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Chuck Prophet takes a crack at cumbia on 'Wake the Dead'

Chuck Prophet with ¿Qiensave?
Kory Thibeault
/
Courtesy of the artists
Chuck Prophet with ¿Qiensave?

Chuck Prophet is proof you should always stick around for the afterparty.

Prophet was playing a gig at Make-Out Room, in San Francisco, and he stuck around for the venue's cumbia night. He immediately fell in love with the music.

Prophet says it was one of the pleasurable things that kept him company during the COVID lockdown, while he was recovering from lymphoma.

Eventually, he connected with Northern California cumbia outfit ¿Qiensave?, and after jamming with them at a few shows, Prophet recruited the band to play on his new album, Wake the Dead.

In today's session, Prophet talks about the immediate connection he had with ¿Qiensave? and how he learned that cumbia has more in common with punk than you might think.

Set List

  • "Wake the Dead"
  • "Betty's Song"
  • "Sally Was a Cop"
  • "Freckle Song"

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod and Will Loftus. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams and our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson.

World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).