Yeison Landero at Cedar Cultural Center, Minneapolis (July 16, 2025)

The Cedar Cultural Center has a Summer at the Cedar series, come rain or shine. Always scheduled for outdoors, this second in the series moved indoors due to the heavy rain over the last day. It was well worth heading in, as Colombian native Yeison Landero brought his cumbia band to Minneapolis.

Cumbia music is a collective term for some musical and folk dancing traditions originating from the mix if indigenous people of South America, Africans, and Europeans during colonial times. It often has drum & flute, along with supporting brass and percussion. Yeison Landero, a San Jacinto, Colombia native, has added accordion to the mix. Like his grandfather Andrés, the “King of cumbia”, Yeison (“Heir to cumbia”) has become a leader in the genre. His first solo record, La Epoca De Oro, was released in 2021. The band (all backing members were in multi-colored Yeison Landero shirts and cowboy hats) came on as a sextet (accordion/vocals, drums, three percussion players, and bass) and Landero’s bright sounding accordion took over. This was lively and very quickly a portion of the audience was on the main floor dancing.

Landero did as much yelling and pumping up the crowd as he did singing, and that really worked. While his accordion provided the central musical hook, those four percussion players made for a rich beat that consistently provided the audience dancers any guide they might need. They also were all mic’ed up to provide backing vocals or encouraging shouts as needed. In the first real break, Landero asked in Spanish if there were people from various countries, and there were cheers for Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela and more. Back into the music, the band continued the high energy singing. A song about Colombia followed, and one of the drummers switched to flute, which added a nice harmony with the accordion. Also, much like any number of guitarists might, Landero switched between two different accordions between songs.

It was fun to watch the doors open every so often, see a new small group of people come in, stand for a moment, then invariably start dancing or even quickly head to the main part of the dance floor. What had started as a reasonable, if small-ish crowd, was soon a pretty hefty audience enjoying the cumbia tunes. How upbeat was this? At one point the bass player was running in place and it seemed to me that he could barely keep the beat. And that was before the purposeful sped up tempo to end the song. Noche de cumbia had a lot of cymbal and Landero whipping up some of the dancers immediately in front of the stage. (A translation app suggested that at one point, Landero said, “God, move your hips woman, this is for you”.)

A (comparatively) slower song followed and let band and audience groove for a little while, with Landero on extended accordion solos between verses and several percussion highlights. A well-deserved, small break gave us a band rep with a small statement in English about the fact that this was the band’s first time in Minnesota, and that they had been on tour for 15 days and had 15 more to go. He also mentioned that Minneapolis exists on the global music scene because of the Cedar and its mission of bringing the best of world music here. The band got back into it, with a bit of call & response with Landero and the rest of the band and also got us more of the flute.

Another break in the action had Landero telling the history of cumbia music, and even I got the gist of this genre coming together from the mix of different people and cultures interacting and building a shared sound. That ended with a shouted “Esta noche, viva la cumbia” before launching into a high-spirited song with a lot of flute, and the first without accordion, as Landero sang and spoke throughout the very fast paced number. That varied and layered percussion plus bass was really key to the success of many of the songs, as they both filled the large space and gave accordion and occasional flute the chance to really fly as counterpoint. Our first crowd sing along was fairly successful with an explosive finish to the song from the band. Late in the set, one of the percussion players entered the crowd, forming a bit of a dance circle and drawing great cheers. Finishing the main set strong, the band left the stage and the audience broke into a chant of “otra” and Landero and band did indeed come on for an encore. A straight up cumbia banger, all of the best elements of the evening were on full display with a breakneck speed and singers barely keeping pace. We got a bunch of audience members from a number of those different countries up on the stage dancing and it was a pretty brilliant moment. As the band was finally done, they left the Minneapolis crowed happily exhausted.