San Jacinto, up in the Montes de María on Colombia’s Caribbean side, had a dancer called Magdalena Ruiz. The gaiteros remembered her white smile and the grace in the way she moved, and how a gathering lifted the moment she arrived: the musicians, the dancers, the drinking, the young and the old. Adolfo Pacheco remembered her too: “Si no llegaba Magdalena, se enfriaba de la gaita el son”. If she failed to arrive, the gaitas went cold. “Ahora la evoco en mi cantar”, he sings, now I call her up in my song.

Those gatherings take the shape of a rueda de cumbia. The musicians stand in the middle and the women dance around them, candles in hand, long skirts sweeping the ground. Caja and gaita set the pace and the circle follows. When Magdalena arrived, that circle opened for her.

“Magdalena Ruiz” opens Madre Cumbia, the album Los Gaiteros de San Jacinto, Fruko and Carmelo Torres release on 20 October through the San Diego label Bad Vibes Good Friends. Ten songs, most of them from the sabanera repertoire: three by Andrés Landero, one Torres wrote himself, the rest from writers like Rafael Pérez and Betty Ochoa.

Los Gaiteros have carried the gaitas of San Jacinto since the 1940s. Fruko was the bassist and producer who ran the golden era of Discos Fuentes. Carmelo Torres took the accordion straight from Andrés Landero, his teacher and the man who made cumbia sabanera. Between them they hold most of what happened to cumbia in the last eighty years, and this is the first time the three of them have been in a studio together.

They recorded in Bogotá with nine musicians in the room, Rory Morison producing and Gabriel Torregrosa directing. On “Magdalena Ruiz” the melody belongs to Iván Salcedo‘s gaita corta, the short flute a San Jacinto cumbia is built on, and Carmelo Torres answers on accordion while Fruko holds the bass underneath. Behind them, caja, conga, guacharaca and maracas keep the rueda turning, and Rafael Castro sings the lead.

Listen to “Magdalena Ruiz” and pre-order Madre Cumbia HERE