National Geographic Music (National Geographic)

Back in the '70s a groovy new sound was percolating up from the depths of the Peruvian Amazon. Born in the rough-and-tumble oil boomtowns of Iquitos, Moyobamba, and Pucallpa, this sound had one foot in the jet age – with funky wah-wah guitars, swirling psychadelic organs and syncopated Latin rhythms – and one foot in the stone age, with pentatonic, Andean melodies that reached back beyond the Incan empire. The music was called chicha and it was good.

But chicha never quite made it out of the jungle and onto the international airwaves – the Peruvian middle class wasn't particularly interested in this homeground sound, and musical styles changed with the times. Still, the music once played by groups like Juaneco y su Combo, Los Mirlos, Los Diablos Rojos remained popular among Peru's working class, and could still be found on old cassette tapes in the country's street markets – which is exactly where musician Olivier Conan stumbled across them a few years back.

Conan brought back a suitcase full of tapes and got busy learning how to play the music. The result was Chicha Libre, a Brooklyn-based band that's introduced the music to a whole new audience of international hipsters – and helped spark renewed interest in the music in Peru. The group released their debut, Sonido Amazonico! early last year on their own independent Barbes label – which is also releasing an ongoing series of vintage chicha recordings called Roots of Chicha. Nat Geo recently caught up with Conan to dive deep into into the roots of chicha.

Nat Geo Music: Tell me about your first encounter with chicha music...

Olivier Conan: I was traveling in Peru about three years ago, and I was buying a lot of cassettes from street vendors in Lima. I've traveled a lot in Latin America and always like to check out the local markets for music to see what kind of music people are listening to – the kind of music that never gets exported internationally. The street vendors always think it's cute when foreigners ask them for local music… Anyway, I kept hearing this amazing, hypnotic sound everywhere I went…

This was chicha?

Right. It was this really unique blend, kind of modern, but ageless. It had all these identifiable elements like '60s surf guitar and funky '70s keyboard and this rolling cumbia beat, but arranged in a completely original way. There were all these really hip elements, and you could see someone contemporary like Manu Chao recording this kind of stuff. It was like nothing I had ever heard before. I was like "I'm a hip guy, how come I don't know about this?" So I asked around and started buying as much chicha as I could. When I came back I had a ton of cassettes that I spent the next few months obsessing over.

So how did Chicha Libre come about?

Really organically, to be honest… when I got back from Peru I shared those tapes with all my musician friends that I've played with for years – especially [guitarist] Vincent [Douglas]. So we decided to put together a group to play this music just for fun. I was really more interested in learning how to play the music than being in a band. But our first gig got such a great response that we decided to see how far we can take it… So far, so good…

So what's the backstory? What is chicha and where did it come from?

Chicha is basically a Peruvian variation on Colombian cumbia and some Cuban styles, which are hugely popular all over Latin America. There are a lot of similar styles played all over Peru that go under the general name of musica criolla, but what grabbed me was a sound that was sometimes called cumbia amazonica, which originated in the Amazonian side of the Andes in Peru in the '60s and early '70s. It was really wild – it managed to combine that swinging, syncopated cumbia sound with these pentatonic scales that you find in Andean indigenous music – and it also used electric guitars and farfisa organs that you'd find in a psychedelic garage band. This is the sound that I think of when I'm talking about chicha.

Where does the name come from?

Well the word chicha means a lot of things. Literally it's a beer made from corn that's been brewed in the Andes as far back as anybody can remember. And in Peruvian slang, chicha can also mean a sort of bad boy… and that kind of feeds into attitudes about the music.

How so?

Chicha isn't really something that the middle class or the upper class in Peru listens to. It's considered a low-class, backwards music. It's even despised in some circles. But part of what we've been doing with Chicha Libre and with the Roots of Chicha series is changing the perception of this music. I get a lot of phonecalls now from journalists in Peru, who want me to explain this music to them! I think they when they see the interest this music generates abroad, they see that it has real value. And I'm kind of proud to be part of that process.

And how has the Roots of Chicha releases helped that process?

I think they helped the music find its rightful audience internationally. There's definitely a species of music fan who loves this kind of musical archeology – people who love the Ethiopiques series and these other "rediscovered" sounds. And chicha is very accessible to North American ears. There's a common language of electric guitars that anyone who grew up on rock and roll understands.

Tell me about the latest release in the series... Juaneco y su Combo...

Well Juaneco is definitely one of my personal favorites... and he was really, really out there. He was a bandleader from Pucallpa, which was still pretty isolated at the time he was starting out, in the '60s, and he had alot of freedom to experiment and develop his own sound. His father had been a bandleader who played the typical criollo music in the '50s and '60s, and Juaneco played accordion in his father's group. But when Juan Sr. retired and Juaneco took over, rock and roll was becoming a really big influence all over the world.

So Juaneco traded in his accordion for a Farfisa organ and teamed up with this brilliant guitar player named Noé Fachin and came up with this whole new psychedlic sound. And it really was psychedelic, too - Fachin was really into taking ayahuasca, which was a hallucinigenic drug that the local Indians used. So the whole band got into this whole Indian trip - dressing up like Shipibo Indians and making this really far out, mystical music. They scored a bunch of hits in Peru in the early '70s and we've covered some of their songs, too.

Wow... you really are a chicha expert.. Was it strange to be a European, living in the U.S., explaining Peruvian music to Peruvians?

[laughs] Very. I was expecting them to be like "who does this French guy think he is telling us about our own music?" But it wasn't like that at all. If anything they were very receptive and curious to find out why it was getting noticed outside of Peru. And you know that Peruvians have been really supportive of the band, too.

What's the response been like among Peruvians?

Well we've only really played for Peruvians living here in the U.S., but they've been really great about us playing the music. Some of them get really nostalgic, because this was the music of their youth, or of their parents and even grandparents.

It's funny, though… years ago when I first started playing Cuban music, some people would question my motives and my authenticity. But it was never Cuban people who asked those questions…