I promised that I would cover more African and South American acts in 2026 when I wrote my
2025 Inventational, and if you thought I was simply blowing smoke and all manner of noxious fury, then you'd better sit yourself down and get ready to house a full buffet of smoked crow. Today, I am introducing you to Sexteto Tabalá, a Colombian folk group whose African ancestry and diasporic connections are so tightly wound around their sound that such lineages and histories are synonymous with themselves in the same way a cat identifies with its own striped coat. Sexteto Tabalá boasts of playing the ONLY true form of Colombian music,* in that it is free from guitars and electric instruments, in addition to pulling from the rich and dearly specific past of their nation's heritage and their familial ties to rebellious maroons, and deploying only instruments that were available to sugarcane workers in centuries past; notably amongst them the marímbula, a plucked box instrument, inspired by African percussion tools, but which owes its origins to Cuba. Further, the sound of Sexteto Tabalá is largely credited to the influence of Cuban engineers hired to supervise the sugarcane industry in the early 20th century in an area of Colombia which had been granted its autonomy by the Spanish Crown since 1713, San Basilio de Palenque. In their off hours, these Cubans would play son montuno songs and teach them to the agricultural workers of the area, most of whom were still descendants of runaway slaves. Over time, these once Cuban sounds would acquire their own distinct character as they were adopted by the Palenque people and transformed into the particular hybrid of African diasporic sound and Caribbean proto-salsa known as son Palenquero, a style that invoked its practitioners' Angolan, Central, and East African roots, sung in a unique dialect Creole derived from Bantu, while remaining independent, flexible, and conspicuously unadorned with the extraneous din of modernity. Sexteto Tabalá hold themselves out as continuing the traditions of the style's best-recognized purveyors like Sexteto Habanero, while taking care to respectfully innovate on traditional workingman's songs when inspiration strikes with indisputable serendipity. Their LP
Reyes del Son Palenquero was recorded in San Basilio de Palenque but reissued by the Bogotá-based Palenque Records in 2016. Rhythmic inspiration that proudly carries the wealth of centuries of history and the debts owed to generations of pastoral workers, a burden as weighty as a mountain, which they hold aloft as if it were as light as a feather.
* I have no way of verifying this, and I'm not saying that I condone such an assessment, however, it is what they say about themselves, which for a band from such a culturally rich and musically inclined country as Colombia, these are really fighting words, and the unnecessarily antagonistic character of their self-assessment genuinely amuses me. Like, why do you have to be so savage, bro? Damn!
