Record grooves and salsa dance moves: the viejoteca phenomenon in Cali, Colombia

Extract

Disfrutar recordando tiempos de ayer al compás de música aprendida a fuerza de bailarla. Revivir la emoción de aquellos Momentos involvidables y sentir que somos los mismos . . .

To enjoy while remembering moments of yesteryear to the rhythm of music learned by force of dancing to it. To live again the emotion of those unforgettable moments and feel that we are the same . . .

Slogan on a poster for Changó Viejoteca, 1995

In the southwest Colombian metropolis of Cali, recorded music has come to exert an unusually strong force on local popular culture in this century. Not only did recordings play a key role in establishing Cuban music, and later, salsa, as the principal musical style of the city, they also became the basis for the record-centred dance scene that predominated in Cali during the 1940s through to the 1970s, and continued to be important as the live scene flourished during the 1980s and 1990s. The centrality of recorded music for Caleños (the inhabitants of Cali) challenges the privileging, in most scholarly work, of live performance as more ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ than its mediated versions. Indeed, for many decades, ‘playing music’ in Cali literally meant putting on a record, as a source of music for other social and expressive activities. The term disco (literally, record disc) still exists as a local synonym for ‘song’, even when it is a live rendition of a song, e.g. ‘vamos a tocar ese disco’ (let's perform that song).