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I thank Amy Cimini and Gust Burns for their generous feedback on early drafts, the peer-reviewers for their insightful comments, and Alejandro L. Madrid for his editorial work on this article. Different versions were presented at the 63rd annual conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology and at the Global Musics and Musical Communities conference hosted by the Department of Music at the University of California, Los Angeles. The responsibility of the content of this article is my own. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.
In a small venue in Bogotá, Colombia, a sweaty crowd dances to a mild-tempo cumbia beat. The sound booms across the room, traversing with vibrations that move across the nearly 100 bodies. Heat is generated by the movement commanded by the hypnotic groove emanating from the stage, making the temperature considerably higher than it is outside; a tropical microclimate in the grey Andean plateau. In the venue, mainly filled by white mestizos in their twenties and thirties, there is one body that stands out. On the stage, a few centimetres above the audience, a black accordionist in his sixties commands the ritual as if he were a snake charmer. The accordion interlaces with sounds from a group playing distorted guitar, fuzzed electric bass, and crashing cymbals. A third person sings on the stage. Wearing stylish shades, the singer recites verses with a paused and fluid style. When the chorus kicks-in, the singer suddenly approaches the accordionist. Sharing the microphone momentarily and bringing the house down, together they sing: ‘porque una cosa es el indio/y otra cosa es la antropología’ (‘because the indian is one thing/ and anthropology is another’).1 The racially charged words are further complicated by the bodies sounding them. It is December 2015, and the album Carmelo Torres y Los Toscos is being released.
The record, originally containing nine tracks, was initially released in Bogotá, Colombia, by *matik-matik* discos in CD and digital formats. Soon enough, it was followed up with vinyl re-issues by the foreign independent labels Names You Can Trust (NYCT) and Galletas Calientes (Hot Cookies). Carmelo Torres is recognized as one of the most important living repositories and performers of accordion cumbia, one of the least-known cumbia styles that...