Benefits Creative Alliance

Casual attire

Tickets $18

Get ready for one hell of a wild Afro-Champeta dance party, direct from Bogota! “There are very few guarantees in life. But one of them must — must! — be that as soon as you hear “Made in Tribu Baharú,” you’ll start moving. (I promise.)”- NPR Music Hailing from Bogotá, Colombia, Tribu Baharú is an afro-champeta music crew who are winning over audiences here in the U.S., one city at a time. Considered the most important Afro-Champeta band on the international scene, their live shows , punctuated by lilting guitar work and nearly acrobatic singers, are sweat-drenched, dance parties. Champeta is a term that refers to a knife used by fishermen to remove fish scales. In recent years the term has come to describe an Afro-Colombia style of music born on Colombia’s Atlantic Coast. Champeta originated In the 1970s and ’80s when traveling West African sailors docking in Colombian ports like Cartagena and Barranquilla, carried along LPs of Congolese soukous, as well as Ghanaian and Nigerian highlife bands. The Atlantic coast of Colombia, which has huge populations who are descendants of slaves and Maroon groups, heard themselves in these sounds. Soon, Colombian artists began soaking up the lilting guitars and big, jazzy harmonies, and all those influences started commingling in the “picó” (sound system) culture of Colombia’s ports. That is how a modern, dazzlingly energetic and decidedly African champeta was born.