The band Orquestra Pacífico Tropical has had at least 19 different members over the years, and at any given time there are at least 10 people playing on stage.
David “Papi” Fimbres, who founded the band with Carlos Segovia, has been a drummer in a number of Northwest bands over the years and an essential part of Portland’s music scene.
We talk to Fimbres and hear band members perform cumbia music in our studio.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. For the last 14 years, the Portland band Orquestra Pacífico Tropical, or OPT, has brought infectious cumbia dance grooves to audiences around the Northwest. Cumbia started in Colombia before spreading all around Latin America and the U.S., but there wasn’t too much of a live cumbia scene here before OPT. The band, now 11 members strong, recently put out their third album. It’s called “El Poder.” They joined us in studio for a performance and interview.
We started with “Cumbia Locura,” a song from their new album.
[“Cumbia Locura” by Orquestra Pacífico Tropical playing, performed live in studio]
Miller: Amazing. “Cumbia Locura” from the new Orquestra Pacífico Tropical album “El Poder.”
Papi, can you introduce us to the members of the band?
David “Papi” Fimbres: Of course. On vocals and bongos is my lovely wife, Shana.
Shana Lindbeck: Hi. Hola.
Fimbres: Shana “Azucar” Lindbeck. And to her left, we have Tony Ramirez on guitar and occasional conga.
Tony Ramirez: Nice to meet y’all.
Fimbres: And on accordion and percussion, we have Andy Manla.
Andy Manla: Hello.
Fimbres: And all the way to his far left, we have Ryan Wiggans on guitar and trumpet.
Ryan Wiggans: Hello.
Fimbres: We’re gonna jump back to the second row because there’s 11 of us. All the way to the back left corner is Paul Matonis on clarinet and percussion. Then we have Jason Elliot on the trombone and a mega cowbell. He’s got his cowbell move now. It’s pretty wild. It’s amazing. [Laughter] It’s really amazing, honestly. And then we have Victor Paul Nash in the middle with trumpet and percussion as well.
We have Edward Matonis Bubl on keys, euphonium, which is also known as a baritone, and percussion as well, and trumpet. I mean, this man plays everything.
Edward Bubl: Hello.
Fimbres: Do you play drums too?
Bubl: A little bit.
Fimbres: Oh! And the anchor, we have Leb Borgerson on bass.
Leb Borgerson: Hello.
Fimbres: And then we have Ana on congas, percussion and vocals.
Ana Rodrigues: Hola.
Fimbres: Ana Rodriguez, my bad. And I’m Papi Fimbres.
Miller: All right, on percussion as well. You grew up in Los Angeles, came to Portland in 1999, and it was a while before you and the guitarist Carlos Segovia decided to start a cumbia band. What was the spark?
Fimbres: The spark was we had a DJ night at a defunct bar called Tiga. We had a night called Double Platinum Latinum, and we would just DJ cumbias, because I grew up with cumbias. And moving to Portland, there’s not a lot of Brown people here. And now I have so many Brown friends it’s amazing. But moving here, I was really missing my culture. So I just told Carlos, I was like, wouldn’t it be crazy if we had a cumbia band, and who does that? And this was 15 years ago. This was so long ago. Like cumbia wasn’t even that cool. Now cumbia is really synonymous now with just a genre. Everyone knows what cumbia is now, which I think is really incredible and awesome, and there’s so many subgenres. But we wanted to go old school and do a big super group, like an Orquestra, and that’s how it came to be.
Miller: What do you remember about the way people responded early on? Because you’re saying it was a very white city, less so now, and that cumbia was less well known. So did people respond immediately or was it like an education campaign?
Fimbres: I would say, honestly, it’s right down the middle. People responded immediately because a lot of friends were like … I mean, that’s how Tony joined the band. He’s like, you need me in your band, bro.
Miller: Tony, you saw them as a fan and then just said…
Ramirez: That’s true.
Miller: … put me in?
Ramirez: I was a fan. Yeah, I moved here about 2012, and I showed up at shows, and I was just dancing, from LA. I was like, same boat, just years later. I’m pretty sure I wrote them a message, whatever the social media was at the time, and I said, “you guys need me to be in your band,” just because I was a big old nerd about it, diving into the history and whatnot. And then we met at a bar, probably argued a little bit, and then we became great friends. [Laughter] But yeah, and then here I am jumping from fan to guitar, in the band now, and percussion, and all that good stuff.
