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Reinterpreting the Global, Rearticulating the Local: Nueva Música Colombiana, Networks, Circulation, and Affect Simón Calle Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2012 © 2012 Simón Calle All rights reserved ABSTRACT Reinterpreting the Global, Rearticulating the Local: Nueva Música Colombiana, Networks, Circulation, and Affect Simón Calle This dissertation analyses identity formation through music among contemporary Colombian musicians. The work focuses on the emergence of musical fusions in Bogotá, which participant musicians and Colombian media have called “nueva música Colombiana” (new Colombian music). The term describes the work of bands that assimilate and transform North-American music genres such as jazz, rock, and hip-hop, and blend them with music historically associated with Afro-Colombian communities such as cumbia and currulao, to produce several popular and experimental musical styles. In the last decade, these new fusions have begun circulating outside Bogotá, becoming the distinctive sound of young Colombia domestically and internationally. The dissertation focuses on questions of musical circulation, affect, and taste as a means for articulating difference, working on the self, and generating attachments others and therefore social bonds and communities This dissertation considers musical fusion from an ontological perspective influenced by actor-network, non-representational, and assemblage theory. Such theories consider a fluid social world, which emerges from the web of associations between heterogeneous human and material entities. The dissertation traces the actions, interactions, and mediations between places, people, institutions, and recordings that enable the emergence of new Colombian music. In considering those associations, it places close attention to the affective relationships between people and music. In that sense, instead of thinking on relatively fixed and consistent relationships between music, place, and identity, built upon discursive or imagined ties, the work considers each of these concepts as a network of relations enmeshed with each other and in consistent re- articulation. Table of Contents Chapter 1: Music, Identity, and Materiality ........................................................................ 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 1 The Emergence of a Music Scene ................................................................................................ 1 Music and Identity ........................................................................................................................ 9 Networks, Assemblages, and Circulating Objects ..................................................................... 15 Affect .......................................................................................................................................... 21 Taste ........................................................................................................................................... 24 Research Methodology and Chapter Layout .............................................................................. 25 Chapter 2: Localizing the Global ...................................................................................... 29 I Have To Search! ...................................................................................................................... 29 From Rock ‘n’ Roll to “Rock en Español”: Rock Circulation in Colombia .............................. 36 Collecting Records: Circulation, Aesthetics, and Affect ........................................................... 48 Learning about Rock: Mediation, Mediator, and Translations .................................................. 57 Localizing Rock: The Consolidation of the Scene ..................................................................... 61 All That Fusion: Jazz Reception in Colombia during the 1990s ............................................... 64 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 73 Chapter 3: Learning How to Listen to Colombian Music ................................................. 75 A Strange Street Performance .................................................................................................... 75 Tradition and Modernity: Gaita and Afro-Colombian Music in the Colombian National Imaginary ................................................................................................................................... 81 Capturing Sound: Sonic Transculturation and the Mediations of Music ................................... 85 World Music, Rock, and Jazz: Actors, Mediators, and Mediations of Colombian Caribbean music in the 1990s ...................................................................................................................... 90 Engaging with Colombian Music during Childhood: Musical Affect and Taste ..................... 100 Learning From Others: Becoming a Colombian Music User .................................................. 111 Travel: Transformative Experiences and Confronting National Identity ................................ 120 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 128 Chapter 4: The Ethnicization of Colombia ..................................................................... 130 Afro-Pacific Music Hits Bogotá ............................................................................................... 130 The Pacific Region: Marginality and Race .............................................................................. 132 Black Communities: Race and Ethnic Identity in the Colombian Pacific region .................... 141 Afro-Pacific Music in Colombia: Chirimía and Marimba ....................................................... 148 Between Salsa and Música Tropical: Afro-Pacific music and the Black Atlantic ................... 153 Music in Guapi: Balada vs. Marimba ...................................................................................... 159 Strategies for the Ethnicization of Afro-Pacific Music ............................................................ 164 Embracing Afro-Pacific Music Through Fusion ...................................................................... 174 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 183 Chapter 5: Conclusions ................................................................................................... 184 The Emergence of New Colombian Music .............................................................................. 184 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 193 Discography .................................................................................................................... 206 i Acknowledgements Many individuals were involved with this project since its very early stages and contributed in many different ways to its completion. I would like to thank all of them for their support, advise, feedback, and their time. I would first want to thank Ana Maria Ochoa, who has been a constant intellectual inspiration, for her support and advice throughout my graduate career and after. I would also like to thank Aaron Fox and Chris Washburne who supported and guided me in the early and later stages of this work. Likewise to Mick Taussig and Gavin Steingo for their close reading and comments. My fellow Columbia University graduate students were very helpful in different steps of this project. I want to specially acknowledge Daphne Carr for her permanent feedback and support in every step of my graduate career, likewise Anita Hoyvik, Nili Belkind, Shannon Garland and Niko Higgins. I want to thank my family Gustavo Calle, Yolanda Alzate and Laura Calle for their encouragement. Finally I want to acknowledge the large network of people in different parts of the world who contributed in some way or another to this project. I want to mention: Maria Mendez, Cristina Gutierrez, Matthew Fishbane, Maria Ospina, David Calle, Mark Burnstein, Antonio Cruz, Jacobo Vélez, Lucho Gaitán, Alejandro Montaña, Tomás Correa, Marlen Obregón, Juan David Castaño, LaWay Segura, Ricardo Gallo, Pedro Ojeda, Mario Galeano, Urian Sarmiento, Juan Sebastían Monsalve, Jorge Sepúlveda, Juan Manuel Toro, Mateo Moleno, Jaime Ospina, Richard Arnedo, Antonio Arnedo, María Angélica Valencia, Yaico Ortiz, Juancho Valencia, Victor Hugo Rodriguez, Santiago Mejia, Sergio Mejia, , Catalina Villamizar, Julián Velandia, Juan Carlos Garay, Humberto Moreno, Luis Daniel Vega, Tom Pryor, and Camilo de Mendoza ii 1 Chapter 1: Music, Identity, and Materiality Introduction The roots of this project go back to the early 2000s when I was working as a radio programmer for a university radio station in Bogotá, Colombia. During those years, I experienced the growth of a small musical scene in Bogotá, in which musicians used traditional Afro-Colombian musics as a source for music experimentation with rock, jazz, and hip-hop. In Colombia, musicians, fans, and the press call the musics performed in