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When my parents moved from Lima, Peru, to the United States, in 1980, they brought with them the basics: three children, several suitcases of clothes, some books, and a small but cherished collection of vinyl. We were not a particularly musical family—no one played an instrument, no one sang—but the records came with us because it was simply inconceivable that they would not.
Like most family record collections from those years, ours was diminished by the arrival of CDs, by garage sales and the occasional cull. Through it all, though, my parents’ Peruvian LPs remained—it’s not surprising, I suppose, that a record of the criollo singer Eva Ayllón didn’t sell at an Alabama garage sale in 1992—and those were the ones I eventually inherited, or appropriated, depending on your point of view. In fact, my parents’ records make up an important part of the collection I have today, augmented over the years by jazz and salsa and cumbia; and, even if they aren’t my musical favorites, it feels like a real privilege to own these records, artifacts of an era and place that mean so much to the people I love that certain songs can still bring them to tears.
When I was in my early thirties, some friends and I started what could accurately, if somewhat ostentatiously, be called a d.j. collective. We named ourselves La Pelanga, and hosted an eponymous party that roamed from one house to another, and now and then to a local club, but whose truest home was the East Oakland loft where I lived at the time, which we’d pack with a hundred people or more, only a few of whom I knew. We liked everything, every kind of music, but mostly we liked how disparate styles sounded when played in succession. Rock en español and samba and reggaetón and salsa—somehow the people who came, our friends and their friends and the friends of their friends, danced to it all, no matter how esoteric or apparently illogical the transitions between tracks might have seemed. We could go from Lebrón Brothers to Café Tacvba to Yuri to Calle 13 to Os Mutantes, and no one would miss a beat—a joyfully scrambled Latin American songbook, spanning the continents and the decades, played at ear-splitting volumes, for a crowd that never stopped dancing.
These are boom times for Latin music. U.S. revenues reached $1.4 billion in 2023, up by sixteen per cent from the previous year. The Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny was a host and a musical guest on “Saturday Night Live” last season, fulfilling both roles while speaking frequently in Spanish. From 2020 to 2022 (before he was displaced by the generational phenomenon that is Taylor Swift), Bad Bunny was the most streamed artist on Spotify. Last year, he was joined in the top five by the Mexican singer Peso Pluma, who was also the most viewed artist on YouTube. The Colombian singer Karol G sold 2.3 million tickets on her global tour, grossing more than three hundred million dollars. Latin music is a big business and, culturally speaking, a very big deal.
And yet—what even is it? A category as elastic as this one exists only for the sake of convenience, an occasionally useful shorthand to describe an entire universe of musical styles. Like so much that is branded “Latin” in the U.S. these days—Latin food, say, or the still mysterious Latino vote—Latin music is not really one thing at all but a category of such kaleidoscopic, disorienting complexity that it dissolves upon close inspection. In 1975, when the Grammys acknowledged the presence of this music, it did so with a single award. The stand-alone Latin Grammys first aired a quarter century later, and last year more than fifty prizes were awarded, including five for various genres of regional Mexican music, six for tropical music, and several others one might not have anticipated (Best Portuguese Language Christian Album, for example). Nearly nineteen million people watched the 2023 awards, at least six million more than watched the regular Grammys. It isn’t that the number of genres within Latin music ballooned; it’s just that the wider culture began paying attention to its profound diversity.
Eblis Álvarez, the forty-seven-year-old composer and musician behind the Colombian band Meridian Brothers, has been immersed in this diversity his entire career. When I first heard the band, I had the same feeling I’d had back in Oakland, during those beautiful, manic parties: the intuitive sense that somehow, within the seemingly infinite ecosystem of Latin music, there was a through line I hadn’t previously understood.
Long-haired, with a scruffy beard, Álvarez comes off as a laid-back, eccentric high priest of Latin music in its very broadest definition. His most evident quality is an overwhelming love of sound, of every kind that human beings use to evoke joy. Álvarez grew up in Bogotá, but his father had come to the capital from Barranquilla, a commercial hub and a center of musical innovation on the Caribbean coast. Crucially, like my parents, he continued to listen to music from home, in his case tropical music that was looked down upon in Bogotá, dismissed as folkloric and unsophisticated, but which nonetheless served as the soundtrack of Álvarez’s childhood.
