Prepare to be exhilarated.  BarrioKandela – the new album from Guatemaya activist Doctor Nativo takes cumbia, reggae, mariachi, Afro-native rhythms and Mesoamerican oral traditions and blends them like they ain’t never been blended before!

DOCTOR NATIVO

Doctor Nativo is a stage name and the guy that uses it is really called Juan Martinez.  Juan was raised in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala and he still bears the scars of a traumatic childhood.  In 1990, his father, Arturo, was assassinated, along with five friends – victims of the country’s savage civil war that raged at the time.

Nativo spent his formative years absorbing the music – salsa, reggae, bolero and cumbia – that played in his father’s restaurant, El Copetin.  The music served as an effective diversion from the horrors of the civil war and it left a deep impression.  By the age of fifteen, Nativo was ready to take what he had learned and to share it with the world.

A period of travelling and busking in Europe, Asia and Latin America culminated in Nativo’s participation in a course at Havana’s Escuela Nacional de Arte and, after he graduated, Navaro settled for a while in Barcelona, Spain.  But the call of his Mayan roots was strong and, in 2010, Navaro returned to his native Guatemala, from where he began his mission to assert his Mayan identity through his music.  His 2018 debut album, Guatemaya, was widely acclaimed and the scene was set.

A HEADY, INTOXICATING, BLEND OF STYLES

BarrioKandela, the new album from Doctor Nativo, carries on where Guatemaya left off.  A heady, intoxicating blend of cumbia, reggae, mariachi, Afro-native rhythms and Mesoamerican oral traditions, it’s an album like no other.  And it’s also a potent statement.  BarrioKandela is described as: “…a manifesto, an ancestral bridge and a clear stand in a time when the world is burning, wars are multiplying and people everywhere are asking again who they are, and where they’re headed.”  And, beyond that magical blend of musical genres, the album has a clear intention: to remind us that we are still a people, that we’re still walking together and that music can still be a tool for collective awareness.

And it puts that point over powerfully and unequivocally.

BarrioKandela gets off to a fantastic start.  If the function of an album’s opening track is to grab listeners by the dangly bits and toss them into the torrent, then Miren Quien Llegó accomplishes that objective with room to spare.  It’s a joyful fusion of reggae and mariachi, with high-strung guitars, brass and strings all sitting triumphantly atop a driving Caribbean rhythm.

GUESTS GALORE…

And so it goes on.  Original Kumbiambero – a tribute to cumbia legend Andrés Landero – gets every part of the body in motion, especially when the trumpets rise up to do their stuff between the verses, and the brass continues to blaze away as the band move on to La Kocina. Featuring Mayan rapper, Chavahaze, Chocolate Kakaw is a ceremonial piece that taps into the ancestral memory of cacao as a sacred food and medicine.  Guitar and harmonica provide a gentle intro before, once again, the rhythms start to pulse – this time, with enough power to knock your speakers off their mountings.

Actress/writer/musician Adriana Primavera is the guest vocalist for Se La Cree, another vibrant mix of reggae and cumbia, and she sticks around for the melodic Minorias.  Both songs take their swipe at ongoing issues such as normalized exclusion and the climate crisis and it’s clear, even to a non-Spanish speaker like myself, that Adriana means every word that she utters. Spreading his net wider, Nativo has also enticed Roco Pachukote, of MEXRock outfit La Maldita Vecindad to sit in for Caminantes, a song that portrays people in motion, resisting, thinking and moving forward.  It’s a chunk of full-force cumbia, awash with brass and played to a solid, pumping beat.  And Roco’s vocal delivery is bafflingly fast!

HAPPY ENDING

Described as: “A pro-420 anthem and also pro-awareness, pro-freedom and pro-legalisation; a song that uses music to laugh at something that shouldn’t have been illegal in the first place,” Fumancher@s is a song that packs a real punch.  And the band sound as though they’re having the time of their lives!

Driving, joyful and raucous, Tiempos de Kumbia delivers exactly what’s expected of it, to an all-pervading cumbia rhythm, peppered with lashings of brass and scattergun lyrics, before this remarkable album is brought to a happy, happy close with Oxlajuj.  The song’s title means 13 in Mayan numerology – a symbol of completion and rebirth that also issues a powerful reminder that every ending is also a beginning.  Chavahaze is back, and he issues another reminder – that everyone should hear a Mayan rap, at least once in their lives.

BarrioKandala is, indeed, an extraordinary album.  Exhilarating – and an album like no other, as I’m sure you’ll agree.

Watch the official video to Tiempos de Kumbia – a track from the album – below:

Doctor Nativo: Website

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