Candombe

Candombe is played on a trio of pitched barrel drums - the high-pitched chico, the mid-range repique, and the low piano - each playing an independent, interlocking pattern. The tempo sits in the 120 to 140 BPM range, but the genre's hallmark is the elastic phrasing between the three drums, which feel as if they pull in slightly different directions. The music is designed to be walked to, not danced to in place; ensembles called cuerdas perform while moving through the streets of Montevideo. Voice and melody are secondary - candombe is fundamentally a percussion conversation.

Enslaved West and Central Africans brought to colonial Montevideo carried drum traditions that, by the 18th and 19th centuries, had coalesced into candombe in the port city's Afro-Uruguayan neighborhoods of Sur and Palermo. The annual Llamadas parade, held each January and February, became the genre's central public ritual. Twentieth-century musicians like Pedro Ferreira and later Ruben Rada brought candombe into popular song, fusing it with jazz, rock, and bossa. UNESCO inscribed candombe on its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2009.

Try to follow one drum at a time before listening to the whole - the chico keeps the steadiest pulse, the repique is the most improvisational, and the piano provides the low resolution. The slight rhythmic offsets between drums are intentional and create the feeling that the music is breathing. In recordings of street cuerdas, ambient sound - footsteps, crowd voices, distant traffic - is part of the texture rather than incidental.

Ruben Rada's 'Malisimo' (1979) fuses traditional candombe rhythm with rock and funk and is one of the most accessible entry points. For the unprocessed street version, recordings of the Llamadas parade circulate widely online.

Llamadas translates literally as 'calls' - the term carries a second meaning of the ancestral calls between family members separated by slavery, which gives the parade its emotional weight as well as its musical one.