"¡Cumbia, Salsa, Son!" out today on Putumayo Discovery!
A celebration of festive Afro-Latin styles from around the world!
¡Cumbia, Salsa, Son! celebrates a variety of festive Afro-Latin styles, from their roots in the Caribbean basin to the dancefloors of the world! This collection brings together ten infectious cumbia, salsa, son, merengue, and champeta tracks, performed by up and coming artists from Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, and Costa Rica alongside unexpected voices from France, Iceland, England, and Canada.
Along the way, you'll hear a Cuban tres guitar trading lines with a big band horn section, the heir of a Colombian accordion dynasty passing his legacy to new generations, and a Vancouver keyboardist chasing the psychedelic sound of 1970s Amazonian cumbia. Whatever the style or the starting point, every track here shares the same goal: to get you up and moving!
¡Cumbia, Salsa, Son! is available for download on our website, iTunes, Qobuz, & Bandcamp with streaming on Apple, Spotify, Qobuz, Deezer, Pandora and other major platforms.
FEATURING (click for info):
• La Cumbia Chicharra (France)
• Pedro Luis Ferrer (Cuba)
• REBOLU (Colombia / USA)
• Orchestra Mambo International (UK)
• Cody Larsen (Canada)
• Pablo Ugalde (Costa Rica)
• Eleazar Joshué (Venezuela)
• Arzalez (Mexico / USA)
• Tómas R. Einarsson with Los Bomboneros (Iceland)
• Yeison Landero (Colombia)
Musician Spotlight
Pedro Luis Ferrer (Cuba)
Featured on ¡Cumbia, Salsa, Son!
Pedro Luis Ferrer is a Cuban composer, guitarist, and singer born in Yaguajay, in what was then Las Villas province and is now Sancti Spíritus. Raised in a family devoted to popular and festive poetry, including his great-grandfather Eufemio Pérez, his father Rodolfo, and his uncle Raúl Ferrer, he began performing with amateur groups in the mid-1960s, joined the rock band Los Dada in 1969, and started his professional career as a trovador (troubadour) in 1973. His music draws on son, trova, guaracha, and changüí, alongside his own compositions for guitar and orchestral formats. Since the late 1990s he has often performed and recorded with his daughter, Lena Ferrer, who contributes vocals, hand percussion, and marímbula.
“Papurrico” appears on Ferrer’s 2026 album, La Bunga, recorded, mixed, and mastered by Ferrer himself in Havana and Miami. Built on teasing repetition, the song turns a single word into a stand-in for something left unsaid, delivered with the playful wit that runs through much of his songwriting. Ferrer sings flirtatiously, “Papurrico, you wicked girl / Papurrico, you breathe it into my ear / Papurrico, so delicious / Papurrico, your glowing embers.”
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Reggae Around the World
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/ Comments·2
Hi Erik. Yes, we wanted the whole album to be just cumbia, but we couldn't get enough tracks together. These days, our process is a little different than it used to be. Now, we are constantly looking for songs we like and go out and licensing them, then we use the pool of songs we have licensed and try to fit 10 of them together into themes that make sense. In the old days, we would come up with the theme first and go out and look for songs that fit that theme. Also, we don't license songs from major record labels anymore, like Sony,. Universal., Warner, etc. We found them too difficult to work with and they did not value the types of artists that we are interested in enough to make them motivated to work with us. Now, we mostly work directly with artists or small labels that control their own rights and who can really benefit from the relationship with Putumayo.
Ah finally a cumbia-themed album! Love it! I hope you consider compiling more albums focussed on a specific musical style!