La Noche

On the night before the wedding, a bunch of us went to the "artists" district of Barranco to catch a show at the La Noche club.   

This is the same club at which I saw Magaly Solier, Masacre, and Area 7 perform in August of last year.  Playing on this Thursday night was an old school mate of Carla's at the school in San Felipe, Lucho Quezquezana (known to old classmates as "Keke").   

Arriving a tad early, we found a table on the second floor balcony, ordered some water and a bottle of pisco, and settled down to chat and await the 11 o'clock show, which -in typical hora peruana (Peruvian time)- started promptly about 45 minutes late.

 

 

Quezquezana has made a longterm project of gathering musicians from diverse traditions and instruments and bringing them together to play Peruvian music and his own compositions, which draw heavily from jazz and Andean musical traditions. (I noticed that one of Quezquezana's percussionists was the same bald guy who was Solier's musical arranger and percussionist.)   On this night his ensemble was performing a set consisting of his latest album Kuntur ("condor" in Quechua).

The music was good, but I think that to really appreciate it one must be able to watch the musicians play the instruments and switch from one instrument to the next, particularly someone like Quezquezana, who himself plays over 20 wind, string, and percussion instruments.   Unfortunately, he is so popular that we were unable to consistently view the stage without craning our necks or staring between people's legs at the stage below us on the ground floor.

Conscious that we were to stay up late on the following evening, and that some of our group did have to work in the morning, we decided to call it a night around 2 a.m. and went home to get some sleep.