4 - Historicizing a Scene and Sound

Summary

Between the 1950s and 1960s, a generation of Colombian drummers created a rich percussive lexicon. These musics circulated in Colombia and abroad under different names, cumbia being one of the most popular ones, we use the term 'música tropical sabanera' to group them. This chapter focuses on four drummers and analyses five rhythmic structures of música tropical sabanera to unveil the understudied yet deeply influential work of these Colombian drummers. Through their drumming practices, we trace the networks of music transnationalisms, media technologies, and commercial circuits that afforded the emergence of these musics. In a liminal space between the local and the transnational, the indigenous and the cosmopolitan, tdrumming practices we analyse unsettle the discursive predominance that the global north has had in the history of the drum kit and its aesthetic, technical, and musical developments in the twentieth century.