Colombia Strikes a New Note

Think of it as the Latin American literary masterpiece “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” set to music.

A multiethnic trio of instruments--a European accordion, an African drum and a scraper-like Indian piece of percussion called a guacharaca--creates a syncopated rhythm to lyrics that read like pastoral poetry. The words celebrate this steamy valley where an occasional breeze off the Guajira Desert to the northeast provides about as much relief as a Santa Ana wind.

But the composers see more: a savanna that smiles when the graceful Matilde walks by. A mountain rising more than 18,000 feet, so high that its peak is snow-covered, even in the tropics. And a train that crosses that mountain, bringing workers from the inland side to the coastal banana plantations--and with them, their music.

Vallenato--literally, the music born in the valley between the snowy Santa Marta Mountains and the Eastern Range of the Andes--has become the music of nostalgia and hope in a Colombia closer to peace than it has been in decades. Music that sings of a better past has come to represent the promise of a better future.

Many urban Colombians know Miami better than this region near the Venezuelan border, a beautiful agricultural area almost emptied of peasants fleeing civil war and drug-related violence.

Now, through the newly popular music, the region and its images have achieved an almost mythical hold on Colombian sentiment. The songs celebrate the legends of Valledupar: Francisco the Man, a mythical escaped slave who killed the German mercenary sent by the Spanish to conquer this region; or the young woman who turned into a mermaid because she swam in the Guatapuri River on Good Friday.

They are also finding out about the goings-on of daily life, such as the couple who eloped or the priest who everyone suspects stole the gold Eucharist and replaced it with a fake. Some of the characters and themes are familiar from the 1967 novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and other writings of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who grew up nearby and lived in Valledupar briefly.

“Urban listeners can identify emotionally without accepting or even desiring to be a rural person,” said Winifred Tate, a U.S. sociologist who is researching vallenato.

That longing for a rural past is a key element in Colombians’ desire to find a way out of their long history of violence by reaching back to a bucolic culture, she said.

A Soundtrack to a New Era

The music reassures them that their country also has a peaceful tradition that can be rescued and turned into their national theme, a fitting soundtrack to a new era of hope.

President Andres Pastrana is proposing dialogues with Colombia’s two major guerrilla groups--veterans of Latin America’s longest civil war--and the private armies financed by cattle ranchers and drug traffickers who fight the rebels. Both insurgent groups have agreed to the talks, awakening hopes for peace after half a century of fighting.

Vallenato, which evolved as new instruments were added to indigenous music and was once considered the music of country drunks, now calls to its listeners in a way that American folk music did in the 1930s, as a yearning voice of the people.

“Faced with the loss of Colombian values brought about by war and the misery it has caused, plus the martyrdom brought by drug trafficking, I think the only vestige of identity left us is vallenato,” local historian Tomas Dario Gutierrez said. “It is the pride that is left us. . . . The medium for expressing what we think, what we want, what we dream is vallenato.”

That is not to say that Valledupar or vallenato performers have been isolated from Colombia’s problems.

Located on one of Colombia’s traditional smuggling routes, this town has seen its share of the drug trade. A human rights activist recently was killed in downtown Valledupar. And narcotics have touched vallenato as they have almost every aspect of Colombian life.

Vallenato musicians, like other performers, have long mixed with narcotics traffickers. Drug barons have offered singers as much as $10,000 to mention their names on a record--an honor usually reserved for old friends or revered masters of vallenato.

Diomedes Diaz, generally considered the greatest contemporary vallenato singer, is awaiting trial on murder charges in a cocaine-related death.

Further, vallenato lovers worry that Colombia’s brutal civil war has made life in the countryside unsafe for the peasants who compose and play vallenato. Their culture--including their music--is being destroyed by violence.

Still, such themes only rarely find their way into vallenato lyrics, which are more likely to deal with rivalries over horses or women, evoking images of a simpler time and simpler problems that could be resolved by a race or a dance.

Vallenato has become the mark of Colombian music internationally. The Bogota-born singer Amparo Sandino, who is based in New York, includes two vallenatos in a slick stage show of music she calls “tropical pop.”

Her polished presentation contrasts sharply with a traditional paranda, or vallenato party, organized here recently in honor of outgoing Environmental Minister Eduardo Verano de la Rosa.

