BUYEPONGO
Photo by Piero F. Giunti
Buyepongo, originally founded in 2008 as a folkloric cumbia band, is a Los Angeles-based quintet that makes contemporary pan-Latin music in the style they intriguingly call “buyangú”—an eclectic but cohesive mezcla of global beats and spicy flavors influenced by their California home base as well as the band members’ travels to Central and South America. Appropriately, Buyepongo loosely defined means to ‘cause a ruckus’ and this merry band of musical noisemakers does exactly that, deploying a bewildering array of riff-heavy sounds and expertly blended influences that work equally well in intimate or modest settings as they do in front of large festival audiences or at cultural and municipal institutions. The band is part of a larger pool of young Latin underground artists from the area that have common immigrant backgrounds and are all up on the musical roots of their parents’ generation but are busy doing their own thing, innovating and moving forward into uncharted territory while remaining acutely aware of where they come from.