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Cali rallyQuantic brings a big batch of
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by ERIN MACLEOD Will Holland, aka Quantic, decided he would spend six months in Colombia. That was three years ago. He’s completed two albums in the country, the second of which, Tradition in Transition, will be launched here in Montreal this weekend. The Mirror reached Quantic by phone in L.A., a stop along the way to our fair city. Mirror: How did you end up in Colombia? Quantic: I went down to Cali [in Colombia] to look for records and found it to be a super place, and I went back a couple more times. A number of things happened—my father passed away, I got super into all the music there. I just wanted to break out and change my scene, really, and decided to move there and do an album. My mum was like, “you’re not coming back!” M: You seem to be interested in between stages. Q: You find people in Afro-Colombian communities who are playing more traditional music with marimba and hand drumming, but you had loads of records from sailors and Americans coming through at Buenaventura port, which is next to Cali. Cali is inland and about three hours away. Bands who were playing traditional rhythms got into Antillean music and started playing salsa, mambo and all these different influences. As far as my new record, for instance, you have Alfredo Linares, the pianist. He plays a lot of bossa nova. But he is living in Colombia and he’s Peruvian—as guidebooks go, he shouldn’t be an expert in bossa nova, but he is. It’s never as straight ahead as you’d think—there is often an assumption that Latin America is pretty limited in terms of types of music. M: People thinking it’s all salsa. Q: That’s a big image that people have. But I think that the combo culture in Colombia, from the 1960s and ’70s, is about orchestras scaling down to small formats, a maximum of 10 people, who played music across the board. They would play funk and soul, calypso, ballads, Latin music. I just want to show people that there is all this other music in Colombia and the surrounding countries. There’s just tons of music from all over Latin America. WITH COMBO BÁRBARO AND ANDY |
