Cali Pachanguero turns 40
, the exquisiteness of a song written in 1984 by maestro Jairo Varela Martínez, which became the emblem of the people of Cali and a must-have for Colombians anywhere in the world.
It’s a special birthday that deserved a big party, so Grupo Niche made a new version and a new video that celebrates in style the pride of a theme that was born great.
Luis Araque, vocalist of Grupo Niche, assured that Cali Pachanguero “is a song that The popular anthem of Valle del Cauca and the city of Cali has returned, who embraced and adopted Grupo Niche as his son. We all grew up listening to Cali Pachanguero. “At the first two notes, people know that it is Cali Pachanguero.”
For his part, another of the vocalists of Grupo Niche, Fito Echeverría, expressed what it means for him to sing one of Colombia’s signature songs in another part of the world: “It is the identity that this sauce and this group have. This group with this song marks a story, because I think that “This song is among the best salsa songs in the world.”
The song Cali Pachanguero is number 7 in the top 15 of the best salsa songs in history, according to Billboard.
The song is composed by maestro Jairo Varela, who did the song in a hotel in New York, after feeling the absence of the city of Cali. For this reason, the piece fully describes the capital of the Valley, narrated by someone who is far away and wants to return home.
“At first it was very local, but it got into different corners of the world. We see people who start to cry, people who hug their relatives in a corner of Europe, in a corner of the United States, since they have not returned for many years, without seeing their relatives,” he says. Alejandro Íñigo, vocalist of Grupo Niche.
Today, 40 years later, the teacher José Aguirre, director of Grupo Niche since 1992, treated the subject with special care to make a very respectful version of the original. Now, injecting a mambo.
“It is a classic that is very complicated to play, because people already know it that way. Let’s say In the structure I only changed one thing: we made a mambo and returned to the other part; That is to say, people will think when they hear it the first time that some sounds were cancelled, like that of Barranquilla Puerta de Oro and that, but no, in the second part it comes,” explains Aguirre.
The song now has two versions and, as a novelty, is also recorded in English.
“First, the version that makes Moncho Santana in 1984, which was a success at the Cali Fair, on the album No Hay Quinto Malo. Then, they do it in the movie Salsa, in English,” recalls Óscar Jaime Cardozo, director of the Planeta Salsa Museum.
Cali Pachanguero is a song that in these 40 years has earned the sense of belonging, pride and infinite loyalty of its audience.
The Niche Group has two Latin Grammys and one American Grammytoday he gives us a new version of the song that stopped being from Cali to become part of the world, reaffirming that Grupo Niche belongs to everyone, the heritage of Colombian music and that… “Cali is Cali, gentlemen, the rest is loma” .
