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.
“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.
Álvarez returned to Bogotá in 2007 to discover that the nascent tropical-music scene he’d left behind was in full bloom: there were festivals of traditional Colombian music, and local bands like Curupira were recording with icons like Paíto (Sixto Silgado) and Gualajo (José Antonio Torres). Soon afterward, Meridian Brothers became a live band—with four additional musicians tasked with re-creating the songs that Álvarez had written, performed, and produced in Copenhagen. It wasn’t easy. Álvarez and his original collaborators (María Valencia, César Quevedo, Damián Ponce, and Alejandro Forero), most of whom he knew from his student days at the Universidad Javeriana, spent months rehearsing before playing their first show, at a Bogotá venue called Matik Matik. (Ponce was later replaced by Mauricio Ramírez, and Alejandro Araujo joined as a sound engineer; even now, it can take six months for the group to learn to play a new set of Meridian Brothers songs live.) Álvarez recalls wondering, from the stage, if the show was going well. There were a couple of dozen people in the audience, most of them sitting on the floor.
Having seen Meridian Brothers live in New York and in Bogotá, I find this hard to imagine. Anyone who sat on the floor at the shows I attended would have been trampled by the hordes of people dancing. But at the time, Álvarez said, audiences in Bogotá didn’t quite know what to do with music like his, or with traditional music more broadly. “If you went dancing, you went to dance salsa,” he told me. “We were in an entirely different category.”
Over the years, this dynamic changed, and a Meridian Brothers show, whether in New York or Bogotá or elsewhere, became a roiling sea of people, even more so after the release of the outstanding 2022 album “Meridian Brothers & El Grupo Renacimiento,” a note-perfect conjuring of salsa’s heyday, released on the New York Latin record label Ansonia. For this album, Álvarez spent five years studying every aspect of the retro salsa sound, practicing at some of Bogotá’s pulsating neighborhood salsa clubs. The result feels like an extension of and an homage to the classic Ansonia catalogue, with a twist. Put the record on, drop the needle, and it’s all there: the urgent slap of the congas, the bass lines that spread over the tracks like dark ink seeping across a canvas, the piano riffs tinged with melancholy. The conceit of the album is that the songs were taken from an obscure and forgotten nineteen-seventies salsa band, but when you listen to the lyrics—which are mostly not about love or broken hearts or parties that stretch until dawn but about all-seeing drones, atom bombs, sniffing glue, and humans transforming into robots—they slide out of their supposed era and into the future. It’s salsa as performed by a singer who has been abducted by aliens, or dropped into the pages of a dystopic sci-fi novel, and is trying to make sense of his experience through music.
Since that album’s critical success, Meridian Brothers regularly plays in clubs and concert halls throughout the U.S., and has reached other significant milestones of Latin alternative hipster stardom: performances for NPR’s “Tiny Desk Concerts” and Seattle’s KEXP, a glowing profile in the New York Times, a summer gig in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. For every album, it seems, Álvarez tries on a new persona, obsesses over another genre of Latin music. He only recently fully recovered from the injury he sustained more than twenty years ago, and is finally able to play the guitar without pain. The latest Meridian Brothers album, “Mi Latinoamérica Sufre” (“My Latin America Suffers”), released in June, once more centers the guitar, showcasing songs with duelling and complementary melodic lines, and references the various West African styles that arrived via the ports of Cartagena and Barranquilla and melted into Colombian tradition, giving rise to genres like champeta.
“Mi Latinoamérica Sufre” is a beautiful, bizarre collection of tracks sung by an alter ego Álvarez created—a self-pitying would-be folklorist named Junior Maximiliano III, who is searching for an identity, and whose drawn-out, languidly performed lyrics stand in sharp contrast to the insistent rhythms of the music itself. Maximiliano’s search is a caricatured version of Álvarez’s own. “I have no defined identity,” he told me, “because I was born in the capital, which robbed me of it.” Álvarez is a chameleon, trying to decipher the meaning of each strand of the marvel that is Colombian and Latin music. The first track, “Sé Que Estoy Cambiando” (“I Know I’m Changing”), captures the essence of the record; it features a jagged, cascading guitar riff with a rhythm that feels almost too complicated to be played. But it is played, and then the percussion falls into place so precisely and unexpectedly that it shocks every time.
I met Álvarez in Bogotá this past July. At his home, we spun through some of his records—the Peruvian cumbia band Los Ases de Huarochirí, the seventies Mexican cumbia star Rigo Tovar, the Colombian vallenato legend Diomedes Díaz—and he showed me around Isaac Newton Studios, his tongue-in-cheek name for his attic, where he wrote, performed, and meticulously constructed the past several Meridian Brothers albums. He tried in vain to explain the complex alchemy he uses to assemble his songs, how he loops his guitar or uses synthesizers, along with laptops, mixers (digital and analog), effects pedals, and dozens of actual instruments. As he did, I felt the room getting smaller; with his upright bass leaning against a wall, yards of cables snaking in and out of amps and mixers and other electronic tools and keyboards, it seemed there was room for only one musician. That’s enough, though, because Meridian Brothers lives principally in Álvarez’s imagination, where he catalogues and curates his influences, then remixes them to his specific, capacious, and idiosyncratic taste.
One of Álvarez’s other projects, the band Chúpame el Dedo (Suck My Finger), which he formed with Ojeda, has a song called “Mi Ancestro Berraco” (roughly translated, “My Badass Ancestor”). It begins as a kind of reggaetón, or as a slowly accelerating old-school Panamanian plena. Periodically, the music drops out so that he and Ojeda can speak. “We want to take a moment to show you a bit of our ancestral culture,” Álvarez says, in a cartoonishly high-pitched voice, during one of these breaks. “Here, all the families gather on the neighborhood soccer field, and we invoke the spirits of the food we eat, like hot dogs and pizza,” Ojeda responds, in a much deeper voice. They assume the role of tour guides—to Bogotá, in this case, but it could be so many other places. Lima. Oakland. Maybe even Birmingham, Alabama. Then the beat comes back, speeding up steadily, ominously, until eventually it sounds less like plena and more like Jimi Hendrix’s rhythm section, the musicians playing as fast as they can, watching anxiously as their bandleader prepares to set his guitar on fire.
And you know what?
We could have played this song at those La Pelanga parties, too. After all, didn’t we figure out then, on the dance floor, that Latin music was salsa and cumbia and reggaetón, of course, but also, incredibly, that it was everything? ♦
