspiration for his imaginary town of Macondo in a Hundred years of Solitude.

Since it lies on the Santa Martha-Bogota railway, an important infrastructure for local activities like carbon minery, Abelardo’s father, Abelardo Carbono Sr (yes, you read it), a man of either french or italian ascent depending on the day Abelardo answers, found work at the railway company and settled there. “My father had a good position at the railway company.

But one day, he lost his job, and a few days later he told Abelardo and me that we better be musicians, because that’s how we might make a living, not with the railway” Abelardo’s brother Abel (!) recalls with a smile. The mother, Elizabeth Arevalo, is standing at Abel’s side, proudly nodding at his son’s words. She also has her part in her sons becoming musicians (younger brother Jafeth was later to become the band’s bass

player), as she was and still is, despite her age, a very good and inspired bolero singer. She and her husband moved to Fundación, Magdalena, right after Abelardo’s birth, were Abelardo Sr was a famous porro and cumbia guitarist, leader of a band called “Los Tigrillos”.

“I started the guitar when I was 8, or 9, just playing along with my father. The only reason why I play guitar is because you couldn’t find a piano or a saxophone, or a trumpet in my village. There were only guitars” he recalls “But my family wanted to save me, they didn’t want me to keep living in that god forsaken place, they wanted me back to civilization. That’s how I was brought to Barranquilla in 1959”. Upon his arrival, he quickly went to become a police cadet as it was pretty much all the city had to offer

him in terms of earning one’s life. During those years, Abelardo kept on playing guitar, but nothing really happened. From his debut as a police cadet in 1963 until the early 80s and the recording of his first hits, he would just play around with Roberto Carlos’s early latin pop tunes.

At the turn of the 80s, Abelardo had almost 2 decades of being in the police “I wasn’t good at that job. I was living in Carrizal, a dangerous neighbourhood, so I was always carrying two guns with me. But I couldn’t fire a weapon, during the exercises my colleagues had to shoot the target for me in order for me to fill up the card ! “ he recalls laughing, “ Even the dog at the corner was scaring me”. With his brothers Jafeth (bass) and Abel (solo guitar), he progressively formed what was to become the nucleus of the bands to come, developing their signature, a sharp guitar, a strong bass and a choir that only brothers’ voices can deliver.

An enduring characteristic of his work until present days, the contribution of tropical pop music to his afro colombian garage sound,

was among the first to arise. As Abelardo himself claims it, his first band

was certainly marked by the heavy influence of pop

rock bands like Venezuela’s

Grupo

Bota (which recorded in the 70s for Discos Park, and came out with Discos Fuentes), the first of a long list of influences. At first sight, since Bota means boot in Spanish (while Grupo Abarca, Abelardo’s first official bandname before choosing a more classic one, was named after a sandal brand), it seems pretty obvious. And indeed, the pop tropical sound, the groaning voice, the drumkit, the mix of rockish and tropical guitar, the delays one would hear later in Abelardo’s work was already here.

Still, it took Abelardo some time to incorporate that formula in his compositions and arrangements. The first song the Grupo Abarca recorded, A otro perro con ese hueso (the colombian proverb “go see another dog with that bone” translates as , “you cant fool me ”), may not be exactly developping the same kind of sound, there was already a resemblance in terms of format and arrangement. It seems A otro perro... was recorded in Medellin with Sonolux, along with a set of songs to form an album called... Additionnally, the vallenato cajon drum, a traditional feature one would rarely consider beyond vallenato circles, was being used here and will be used extensively by him in various contexts. With its childish voices drowned in reverb, the swinging electric bass contrasting with the acoustic guitar, and the funny lyrics about a man who promises a lot as the choir rejects his affirmations, the tune stood out of a 12-songs

compilation edited by Sonolux and gained

Abelardo’s band a new attention from the music

industry in Medellin.

This is also when things started

g e t t i n g m o r e

difficult for Abelardo Carbono in the police forces. “I was playing in the bus sometimes dressed in uniform. People were making funny faces. One day we played at a big navy ceremony in Cartagena, so for a while they left me alone with that problem that I was a musician. But they started saying, “musician or policeman, you have to choose !” ” Meanwhile, the band went to Medellin where Codiscos had them record Guana Tangula, their second album, which came out in 1980 and enjoyed good airplay “The radio djs were calling me all the time to be the first to receive my new album, back then. It was different. Then came te marimbero era, where the big marijuana traffickers were paying huge money to get their artist at the top of the playlist. I never got in that game” Though “Quiero a mi gente” and “Shallcarri” seem to testify once again that Fela Kuti’s Shakara had a huge impact on the musicians from the coast, the West African and French Caribbean influence was more and more obvious in the band’s work, despite Abelardo claiming that he wasn’t listening to radio, nor looking for records. Considering these are the words of a man called Abelardo, son of man called Abelardo, and brother of a man called Abel, this kind of illusion of a self generated, ex nihilo inspiration comes as no surprise. And after all, Abelardo’s Carbono music, one could call “proto champeta”, is the result of so many influences that even music alone is not the only influence: from tigers to congolese, disco and pop, from afro beat to donkeys, cats and compa,

champeta’s trademark, and that of its creator in the first place, is the ability to recycle bits of just about anything. Abelardo had and still has an excellent musical ear, as he is able to remember a melody for a long time and instantly apply different lyrics of his own to it : from Dianna Ross’s I feel love to Roberto Carlos and his cacharito or Juan Valencia’s Anyhow, beyond afro beat, the compa and congolese sounds rapidly marked the band, and the use of the drumkit meant a new era for the band. The fact that the next two albums were to be recorded with Felito in Barranquilla meant a few changes in musical direction for Abelardo. By then the band was simply called Abelardo Carbono y su conjunto.It was like relocating in their own hometown: “People thought we were a bunch of guys from Medellin, since we came out on those labels from Medellin, and our music was like no other in Barranquilla.” recalls newly integrated drummer Christian Pocho. SECOND ALBUM.

The presence of a drum and the electric guitar were two of the most notable changesin Abelardo’s music. Michi Sarmiento playing his saxophone was the sign that his music had gained respect from the costa’s music scene. For some reason he cannot explain, the follow up to those albums was not, as one couldexpect, immediate...