Singer’s Descriptions Set Crowd Whispering

Shunning the kiosk where organizers had expected them to perform, venerable composer and singer Leandro Diaz and Nicolas “Colacho” Mendoza, generally considered the greatest living vallenato accordionist, sat with their friends, including the guest of honor. As the group began to play, a circle of listeners formed.

Diaz sang of Matilde walking through the savanna and other descriptions that set the crowd whispering--as crowds have for decades--about how a composer blind from birth could describe nature so perfectly. As Diaz’s 70-year-old voice tired, his son, Ivo, took over.

Maybe it was just the generous servings of Johnny Walker Red, but nearly everyone was crying by the time Ivo sang, “I will give you my eyes because you gave me your soul.”

The idea that a Cabinet minister might be honored in such a way would never have occurred to Valledupar society 40 years ago.

“People here in the land of the accordion did not like the music,” Diaz recalled. “It was only for people who liked wild parties and drinking.”

As recently as the 1950s, the statutes of the Valledupar Social Club mandated expulsion for any member who brought “accordion bands” into the salons. Now the stately club has a salon named Vallenato.

In fact, vallenato’s most famous composer, Rafael Escalona, started writing the music despite strong resistance from his landed gentry family.

“I began to make stories about life, about characters who live or lived,” recalled the composer, now 71. “Because I am an educated person, I know how to use poetic language that is more subtle, and that caught on. Students began to play vallenato in Cartagena,” the sophisticated Colombian port and resort.

Vallenato began to gain wider acceptance thanks to one of Escalona’s friends: an up-and-coming politician named Alfonso Lopez Michelson. As governor, Lopez Michelson looked for a way to promote tourism in Valledupar three decades ago.

He decided on an annual folk music festival, which has become a celebration of traditional vallenato. Both the festival and Lopez Michelson’s political interests in Valledupar are overseen by Consuelo Araujonoguera.

Despite a prim, matronly manner that contrasts with the earthy lyrics and even earthier ambience of traditional vallenato, she has become so important in the life of Valledupar and its music that she is known simply as “La Cacica,” a feminine version of the traditional title for a political boss.

Her role as Lopez Michelson’s local caretaker became even more important when he was elected president in 1974 and took vallenato to the capital with him. Accordions played at official events, validating vallenato as an acceptable expression of Colombian folk tradition.

But the music he took was already different from the pastoral stories of Escalona and Diaz. Another upper-class composer--a music conservatory graduate, no less--was writing romantic vallenatos.

“I began with more delicate verses to women, speaking of roses, of flowers, and at first there was a lot of resistance,” said Gustavo Gutierrez, swaying in a rocker on the patio of his modest home. “Nowadays, romantic vallenato is what people think of as vallenato.”

Trend Alarms Longtime Fans

That evolution worried longtime vallenato fans until recently. Now they have been all but overwhelmed by what they see as an even more alarming trend.

In 1991, Colombia’s most famous director, Sergio Cabrera, made a television miniseries of Escalona’s life. For the title role, he chose Carlos Vives, a pop singer from the nearby town of Santa Marta.

Both the series and Vives were hits. They brought instant attention to vallenato, both in Colombia and internationally. But Vives’ vallenato is what might be called a Paul Simon version of the folk music.

“Carlos Vives does not respect the vallenato rhythms, and he adds his own style,” musicologist Ciro Quiroz said. “He has penetrated that world market by picking the best vallenato songs. But when he finishes the selection, what is left is junk.”

It is Vives’ vallenato that is played in the sophisticated dance clubs of Bogota, the capital, and Miami, and even inspired a vallenato festival this year in Monterrey, Mexico, where the accordion style of norteno music was adapted to Colombian rhythms.

Generally, people here are appalled by Vives’ treatment of the traditional form. But historian Gutierrez argues that the civil war that has displaced an estimated 1 million Colombians in this decade is the real threat to vallenato.

“Vallenato is rural music,” he said. “Our beautiful valley was full of peasants . . . who raised chickens and planted oranges and mangoes and were in tune with nature.

“We do not have that anymore because the war has made our peasants urban refugees. Their children cannot sing about bird songs or the murmur of a river, because they have not heard it. We no longer have the person who sings to nature.

“Maybe if we can achieve peace, people can go back to the country.”