One of Álvarez’s first instruments was a homemade drum kit, fashioned from buckets, pillows, and other household objects. At seven, he started on the flute. Within a couple of years, he was already a bandleader—organizing the neighborhood kids to reproduce songs they heard on the radio. After his mother decided to learn to play the guitar, Álvarez did, too, very quickly outpacing her. By eleven, he was playing hard rock on a nylon-string classical guitar, recording rhythm tracks onto a cassette which could accompany his solos. Guitar became his obsession, and in high school, while his classmates chose between soccer and socializing, he spent his breaks playing songs he’d learned from the radio. His range immediately impressed: Álvarez might go straight from a cover of the Cuban singer-songwriter Silvio Rodríguez into a rendition of a Metallica song. According to a high-school friend, Pedro Ojeda, the leader of the cumbia band Romperayo and a longtime musical collaborator, Álvarez became something of a star at school after he wrote and performed a catchy bossa nova called “Canción Para Ti” (“Song for You”), whose lyrics the whole student body learned by heart. “I knew he was a genius right away,” Ojeda said.
Álvarez went on to study composition and classical guitar at the Universidad Javeriana, in Bogotá, while cultivating a parallel practice in rock, the preferred music of the city’s middle-class youth. By the time he was in his twenties, he was a classical- and jazz-guitar virtuoso, an award-winning composer, and a skilled instrumentalist on flute, cello, and clarinet. And he had fallen in love—or back in love—with the traditional music of Colombia, the same rhythms his father had brought from the coast. Álvarez studied percussion with Marco Vinicio Oyaga, and learned to play instruments such as the gaita and the flauta de millo, two traditional Colombian flutes.
In the mid-nineties, Álvarez reconnected with Javier Morales, a former schoolmate, after both had done their military service, which was obligatory in Colombia. They’d scour their parents’ music collections, hanging out and listening to old vinyl and cassettes for inspiration. Together, they formed El Dúo Latin Lover, as a joke. “We liked to poke fun at merengue and vallenato,” Morales told me, because so much of what was played on the radio was, to their ears, weepy and sentimental. “We had no pretensions, but this was how we began to relate to other kinds of music that weren’t rock.” The song “Cumbia en la Cancha de Básket” (“Cumbia on the Basketball Court”), from 1995, is representative of their style: a sarcastic, lo-fi, and danceable cumbia that does indeed sound as if it were recorded in a middle-school gym, until the rhythm breaks into a bridge that briefly evokes the melodies of Argentinean rock bands like Sui Generis or Soda Stereo.
In the late nineties and early two-thousands, as guerrilla and paramilitary violence worsened, life in many parts of Colombia became untenable; millions were forced to leave their homes. Tens of thousands of rural Colombians sought refuge in Bogotá, bringing their music and their culture with them. It was an unspeakable human tragedy and a national political failure, which had the unexpected effect of helping to transform the sound of the capital. It was now easier to see the authentic masters of traditional Colombian music like Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto, or singers like the legendary Totó La Momposina and Petrona Martínez, playing in Bogotá. Ojeda said that these were fruitful years of collaboration and connection, and that he often found himself at after-hours jam sessions with musicians he’d only ever heard on records.
Cartoon by John O’Brien
“I didn’t experience this phenomenon in its fullness, and that’s something painful I’ve always carried with me,” Álvarez told me when I asked about this era. In 2002, he left for Copenhagen to study composition at the Royal Danish Academy of Music, choosing instead a kind of musical, cultural, and linguistic isolation that better suited his character. “The classic archetype is for a musician to play in a group,” he said, “but I’m not particularly social.” In Copenhagen, he subjected himself to arduous practice sessions, sometimes as long as twelve hours, along with ill-advised exercises designed to strengthen his wrists and arms. The combination resulted in a severe injury to his left hand. For months, Álvarez couldn’t play at all, or even write notations, so he passed his time reading and, because he’d moved to Denmark with just a handful of books, rereading. Even as he recovered, the long, melodic lines of classical guitar or the fluid, inventive phrasings of bebop remained difficult to play, so he began trying out new techniques to create a sound that was staccato, jumpy, repetitive, more rhythmic and less melodic—perfect for tropical styles. He added loops and other digital recording techniques, building layers of sound, sampling the kalimba, playing the clarinet and drums, and, in this way, he put together the first Meridian Brothers album, alone. The resulting record, “El Advenimiento del Castillo Mujer” (“The Advent of the Woman Castle”), was released in 2005. Musically, it was spare, experimental, rooted in Colombian rhythms but also often sombre. Lyrically, it was the opposite, lush and full of startling imagery—for instance, “You come from astronomy, science, and truth, while your husband, the prince, eats from your solitude”—heavily influenced by the Colombian writer Álvaro Mutis, the author of one of the novels that Álvarez had brought with him to Copenhagen and read dozens of times during his recovery.
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