Los Orangutanes

Hungary's number one and perhaps the only Latin American cumbia party band, Los Orangutanes, is unique in East-Central Europe. The band is made up of Hungarian, Peruvian and Uruguayan musicians from Anselmo Crew, Irie Maffia, Besh o droM, Ladánybene 27, Zuboly, and Manaky, among others. The group debuted on 16 December 2017 to a sold-out crowd and proved that this music is impossible to listen to sitting down. A house party atmosphere is guaranteed!

Cumbia is originally a Colombian musical genre that spread to other continents after its conquest of Central and South America, and like a virus, infected some Hungarian musicians. Thus, Hungarian cumbia was born, and its first representative was the band Los Orangutanes, or The Orangutans. The band was born from the passion of Szabolcs Árkosi, Márton Élő, Zsolt Krecsmáry, Iván Tabeira, Attila Herr, Alex Torres, Dávid Szarvas, Ákos Pásztor, Ádám Meggyes and Szabolcs Bognár.

The "ancient cumbia" was played with percussion and flutes. According to legend, in the early 20th century a cargo ship carrying accordions to Argentina sank off the Colombian coast, and the water washed ashore many instruments, which the locals picked up and began to use. So much so that the accordion later became one of the main instruments of the genre. In the 1940s, traditional instruments were replaced by the big band sound of the time, and thanks to recordings, cumbia began to spread throughout the world. Since then, everyone has added a little bit of their own culture to cumbia, and today there are mulatto, gangster, hipster, electro, traditional and dub versions.