frequencies

by josh kun
Global Lima

PERUVIANS CALL THE cliffs above the highway that dumps Lima into the Pacific La Costa Verde, the green coast, even though there's barely any green left.

When the surfers down below look up at the city, they mainly see towering erosion walls of deep brown earth, articulate and forbidding reminders that just beyond the crests are 7 million people and taxis that never stop honking.

Built into one swath of hillside is an urban warning to the waves: a three-story outdoor mall where you can buy Incan wool sweaters and then eat at Tony Roma's. It's a testament to the bumpy drive toward modernity that Lima has been pursuing since 1990, a pursuit that has filled this city – overflowing with migrants from the Andean provinces – with 24-hour Shell stations, Burger Kings, and KFC delivery boys on sputtering mopeds.

During these winter months, Lima is – as Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa describes it at the beginning of his just-published Letters to a Young Novelist – "gray Lima." It's the only reference Vargas Llosa's hometown gets in the book, leaving Lima a city of cold grays, its cement streets wrapped in blankets of never-lifting fog. The gray of the city clouds its true colors, though: 24 districts of urban difference where Eurofied criollos clash with indios and buildings jump colonial centuries in muted yellows and aqua blues.

The 19th century weighs heaviest on Barranco, Lima's after-hours district of choice, where the history of Peruvian music – from traditional huayno to techno-cumbia – pours out of crumbling bars steeped in bohemian romance. I recently sat in one of them with Gian Marco, Lima's local pop hero and the Latin world's most in-demand new composer, who on every Friday night for the better part of the '90s, in a bar just around the corner, sat on a stool with his acoustic guitar and sang for limeños while they drank their pisco and bottles of cusqueña. Now he plays to sold-out crowds of 30,000, and when he walks through Barranco, young Peruvian girls cup their mouths to keep from screaming. After five albums in Latin America and a stint as a host on a kids' game show, Marco has moved to Miami and released the Emilio Estefan-produced A Tiempo, his first go at U.S. audiences.

Marco is that rare member of the Latin pop world who can balance his roots with the commercial demands of a global market. He has written songs for Mandy Moore and Marc Anthony and yet remains a deferential student of Peruvian music, dabbling in Afro-Peruvian styles and Peru-ified nueva trova and even releasing an album of classic waltz-tinged musica criolla. A Tiempo is the perfect offspring of the Lima-Miami mix, a sparkling showcase of tropicalized Latin pop balladry that knows that before you can go global, you have to come from somewhere.

The album's radio-perfect hit "Se Me Olvido" is also its most secretly Peruvian song, a sunny broken-heart diatribe built atop the rhythms of a cajon – the wooden box that's the percussive building block of Afro-Peruvian music. The cajon is all over Espíritu Vivo, the latest from the great Afro-Peruvian singer Susana Baca, whose world is centered far from Barranco in Chorillos, a black neighborhood on the outskirts of Lima. Though Espíritu is certainly more avowedly Peruvian in style than A Tiempo, Baca is also interested in interpreting local music through global idioms, lending her warm, elegant voice to songs by Johnny Mercer, Björk, and Caetano Veloso, alongside Peruvian composers Chabuca Grande and Mario Lazo. Peruvian musicians are also on board, as are downtown New York favorites John Medeski and Marc Ribot.

Before he killed himself in Lima in 1969, the Peruvian novelist José María Arguedas wrote that Peru consisted of two nations, the Quechua and the criollo. Espíritu Vivo continues Baca's quest to prove that there is a third that still remains invisible, the black nation descended from African slaves brought to Peru by Spanish and Portuguese colonists. For Arguedas, Peru's ethnic nations were "walled in," separated by borders he was determined to break down without losing his Indian identity. On Espíritu, Baca pulls off a similar move, breaking down borders between genres and traditions without ever relinquishing her blackness.

Marco comes from the nation both Baca and Arguedas position themselves against – he has Italian parents, a father who's a famous singer, a mother who's a famous actress. So his task has been a different one: to find out how to open international pop up to Afro-Peru, how to create a conversation between Miami and the sounds of the charango and the quena that Arguedas held so sacred (in them, he once wrote, "I shall hear everything"). Marco may represent what Arguedas vowed to never become – an export of acculturated Peru – but A Tiempo chips away at Peru's national walls in its own way, from the top down, bringing the many colors of the gray city to a world that has never heard it before.