Cumbia Ya ! concerts

About Cumbia Ya !

Cumbia Ya! is a Paris-based eleven-piece orchestra devoted to Colombian cumbia and its adjoining dance forms. The compelling reason to see them live is unusually concrete: the group has worked regularly at Paris’s Studio de l’Ermitage since its first appearance there on March 3, 2007, developing a dance-band repertoire through a long-running local residency instead of occasional revival sets.

Built in a Paris club

The ensemble took shape around the Studio de l’Ermitage in Paris’s 20th arrondissement, a venue whose programme centers jazz and musiques du monde. La Terrasse dates Cumbia Ya!’s arrival there to March 3, 2007 and describes a combo formed around cumbia, focused at first on the breadth of Colombian classics. A documented early eleven-player lineup included vocalists and clarinetists Soledad Romero and Augusto Ramos; saxophonists Roland Seilhes and Tullia Morand; trombonists Ramos and Olivier Caron; trumpeters Julien Matrot and Xavier Bornens; percussionists David Zerathe, Ali Fadelane, and Monica Lopez; plus François Piriou on baby bass.

A compact catalog, centered on one album

The key recorded statement is La Mecánica del Porro, released April 28, 2014 through Tarambana. It runs 13 tracks and 57 minutes, making room for a full orchestra’s approach where the live band’s percussion, reeds, brass, voice, and bass can register across an album-length program. Its song list includes “Carmen de Bolívar,” “La Gorra,” “En la Madrugada,” “Danza Negra,” “Ola de Agua,” “La Buchaca,” and “El Tablón.” The record supplies the clearest entry point into the group’s recorded identity: Colombian popular-memory material reframed through a band whose press descriptions place jazz alongside traditional music.

That framing matters because the orchestra’s repertory operates as a particular kind of revival: La Terrasse links it to the legacy of Lucho Bermúdez while describing a formula that has grown beyond those reference points. L’Officiel des spectacles similarly hears the group through early-jazz influence and Bermúdez’s inheritance, with older traditions shaped into a contemporary orchestral cumbia. The musical change from source material to Cumbia Ya!’s version therefore lies in ensemble scale and arrangement: horns and clarinets join tambora, timbales, congas, alegre, maracas, and baby bass, a lineup documented in a French Ministry of Culture festival program.

The next recorded activity arrives as singles. “Puras Mentiras” appeared in 2025, followed by “Motor y Motivo,” dated April 10, 2025 on the artist’s Apple Music page and listed there as the latest release. These tracks signal a return to recording after the long interval following La Mecánica del Porro, while the catalog still points listeners back to the 2014 album as the substantial body of work. For a prospective attendee, that imbalance favors a concert-first understanding of Cumbia Ya!: the archive is lean; the continuing project is stage-centered.

A residency made for dancing

The live case begins with scale. Cumbia Ya! performs as an eleven-musician orchestra, with tambours and clarinet specifically named by La Terrasse as central to its dance-floor invitation. The same account says the group has continued working from the Studio de l’Ermitage through a regular residency since 2007. That amounts to almost twenty years with one room as a working base. The venue sits at 8 rue de l’Ermitage in Paris’s 20th arrondissement and presents jazz and world-music programming; its published listings show Cumbia Ya! there on March 21, May 30, July 5, and September 5 across 2025–26 records. The opened venue materials establish a recurring club engagement, though they provide no verified capacity figure.

The next chapter

As of August 7, 2026, “Motor y Motivo” remains Cumbia Ya!’s latest listed release, following the 2025 single “Puras Mentiras.” The calendar continues the familiar Paris pattern: Studio de l’Ermitage has already listed a September 5, 2026 appearance. CrowdMate’s upcoming dates extend that return to Saturday, November 7, 2026, and Saturday, December 5, 2026, both at Studio de l’Ermitage in Paris. Expect the useful through-line of this band’s history: a full acoustic orchestra playing Colombian-rooted dance music in the venue where its collective language developed.

Start with these three

Start with “Mi Pueblo” for the group’s most widely surfaced track; “Danza Negra” for a six-minute album cut; and “Carmen de Bolívar” for a direct route into La Mecánica del Porro’s 2014 repertoire.

Sources

1. Cumbia Ya ! creuse le fertile sillon de la musique colombienne — La Terrasse
2. Concert Cumbia Ya! le 5 Juillet 2025 - Studio de l'Ermitage — L’Officiel des spectacles
3. Programme du festival — Ministère de la Culture
4. La Mecánica del Porro — Apple Music
5. Studio de l'Ermitage - Paris 20e — L’Officiel des spectacles