Joropo is an ever-evolving style of folk music and dance found in Venezuela that fuses strains of music from the nation’s African and European past to form a distinctly Venezuelan música criolla (“creole” music). Colombian-Venezuelan musician Claudia Calderon’s website offers an introduction to joropo and provides excerpts of different styles of joropo music.
COUNTRY: Venezuela
KEY INSTRUMENTS: Bandola, Cuatro, Harp (arpa llanera), Maracas
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A bandola is a stringed instrument with a pear-shaped body that’s a close cousin of the mandolin and is a staple instrument in the South American countries of Colombia and Venezuela. A mandolin player can convert that instruments to one of the three kinds of bandola, a “bandola oriental,” by manipulating the bridge and adding four nylon strings to the mandolin’s customary four. See the other two kinds of bandola in action: the four-stringed bandola llanera, and the bandola andina colombiana, which can have a variety of configurations of strings.
COUNTRY Colombia, Venezuela
KEY GENRES: Joropo
Marrabenta is a popular form of Mozambican dance music. The genre originated in the ’30s and ’40s while the Portuguese still ruled Mozambique and the older local bands tried to simulate traditional African dance rhythms using Portuguese instruments. Today’s marrabanta bands primarily play electronic instruments like guitars and keyboards and have brought many global genres into their music, like blues and reggae.
A fun fact from Wikipedia’s entry on Marrabenta: “According to vocalist Dilon Djindje, Marrabenta is named for the energetic performances he delivered as he toured across Mozambique. The intensity and vitality of his shows led audiences to believe that he was breaking the emotional limits of those in attendance. The musicians who played this music came to be called arrabenta, a Portugese term for ‘break it.'”
