Select audiences are currently obsessed with alternative adult contemporary easy listening; consider it the Great American Songbook for Generation X and elder millennials. Bands including Khruangbin, Glass Beams, Menahan Street Band and Surprise Chef are making music informed by worldbeat, ‘70s funk, jazz and soul, but refracted through a sensibility that comes with having spent one’s teens and 20s listening to hip-hop, punk rock, and alternative music of all stripes. This format for grownups, AAC, is all those things and none of those things combined, which makes it so intriguing and fresh sounding.
And that brings us to Los Mirlos. Formed in Moyobamba, Peru, in 1972, Los Mirlos (The Blackbirds) have been has putting out cumbia tinged with funk, soul and jazz-rock since the 1970s — a prodigious 33 records, plus a 2022 documentary, La Danza de Los Mirlos. If ever a band belonged in the AAC canon without even meaning to, it’s Los Mirlos.
With their surfy, psychedelic cumbia amalgamation, copious output, and Rolodex of past members, Los Mirlos have stuck it out this whole time doing what they love, and that tenacity and passion are now being rewarded. They’re celebrated as a major musical influence in their native Peru, whose natural sound palette is an abiding feature of Los Mirlos’ music: Most songs start with a bird whistle, as an homage to the band members’ Peruvian Amazonia origins.
Los Mirlos are on an album anniversary tour commemorating one of their early releases, 1975’s Los Charapas de Oro, which was remastered and re-released in 2018 and helped bring the band to the attention of a certain maturing generational cohort up north.
With people today sporting ’70s Zamrock band tees and listening to time-traveling global music apps like Radiooooo, it turns out that the smirky hipsters and petulant audiophiles — which many of us are — were on to something in their Internet-enabled quest for music that might have otherwise escaped their notice. Whether age spurs people to seek out new (to them) culture or solidify their bad taste, one thing is certain: surf-psych cumbia will live forever.
Los Mirlos play the Miami Beach Bandshell 8pm Wednesday, April 9th. instagram.com/losmirlos ~ Tim Moffatt
