Zepeda and Omonte.
Shaki Presents, a.k.a. Rick Omonte, brought an evening of cumbias to Bregamos on Wednesday night, centering on California DJ Turbo Sonidero, who combines the old Latin American dance with elements of hip hop to create his own style. All the elements came together to create a mesmerizing mix of rhythms and voices, just right to propel dancers’ feet across the floor.
Cumbia is a dance rhythm that originated in Colombia through the slave trade centuries ago and, like many aspects of Latin American culture, grew out of a mix of African, indigenous, and European ideas. By the 1960s the rhythm had spread all over Latin America, in part because it proved to be quite adaptable. Musicians have paired it with everything from big band arrangements to psychedelic guitar to synthesizer, even as some melodies and tonalities have persisted across time. In cumbias, tradition and innovation walk hand in hand.
The San Jose, Ca.-based Turbo Sonidero — a.k.a. Roman Zepeda — who infuses cumbia with hip hop, caught New Haven musician Rick Omonte’s ear a few years ago. “It kind of blew my mind” when he first heard it — “this super slowed down, pitched down” cumbia laden with “hip hop influence” in that it was “sample-based.”
Zepeda grew up with hip hop in San Jose, and got the idea to mix it into cumbia when visiting family in Mexico in 2006. “They would have these sound system parties, and I started listening,” he said. He noticed that “some of it was being done electronically,” some of it “sample-based,” some of it “mechanical.”
“I thought: maybe there’s something I can do,” he said.
He returned to the United States “really inspired.” He had been doing experimental hip hop, which he described as “introverted… you’re playing for yourself. With these sound system parties, what was nice was seeing people coming together, dancing.” He wanted to try to do it, even if he “wasn’t from the scene.” He made tracks and posted them online. “One of my best friends hit me up” and asked him to play a party the next week. He did, and “people liked it so much, they booked me for another party. And then they started booking me for parties nonstop,” he said. “I’ve been doing it ever since.”
“I feel like what I’m doing is not something that’s original,” Zepeda added. “I have my own style, but I’m also coming from a tradition of music that was created over 200 years ago.” He worked from antecedents: the cumbia rebajada, or slowed-down cumbia, from Monterrey, Mexico, and cumbia editada, which is sampled-based. He pointed out that people starting experimenting with cumbia and hip hop together 20 years ago, and electronics decades earlier than that.
Zepeda, in short, wasn’t aiming for originality. “I feel like it’s a form of communication. I’m from San Jose. These are my roots, this is what I grew up listening to, and this is how I’m going to express it in cumbia.” That was the joy of the music; it worked “any way you want to express it.”
But as Zepeda kept releasing more music from San Jose, however, Omonte, listening in New Haven, “started to really fall deep into this hole” of hearing how distinct Zepeda’s style was, often taking the background elements of songs from other genres and making them the primary element in his cumbias. On his 2022 release, Lowrider Kumbias, he pulled from doo-wop and soul to create “these outrageous, room-shaking, earth-quaking, hip-shaking cumbias,” Omonte said. “So I’m obssessed, of course.”
But cumbia’s long tradition mattered. You could argue that cumbia, in its reworking and repurposing of fragments of old melodies throughout its history, was always based in samples; cumbia artists, in quoting older cumbias on physical instruments, were sampling before technology allowed it. Some of these melodies were “done 200 years ago,” Zepeda said. “Supposedly they come from birds. I don’t know if it’s true.” The “melodies have been recycled over and over,” Zepeda said, but “everyone interprets it different,” like different visual artists wouldn’t draw the same tree the same way.
Also, “Cumbia is very accommodating,” Omonte said. As long as the rhythm is right, and you can dance the dance to it, almost any innovation can work. “And with the modern culture of bass, now you can listen to cumbias and your car rattles,” he added.
Omonte contacted Zepeda years ago inviting him to visit New Haven if he ever decided to do a tour of the East Coast. A few months ago Zepeda wrote back to say he was playing in New York and Omonte brought him to New Haven. “This night is really built around him,” Omonte said.
Omonte, operating under his nom de DJ, Shaki, took the first set at the turntables, then gave it over to fellow DJs Dayansiiita and Libre Sonidero, who live in Norwalk and play parties in New York. All three played a mix of cumbias past and present. The crowd was thin at first; then, around 9:30 p.m., a group of friends arrived ready to dance. They formed a circle and began to move. The door opened again, and a woman walked through it with arms extended, rolling her shoulders in time to the music. Along with the dancers came music fans, people who bobbed their heads, concentrating on listening. By 10 p.m. couples had arrived to parry and spin across the dance floor.
When Turbo Sonidero took his turn, the mood shifted. The rhythms got slower and, seemingly, a million times heavier. Some dissonant elements emerged that added tension and drama. Zepeda began combining and recombining records faster and faster as the beat felt slower and slower. The effect was hypnotic. The couple stopped dancing, and in time almost everyone was swaying side to side, watching, listening, waiting for what he would do next. It was keeping in the tradition, and innovating, too.
