Fantástico News!

By 1973, Lucha Reyes had already reached the peak of her career, and that summer she gets invited to perform in Chicago and at the renowned Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan. She still does not know that she will have to quit the stages forever that year, at the request of her doctors, who see her body deteriorating due to diabetes. But she now feels like an Ella Fitzgerald or a Nina Simone whose voice has acquired an unquestionable weight. Now she is listened to with respect and attention both in working-class alleys and in renowned theaters of the world”.

"Sensual”, her debut album, is one of the greatest gems of Venezuelan bolero. The backing of the Porfi Jiménez Orchestra and his arrangements made “Sensual” one of the most successful albums of its time. The selection of the twelve songs on the album was also a success. Although the years of the bolero's greatest splendor seemed to have passed, the bolero continued to spread throughout Latin America.

Before starting a fascinating artistic life that would earn her a star on Hollywood Boulevard, Yma Sumac was, in fact, Zoila Emperatriz Chávarry (1922 - 2008), a girl from the heights of Cajamarca (Perú) who boasted having had exotic birds as singing teachers. Since then, Yma understood that fiction would be useful not only to reinvent herself with the lavish originality that would make her the first Peruvian to arrive in Hollywood, but also to paint her country with myths and legends in a time that it was little more than a sketch for the world: an arcane and unknown country that deserved to be seen.

To talk about Grupo Alegria is to propose an approach to the origins of Andean psychedelic cumbia. It is a way to resume the time when big ‘chicha’ groups took over the capital and put the final soundtrack to an epoch of great hopes, passion and pain.

To arrive in Lima in the 70s. The smog, the traffic, the chaos, the slums, the shacks. It is not the panorama of one; it is the experience of thousands of migrants staying at the edge of a man-eating capital. It is their struggle not to be devoured. Any attempt to understand the place and the present is immortalized in vinyl recordings: the music that refers to work, the highlands, the arrival to the capital, is revered among dust clouds lifted by their feet in motion, their fingers pointing to the sky. Happiness and misery are danced on the same night, on the same dance floor no one knows whether to laugh or cry. An outdated and conservative part of Lima despises them for this, but they go on. They exist.

Almost four decades after Éxitos, éxitos, éxitos, the very poor living conditions around La Parada have not improved substantially, despite the glorification of individual initiatives and the status of  “small businesses”; that the State conferred upon ambulatory trade in the late eighties.