Grupo Niche continues Colombian education effort

By Timothy Pratt

Monday, May 19, 2003 | 8:24 a.m.

A few hours before his falsetto carried some of the most layered beats to hit the Strip in a long time Friday night in the Sevilla Club, Grupo Niche singer Charlie Cardona found himself in a cab after dinner at The Rio.

"Where are you from?' the cabbie asked.

"Colombia," Cardona answered.

"Do you like cocaine?" the cabbie continued.

Cardona, who is Christian and doesn't even drink, shrugged the comment off at the time. But he mentioned the story backstage after nearly two hours of filling the Sevilla's dance floor with a cross-section of the Las Vegas Valley's Latinos, who rarely sat throughout the after-midnight show.

For 22 years Grupo Niche has struggled to get the word out to the world about the staggering cultural diversity that Colombia has between its two coasts. And though the first Colombian salsa group to play Madison Square Garden has produced an album each year during those decades and been nominated for a Grammy, it would seem, Cardona said Friday night, that its work is not yet done.

"You feel stigmatized as a Colombian," he said. "It's such an extensive, rich nation, yet we all pay for the actions of a few," he said in Spanish.

Indeed, Jairo Varela, the man behind the group, who has written the lyrics and arrangements for the hundreds of songs in its repertoire, has paid dearly for the chaos created by his country's rogue armies, drug cartels, and corruption.

For receiving a check from a middle-level figure linked to the Cali drug cartel for around $7,000 to play at a party back in the '90s, Varela was accused of illicit enrichment and jailed in Cali for nearly a year. The Colombian government was engaged in a witch hunt at the time that some analysts have since said was mostly rigged to impress Washington, the source of millions in anti-drug money.

Varela, who stayed at his current home in Miami Friday night -- "I'm working on a new record," he said -- recalled those days over the phone on Sunday afternoon.

The 52-year-old, who often appears onstage to keep the beat with a cowbell, was cleared of all charges back in 1995. "I never understood why they had me in there," he said.

Nearly eight years later, Varela said the experience left its mark on him.

"Politicians are thankless," the bandleader said.

"Instead of supporting those of us who spend decades trying to show another side of Colombia -- its culture, its hard work -- they tear you down," he said.

But Varela's imprisonment -- which was met with 100,000 letters from Cali's barrios and elsewhere, where working class people hear Grupo Niche in the city's tropical heat while riding the bus, buying a loaf of bread, or cooking a sancocho at home -- did not stop the group.

Varela wrote a whole album behind bars, including a song about prison life and one, "Trial by Fire," addressed to the attorney general who had put him there.

But on Friday night many of those political songs, and others about the black culture of Colombia's Pacific coast, where Varela was born -- "niche" is slang for black -- were absent.

The focus was mostly on the group's infectious, danceable love songs, mixed in with a few of the anthems the group has written to its adopted hometown, Cali -- Colombia's second-largest city, a few hours inland from the Pacific.

Some of the tunes seemed to bring on that strange mix of joy and sadness Brazilians call saudade that being away from your homeland produces. After "Cali Pachanguero," a hymn Cali claims ever since its 1984 release, a woman with that city's trademark cinnamon-colored skin and tight curls leapt onstage and gave Cardona a teary kiss.

These songs have traveled easiest to the different Latin American countries Grupo Niche has visited and sold millions of records to over the years. And when natives of those countries come in search of a better life in the United States, the group follows.

Indeed, together there may well have been as many Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and others as there were Colombians at the Sevilla, located inside Desert Passage mall at Aladdin.

The pan-Latin crowd supported the argument that has been made for salsa being considered one of the few musical genres that has traveled to all of Latin America's diverse cultures, as rock has through the English-speaking world.

Niche's 13 members rocked the house, with loose trombone and timbale -- the instrument Tito Puente made famous -- solos, and a nonstop, 1 hour, 45-minute minute set.

The group has always been tight, and Friday was no exception. It occasionally broke from the Caribbean-influenced staccato that is salsa to the loopier but no less rhythmically complex black beats of Colombia's coasts.

Those beats will be on Niche's new album, Varela said, as he is composing tunes in Colombia's currulao and cumbia, a departure from salsa.

Unfortunately, the leader of Colombia's most famous band lives and works from outside the country, as the guerrillas that fight the government and buy arms with drug money and kidnappings began threatening him three years ago.

"They demanded that I pay them a certain amount of money, or I would be in danger," he said.

"You can't live in a country like that, where there's no guarantee of what might happen tomorrow."