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Lila Downs

Lila Downs

Lila Downs is one of the most influential artists in Latin America. She has one of the world’s most singular voices, and is known for her charismatic performances. Her own compositions often combine genres and rhythms as diverse as Mexican rancheras and corridos, boleros, jazz standards, hip-hop, cumbia, and North American folk music. Her music often focuses on social justice, immigration, and women’s issues.

She grew up in both Minnesota and Oaxaca Mexico, her mother is from the Mixtec indigenous group, and her father was Scottish-American. Lila sings in Spanish, English, and varios Native American languages as Zapotec, Mixtec, Nahuatl, Maya, and Purepecha.

She has recorded duets with artists as diverse as Mercedes Sosa, Caetano Veloso, Juanes, Nora Jones, Juan Gabriel, Santana, The Chieftains, Diego La Cigala, Celso Piña and Toto La Momposina. Chavela Vargas “named” Lila her “sucessor”.

Lila has graced the stages of many of the world’s most prestigious festivals and venues including Jazz at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, and the Hollywood Bowl. She was invited by Barack Obama to sing at the White House, and has performed at the Oscars for her participation in the film Frida.

Lila has recorded 15 studio albums and 2 lives. She has been nominated for nine Grammy Awards and has won six.

Lila Downs in numbers
Facebook: 1.500.000 fans
Spotify: 2.007.447 monthly listeners
Chaine Youtube: 303.879.650 views
Grammy Awards: 6 (9 nominations)

The Mexican American singer has a stunning voice, a confident multicultural vision grounded in her Mixtec Indian roots. Los Angeles Times

Ms. Downs has multiple voices, from an airborne near-falsetto down to a forthright alto and a sultry, emotive contralto. New York Times

Few alternative artists have the dynamic power and range of this bilingual warrior-woman, who has recorded nine albums, earning a Grammy and four Latin Grammys along the way. NPR

SON ROMPE PERA

Son Rompe Pera

Born and raised in the deep outskirts of Mexico City, the Gama brothers are keeping alive the rich legacy of marimba music running through their family with their latest project, Son Rompe Pera.

While firmly rooted in the tradition of this historic instrument, their fresh take on this folk icon challenges its limits as never before, moving it into the garage/punk world of urban misfits and firmly planting it in the 21st century.

Originally performing alongside their father at local events since they were kids, they now find themselves at the forefront of the contemporary international cumbia scene with their sonic explorations of the classic marimba. Their absolute unique blend comes from a typical youthful rebellion, when as teenagers they left behind their upbringing on the marimba and began to play in various punk, rockabilly and ska bands.

Now they’ve gone full circle with the marimba back leading the way, and mixing all of their influences together with their energetic take on the popular instrument, giving it a new twist never before seen in Mexican folk music.

Their live shows are a sweaty mess of dancing fans, and this garage-cumbia-marimba-punk band (the only band of its kind in the world) never disappoints on stage. Their authenticity shines through as they give their modern interpretation of Mexican, Peruvian, and Colombian classics, as well as their own original material and some surprise covers. The contrast of the traditional marimba with their youthful attitude and street sense connects the audience to the past while they dance into the future.

Their first album, Batuco, due out on the ZZK label imprint, AYA Records, in 2020, is named after their recently deceased father, and is a representation of everything he taught them growing up, plus their first steps into a new, international career.

UNESCO inscribed the marimba on the 2015 list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

OFFICIAL SHOWCASE WOMEX 2022

The Garifuna Collective

For more than 10 years The Garifuna Collective has pushed the boundaries of their dynamic, centuries-old musical traditions, breaking new ground with performances that show why UNESCO has proclaimed the language, dance, and music of the Garifuna people of Central America as a “Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity”.

The Garifuna Collective has performed in over 25 countries has been part of the most celebrated Garifuna albums of all time, including the critically acclaimed Wátina, recipient of the WOMEX and BBC World Music Award and voted by Amazon as the Number One World Music Album of All Time.

After an intense showcase performance that culminated with the first encore in 15 years at WOMEX, the band is extremely excited to be bringing their music and vibrant culture to the world stage in 2022.

Pao Barreto

Pao Barreto

After having participated in many “French Latin” bands such as The Bongo Hop, Who’s the Cuban, Cumbia Ya! and Cumbia y Cardón, the Colombian Pao Barreto, settled in Paris for almost ten years, launched last year her solo career with a first album, “Spiralis”, released in spring 2021.

Her compositions draw on a multitude of styles: festive Caribbean rhythms (porro, champeta, cumbia) rub shoulders with highly reverberated electronic sounds, with touches of soul, funk, swing and reggae.

Her texts celebrate the themes which are dear to her: the connection to nature, the cyclical rhythm of everything and the capacity of each one to transform.

Xenia França

Xenia França

Xenia França hails from Bahia, the birthplace of Brazil’s most iconic musicians — Gal Costa, Caetano Veloso, and Gilberto Gil to name just three. França continues in that distinguished lineage, building a career that’s captivated audiences at home and abroad.

Her sound honors the roots of African diaspora in Brazil, blending traditional percussion with electronica, jazz, and R&B.

Nominated for the Latin Grammy in 2018 both for her debut album Xenia, and also for the single “Pra Que Me Chamas?”

Cuarteto Tafi

Cuarteto Tafi

It was during a trip to Argentina, on the colorful and arid lands
from the northwest of this country, that this Franco Argentinian quartet gathers for the first time. Perched on a mountain at 3000 meters, wandering the popular open stages, the musicians decide
to call this musical and human encounter the Cuarteto Tafi.

