Cuatro Piraguas started “La Cumbia del Jardinero” after a sleepless night and a small gardening episode at Villa Plagwitz in Leipzig, which suits a debut album called En vela, Spanish for a night spent awake. The quartet take their name from the dugout canoes of Latin America and the Caribbean, and work across Afro-Peruvian rhythm, Colombian Caribbean folklore and the music of Venezuela and Brazil. Celia Regina sings and plays cuatro, with Mauricio Vivas on accordion, guitar and cuatro, Thomas Campbell Tyler on bass and Felix Zehdnicker on percussion.

A year of live shows shaped the song, and the recording with their friend Max Gruener adds clarinet and trombone from Eldar Tsalikov and Marleen Dahms, plus backing vocals from friends. The band name two Colombian influences: Totó la Momposina, the singer from the river island of Mompox who died in May aged 85, and Cali-born songwriter Marta Gómez. The verses fill a gardener’s morning with small chores done with affection: coffee at the window, water against a dry spell, an ear for what each plant has to say. The chorus switches to labour, alternating between a gardener who works all day and a wheelbarrow that keeps rolling.

The band read that routine as a picture of their own debut: gardens and records both take time and care before anything flowers. En vela is due this autumn, and vinyl, CD and download pre-orders run through their crowdfunding page until 27 September. Two nights before it closes, they play a free gig at Kulturbar froelich & herrlich, beneath Leipzig’s Westflügel puppet theatre on Friday 25 September.

Stream “La Cumbia del Jardinero” HERE and support the release of En Vela through the band’s crowdfunding page at THIS LINK