Combo Tezeta: 'Ritmo Interestelar'

The Sunday Music Drop is a weekly radio series hosted by the KQED weekend news team. In each segment, we feature a song from a local musician or band with an upcoming show and hear about what inspires their music.

Combo Tezeta is an East Bay band that plays cumbia music inspired by Peruvian psychedelic rock from the 1960s and 1970s.

Danny Snyder, from Berkeley, plays both the guitar and organ for the band. Abraham Aguilar is from Hercules and plays the bass. In the early 2000s, Snyder decided to start playing a style of music called surf rock, which incorporates electric guitars imitating the sound of waves crashing.

“And at the same time, Abraham and his friends also decided to start playing surf rock,” Snyder says. “Even though I’m quite a bit older, we were in the same scene, and we became good friends early on.”

Snyder, who’s in his late 50s, says that many people at his age would be hanging up their guitars while he feels like he’s just getting started. The rest of the band members are in their mid-30s. Eventually, he and Aguilar’s friends all decided to switch from playing surf rock to Latin music in cumbia.

“The transition for us came from listening to two albums in particular,” Aguilar says. “One of them is by a band from Mexico City called Sonido Gallo Negro and a compilation album called ‘The Roots of Chicha.’”

Traditional cumbia music uses brass instruments and an accordion, which Snyder says gives the music more of a folk feel to it.

“In the early to mid-sixties, rock and roll music was filtering down to Peru, and it mixed in with the cumbias that they were playing there, which had filtered down from Columbia and all mixed together,” he says. “It created a new sound that kind of exploded.”

Snyder says once the band was exposed to the “Roots of Chicha” and Sonido Gallo Negro, they felt more confident and incorporated surf rock into the music.

“Because we played surf music, which is an instrumental guitar style, at least the way we played it, we’re able to incorporate the instrumental guitar leads and melodies throughout the song,” he says. “Even if there’s singing going on, we interweave that.”

Snyder says that what separated that style of music from what Combo Tezeta was doing before was the fact that it was designed to make people dance. Aguilar says that at the end of the day, “you just want to produce something cool, something fun.”

The band’s members also include Franklin Aguilar, Jonathan Rodriguez, Tony Bald, Santiago Ruiz, and Cesar Flores.

If you’d like to hear Combo Tezeta live, the band will be performing at Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland on Nov. 23. To hear past episodes of the Sunday Music Drop, click here.