Rough Guide to Peru Rare Groove

This crate digging Rough Guide brings to light forgotten gems and golden grooves of tropical Peru. In the golden era of Peru's record and radio industry, musicians, composers and producers created their own variants of these foreign-born genres, most frequently to satisfy and attract their dancing public (often defined by race/class divisions) with something they could recognize and call their own. Using these imported styles as building blocks they put their personal spin on what was generally termed (in the case of Latin dance music) música tropical bailable. Home-grown ingredients in the form of dances, melodies, and instrumentation from the array of Peru's indigenous peoples (such as the huayno) as well as African and Spanish-influenced música criolla, Spanish flamenco and Brazilian carimbó, samba and baião all swirled together in the melting pot with imported tropical Afro-Caribbean or North American / European pop sounds to create an ambiance as competitive, creative, sophisticated and diverse as anywhere else at the time. From Todos Vuelven and Toro Mata (made famous by Rubén Blades and Celia Cruz respectively) to Macondo (inspired by García Márquez's 100 Years of Solitude and covered countless times internationally) and Colegiala (a mega-smash for Colombia's Rodolfo y su Típica but originally by Walter León's Los Ilusionistas), Peru has supplied hits for the world of salsa and cumbia time and time again. Several recent collections have featured the originals, and here for example we present the song that launched a hundred iterations, Johnny Arce's Macondo.

LP - 11 tracks With Download.