Description

7" Vinyl – NYCT-7096

We modestly suggest that perhaps one missing piece of Yeison’s impressive curriculum vitae was a record release with Names You Can Trust, champions of traditional Colombian recordings and their modern offshoots for almost twenty years from their home base in Brooklyn. NYCT set about correcting this when a serendipitous break in Yeison’s US tour in 2025 turned into the perfect recording opportunity in upstate New York.

As temperatures hovered as hot as a Caribbean savanna, an East Coast summer session with Yeison’s touring conjunto summoned all the spirits and sabor that reside at the heart of this tropical art form. With tío Javier Guerra Alvis (one of Andrés Landero’s sons) providing the steady rhythm of the guacharaca, and the rest of the band’s talented players in full tour-seasoned form, the group channeled one of Andrés’s most revered, deep cuts in “Santa Lucia” as well as an original composition from Yeison himself, the appropriately-titled “Cumbia Sin Fronteras.”

These two selections encapsulate the movement of the current cumbia nexus, from an ode to the Colombian countryside traditions in “Santa Lucia” to the international ascent of cumbia’s modern path in “Cumbia Sin Fronteras” (Cumbia Without Borders). Sonically, these two tracks reach for a harmonious balance between raw, traditional, and truly unique, and their finished form on the preferred 7-inch format means they’re destined to reach the hands of selectors and sonideros worldwide, just as the elder Landero’s records did across decades and generations. El heredero de la cumbia (the heir to cumbia) is in a good place, Landero vive!