“Everybody stand up!” Pablo shouted into the mic. We stood immediately. Since the opening batucada (a ripping, percussive substyle of samba), most of us had been fighting the urge to jump out of our seats. We just weren’t sure how to act. This wasn’t a music venue but a lecture hall in the Biology building at the University of Colorado. The group Debajo del Agua had just presented a Latin American music workshop, examining the roots of Andean music, Afro-Latino percussion, and hip hop in Latin America. They’d demonstrated various strings: guitar, charrango, tiple, tres, cuatro, jibarito, bass, as well as wind instruments: quena, zampoña, rondador, and percussion:congas, cajon, clave, guiro, quica, maraca, bombo, shekere, campana.

Then they began performing, mixing Caribbean / African percussion with jazz and Latin melodies and weaving in hip hop beats and flows. In short, they were kicking our asses.

Those of us who’d just stood up now looked around at each other and suddenly we all started laughing: we’d blocked everyone else’s view of the stage. Pablo chuckled too, scanned the auditorium, then—spotting an open area at the top of the stairs—invited us up there to dance. In the thirty or so seconds it took for this to happen there was a rare kind of emotional transaction between the people on stage and the audience. It was as if Pablo, along with his brothers Dani and Elias (the other two emcees), their father José, and the rest of the band weren’t putting on a show but just sharing what they did as a family every day. Which, as I was to learn, is exactly the case.

Family

“Pablo taught me how to rap,” explains Elias Cornejo. “I would beatbox in ciphers and I started getting pretty good. Eventually, it turned into a rush to have the ability to start up ciphers out of thin air after concerts and after school cause people would hear the beat drop and just go wild. Immersed in the lyrical side of the music, Pablo would freestyle with me on the daily, just in between doing our homework and whatnot. When I got old enough to go out with him, we would wreck it at parties. . . When you threw my brother Dan and my cousins in the mix, it was like hip hop (at least rappin) was everywhere I went; school, home, parties, family reunions, you name it.”

Along with hip hop, learning to play instruments brought the family together. “My father always had instruments around the house that were never off limits to touch,” Elias recalls. “The second he saw that we showed interest we would take the time to teach us and give us exercises. Whether actually playing or just singing and learning the words to the music (which was mostly Andean music) I can remember that music was a strong fabric that kept the family tight.”  Read More...