The Best of the Colombian Acts at Jazz Fest 2024

Colombian rap group Kombilesa Mi

This year’s Cultural Exchange partner is Colombia, and the acts performing in the Expedia Cultural Exchange Pavilion offer some musical opportunities that will be once in a lifetime for most of us.

In recent years, the International lineup has provided some of the exciting Jazz Fest moments for me. Last year a guy apologized for holding his phone in front of my face for a minute while recording Toureg guitar wizard Mdou Moctar last year, and I couldn’t complain. “How often are we this close to magic?” I replied.

People shuffle around and groove to music at most stages, but I’ve been part of some actual dance parties in the Expedia Cultural Exchange Pavilion, where the enclosed tent can help create a more inviting, intimate vibe. Monteal’s Congotronics artist Kizaba struggled to connect with the distant audience when he opened the Festival Stage in 2022, but the tent became a dance floor when played it an hour later.

These shows are for the most part once or twice in a lifetime opportunities. Some of the most famous acts like Moctar have returned and likely will again, but most of the bands don’t tour and won’t be back. So if you’re in a tough decision moment, ask yourself who you’ll get to see next month or next year and choose accordingly.

Some acts got a lot attention during the festival like Jupiter & Okwess from the Democratic Republic of the Congo when they played it in 2018 and 2019, but everybody but the reggaeton faithful slept on J. Balvin in 2019. It’s easy to miss them because for most people they’re just more names you don’t recognize in dense blocks of text, me included. I lucked out and had press releases come at exactly the right time in some cases, such as when Haitian Voodoo blues act Moonlight Benjamin played Jazz Fest in 2019. Singer Moonlight Benjamin was a rock ’n’ roll priestess on stage, and with her French band she made me think of the L.A. punk blues band The Gun Club.

For the most part, I do my homework, running names through YouTube because I want to hear the songs and see what the visuals tell me. I’m usually looking for music from other cultures that is in dialogue with contemporary trends, where artists are negotiating many of the same issues that artists working in traditional forms are dealing with here. People in Louisiana playing jazz, blues, Cajun and zydeco have to figure out how to deal with the end of the 20th and start of the 21st centuries in their music—if they deal with it all—and artists in other cultures face the same questions.

My picks are largely shaped by that preference, and I recognize that in some cases I’m using the wrong tools to get a proper handle on some acts. I can’t help but try to use western pop and rock frameworks at times, even if those aren’t the most relevant reference points. Fortunately, they’re also not irrelevant since American and British popular music have so much reach that they have at least some influence in all but the most tradition-bound music.

While my preferences in music of international origin is for sounds that exist in in-between spaces, I am also interested in Colombian acts Los Cumbia Stars and Grupo Niche, who play pro level cumbia and salsa respectively. If someone can give me the Cadillac version of these rhythms, I’ll hear them out.

People who want the uncut tradition may need to do some homework for themselves. Based on what I’ve heard, here are the acts from Colombia that I’m most looking forward to.

To start, I reached out to Lucas Silva, head of the Colombian label Palenque Records. I’ve liked the label’s Afro-Colombian dancehall and dub, and I was curious who he’d recommend.

“Matachindé is the best,” Silva wrote, and also recommended Kombilesa Mi, who are from the city of Palenque.

Matachindé (May 3, 11:15 a.m., Congo Square Stage; 2:05 p.m., Expedia Cultural Exchange Pavilion; May 4, 11:30 a.m., Expedia Cultural Exchange Pavilion; May 5, 12:40 p.m., Expedia Cultural Exchange Pavilion) is a band of traditionalists, but in the most specialized way. They’re preserving the disappearing Yurumanguí culture, indigenous to the region around the Yurumanguí River in Colombia. I love hearing something new, and based on the performances I’ve seen, it may be old to the band but it’s all new to me. It also looks like they will fill almost any stage they play.

Kombilesa Mi (April 26, 2:15 p.m., Expedia Cultural Exchange Pavilion; April 27, 2:05 p.m., Expedia Cultural Exchange Pavilion; 4:30 p.m., Allison Miner Music Heritage Stage; April 28, 2:50 p.m., Congo Square Stage; 5 p.m., Expedia Cultural Exchange Pavilion) is clearly my speed as they add hip-hop to Afro-Colombian rhythms, rapping in palenkero, a Spanish creole based heavily on the Bantu language. They have an EP on Palenque with cool remixes that make their tracks even more club-friendly, assuming those clubs are in Colombia.

There are two acts you only get one shot at. Simon Mejía and Liliana Saumet are Bomba Estéreo (April 27, 2:50 p.m., Congo Square Stage). “The concept was trying to make an electronic music that was original, that wasn’t a copy of the electronic music that was made in London or New York or Detroit or Berlin,” Mejía told The New York Times’ Jon Pareles. “It was kind of an identity search. OK, if we, as Colombians or Latin Americans, are going to make electronic music, how would it sound? Our dance music is cumbia, is champeta, is salsa, is merengue, is all the tropical and Caribbean and folk music. And the international dance music is electronic music. So what happens if those two worlds that come from dance—that connection with the ritualistic —can come together because they have the same root?”

On April 28, Colombian singer Goyo will join New Orleans’ ÌFÉ when they play the Jazz and Heritage Stage on Sunday, April 28 at 3:05 p.m. Goyo emerged from the Colombian hip-hop collective ChocQuibTown to pursue a solo career. “I come from a country where a lot of people have been working to give visibility to our culture, to move forward on some issues that are difficult in our community and as a country,” she told Billboard’s Isabela Raygoza. “So I feel very happy to be able to tell my story and have young girls tell theirs.”

Bejuco (May 3, 1:30 p.m., Congo Square Stage; 5 p.m., Expedia Cultural Exchange Pavilion; May 4, 2 p.m., Expedia Cultural Exchange Pavilion; 4:35 p.m., Jazz & Heritage Stage) plays what it calls the Bambuco Beat, a fusion of rhythms from Colombia’s Pacific coast and Afrobeat.

Cimarrón (May 4, 1:20 p.m., Festival Stage; 3:20 p.m., Expedia Cultural Exchange Pavilion; May 5, 12:25 p.m., Sheraton New Orleans Fais Do-Do Stage; 5 p.m., Expedia Cultural Exchange Pavilion) will display some of the best musical chops on the Fair Grounds when they play. The sound is made to accompany a stomp dance that originated on the plains of the Orinoco River, but I processed it initially as prog-folk-rock.

If I understand Rancho Aparte (April 25, 2:45 p.m., Parade; April 26, 12:15 p.m., Festival Stage; 5 p.m., Expedia Cultural Exchange Pavilion; April 27, 2:30 p.m., Allison Miner Music Heritage Stage; ) correctly, it’s street party music, and New Orleanians will recognize the vibe and aesthetic. And just as music made for public spaces in New Orleans has a variety of interconnected roots, Rancho Aparte draws from a variety of Afro-Colombian traditions.

The video below is from their last show in Bogotá before leaving for the U.S. tour that will bring them to Jazz Fest.

The name “Gaita Loop” (April 27, 11:30 a.m., Expedia Cultural Exchange Pavilion; April 28, 12:40 p.m., Expedia Cultural Exchange Pavilion ) is self-explanatory. Gaita Loop plays the Colombian flute-like instrument and loops it to create new, sample-based music out of traditional sounds and what sound like folk melodies.