El Combo Cumbialandia are a Cumberland band of Latin, Caucasian and globally-nomadic musicians dedicated to servicing diversity in the music culture of the Salish Sea, BC and beyond. As students of heavyweight Latin grooves and the ancestral traditions that make up their sound, they feed a vein of cultural inquiry with every show, bringing audiences into the story and power of real roots music. With originals alongside songs from Brazil, Mexico, Cuba, Peru and Colombia, their sound revolves around Cumbia - known to some as the “backbone of Latin music” - a style originating in Colombia out of African, Indigenous and European musical tradition. It carries the very history of Latin America in its driving rhythm, bright horn and accordion melodies, and folk poetics. “El Combo” reminds us that every song comes from a tradition, and tells a story of a people and a place, where life is made by music and dancing. Their shows deliver an irresistible energy straight to the hips and the heart, to dance up a memory of music as more than celebration, more than art, and more than entertainment, but also as the soul of renewal itself, bringing the fire of life into the world through physical bodies. Expect to dance, hard.
We respectfully acknowledge that the Filberg Festival takes place on the unceded traditional territory of the K'omoks First Nation, Gila 'kasla...Hay ch q'a'.