Since its beginnings on the French scene, the group has brought its personal and original touch to world music, by mixing song in poetic and committed Spanish – sweet nostalgia for the Argentinian exile of the singer – to the sound of the eastern Mediterranean from the Greek bouzouki, to the softness and dexterity of the flamenco guitar, and the rhythms bewitching Afro Latin percussions.

Each with its own history and its metal influences, salsa, flamenco, rock. From these different personalities and musical stories, they have managed to create an entity, 4 albums and a notoriety noticed on the French scene.

Today their musical style is open, uninhibited, propels and frees itself: an original fusion between music with Latin American influences and arrangements with modern sounds.

Their music whispers and shouts to us about the world, with its bitterness and its flaws, its painful borders and its revolting injustices, but also with its beauties and its buds of hope, its loves and his fights.

Around Leonor Harispe, radiant singer with a remarkable scenic presence, Ludovic Deny (Bouzouki), Matthieu Guenez (Guitar and Oud) and Frédéric Theiler (Percussions) win with force on this irresistibly energetic and poetic 4 th album.

“The Cuarteto Tafi brings to Argentine music a fresh breeze of creativity, quality and originality.” Eduardo Makaroff (Gotan Project)

CANDELEROS

Candeleros

Psychedelic afro-caribbean Cumbia

Drawing from influences like Cumbia, Merengue, Dub and afro-caribbean rhythms, Candeleros surrender to a sort of exorcism full of differents sounds in which they reach altered states of consciousness. All of this includes percussion sounds coming from the beyond, Andean echoes, cinematic atmospheres and tunes that seem to come from an old episode of The Twilight Zone. Candeleros music is like digging into a postmodernism hole to find the very pure of tropicalismo.

Candeleros is a plurinacional group of six people that come from Colombia and Venezuela. They have their operational center in Madrid, from where they try to expand a multicoloured psychedelic sound to dance. “Echar una candela” is commonly known as the improvised reunion around the tobacco, fire and music. “La candela” also is the measurement for the lights units and their intensity. “Candela” and “fuego” are also used as metaphors for passion, hit and love.

Candeleros goal is to unify the afro-caribbean sounds as a proof of identity, folklore and modernity. William, Fernando, Urko, Sergio, Alex and Andrés come from places where we can listen to rhythms like Cumbia and Son. They have mixed these rhythms alongside with percussion sounds and guitars to create a sort of psychedelic ritual.

During their seven years of musical trajectory, Candeleros has performed in differents shows around Europe and United States. They have performed in important festivals such as Sonorama Ribera, Trans Musicales de Rennes (France), Sziget Festival (Budapest), BAM Festival (Barcelona), SXSW (Austin).

In addition to all of this, Candeleros music can be found in music platforms such as KEXP radio, FIP Radio, Radio Gladys Palmera and Sofar Sounds Madrid.

Nortec Collective

Nortec Collective

BOSTICH + FUSSIBLE emerged from the burgeoning electronic scene in Tijuana. In 1999 they invented a new style of music called Nortec – a fusion of Norteño (“from the North”) and Techno, founding as well the Nortec Collective.

Documenting the collision between electronic music characterized by heavy dance beats and traditional forms of Mexican music performed with live instrumentation, Nortec Collective paved the way for a new generation of producers and DJs that have reinvented electronic music from a global perspective.

Their last album “Motel Baja” was released in 2014 closing their Nortec trilogy with the Grammy nominees “Bulevar 2000” and “Tijuana Sound Machine”.

The duo has toured for the last 15 years around the globe from Europe to Australia, from South America to Japan and China, also performed in the most important festivals such as Bonnaroo and Coachella – all while still managing to find the time to become iconic artists in their home country of Mexico.

Since 1999, the Nortec Collective musicians have toured throughout the United States, Mexico, Europe, Japan and Latin America. They have played at Central Park’s SummerStage and Irving Plaza in New York, as well as the Winter Music Conference in Miami, the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and shows at the Royal Festival Hall in London and Elysée Montmartre in Paris.

They have done remixes for Beck, Calexico, Ennio Morricone, Kronos Quartet, Leigh Nash, Lenny Kravitz among others…

The song “Tijuana Makes Me Happy” was on the soundtrack of 2006 FIFA World Cup Germany, the video game by EA Sports, and is the title song of the feature film by the same name.

In 2016, Nortec collaborated on the production for the music for Cirque Du Soleil’s show, Luzia.

CARMELO TORRES

Carmelo Torres

Accordion player and composer, Carmelo Torres is considered as one of the main protagonists in the story of Colombian Cumbia. He is the living legacy of Cumbia Sabanera, a rural accordion style of cumbia from San Jacinto, in the Caribbean region of Colombia, influenced by the traditional flutes.

He learned to play vallenato first, by himself, before he met the ‘King of Cumbia’, Andrés Landero who was his teacher since kid, and started to play cumbias.

Since Landero passed away in 2000, Carmelo’s major concern’s been to carry on his teacher’s legacy, keeping the cumbia genre alive and teaching the youngest.

Carmelo is now knowned as The Accordion Bible. In 2019, Carmelo Torres’ music still smells as the music of the countryside, the sabana is present when he sings about labour works, nature, life and love. Indeed, He lives this new century and the globalization of our world musics as cumbia and vallenato and his music can be danced in nightclubs making part of our generation, looking backwards and towards in the same song.

With his group, he has performed widely at home in Colombia at caribean festivals winning all the contests and at the prestigious Festival Colombia al Parque in Bogotá in 2013. Torres has also travelled extensively with his conjunto as far as Europe, Australia, South Korea, Morroco and throughout Latin America in México, Panamá, Perú, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brasil.

WOMEX 2019 Official Selection