Miller: Edward, what about you? Did you grow up with cumbia?
Bubl: No. Kind of around the same time Papi was with Carlos and DJing, oddly enough, I got into cumbia from a colleague at a school that I worked with. And then my brother and I started playing cumbia, and some of these original cumbia tracks from Peru and Colombia, at the Jack London bar at open mic. It was kind of crazy and then…
Fimbres: What year was that?
Bubl: That was around … It was two years before OPT.
Fimbres: So, 2013.
Bubl: Yeah. And then, you and I were already friends.
Fimbres: Oh! We started in ‘12, so it was 2010. Oh my goodness, we’re old!
Bubl: It was really early. And then we realized that we’re both listening and liking cumbia, and we’re like, well, you needed the horn section. [Laughter] And back then I only played a trumpet, but yeah…
Miller: Papi, you’ve said in the past that music has kept you alive.
Fimbres: Absolutely.
Miller: What do you mean by that?
Fimbres: I mean, music is absolute therapy for me. When I play music, I become a different person. When I’m on stage, I’m a different ... I feel like there’s this conduit between people on that side and people on this side of the monitors. I feel like we just become this influx of energy, and that really revitalizes me, like to the T. It’s like I could have the worst day ever, and I could just be in a crummy mood or I could just be exhausted, and I just get on stage and I play music, and it truly just brings me back to life.
Miller: Let’s listen to another song from the new album. It’s called “Diablada.” Anything we should know before we hear this, Tony?
Ramirez: Well, as you’ve heard, we’ve been inspired by all sorts of places in Latin America, and “Diablada” translates to “the dance of the devils.” And it’s really the synchronetic dualistic perspective on the history and colonial history of Latin America. And that’s really prevalent in all cultures across Latin America, so from the pre-colonial history to post-colonial history, and the good and evil, and how different cultures in Latin America balance that out. So in this case, it was this Bolivian, Peruvian, Chilean dance that is a folkloric dance that they do at this time of year, like a festival, all the way to Mexico where they do it in Costa Chica in Oaxaca, where it’s like this rebellious force of Africans that lived in Mexico against the colonial histories and powers.
So this is being inspired by, by all of that and just having an approach of psychedelia on top of it. It’s kind of like the rich writing history of Latin America you can throw in there too, this magic realism. So it’s nice to think about it that way. It’s just really cinematic and beautiful.
Miller: This is “Diablada” from the new OPT album “El Poder.”
[“Diablada” by Orquestra Pacífico Tropical playing, performed live in studio]
Miller: That song is called “Diablada.”
I’ve read that you started work on this album – this is from the liner notes – on a gloomy coastal weekend in November of 2020. So, a while ago, and really dark times for a lot of people around the world. I love the idea of an album of music that has all these global influences – African, Latin American, European instruments, American sort of garage fuzz – but from a tropical place, and then coming from the traditionally gloomy, rainy fall or winter of the Northwest coast. What do you remember from that first weekend?
Fimbres: We came with the intention of not having an intention. We went to the place with an open heart and we’re just like, let’s just jam. Like half of us are engineers, so we just brought all of our mics. We brought all our stuff, and we just set up in the living room like a jam space, essentially, and we just played to the wee hours. And people were flipping instruments and people were playing instruments that we don’t normally play, so we were just really experimenting. And from that session, I believe almost all these songs came to fruition. Is that correct?
Bubl: Most, yeah.
Fimbres: Most, yeah.
Miller: So you had some version of almost all the songs in the album from just playing around and experimenting, and you hadn’t come with melodies or lyrics or ideas?
Bubl: A little bit. There were fragments here and there that people came with, and we kind of worked some of those out, but there was so much material that came from that weekend that we were able to kind of patch things together and write new parts that kind of fit that mood of that weekend.
Fimbres: Exactly, yeah.
Miller: What’s that process like? Because it seems like this was like a creative explosion in the gloom, and the rain, and the dark…
Fimbres: It was gloomy too.
Miller: But then years passed and what we just heard, and what’s on the album, are really fleshed out, highly orchestrated, meticulously done dance tunes. So how do you go from those initial ideas to what we just heard?
Fimbres: That’s a good question. [Laughter] Anyone?
Lindbeck: I mean, we continuously kept staying together, like we never stopped playing music. With the pandemic happening and a lot of personal stuff happening, even in our band, we just kept coming to rehearsals, maybe not every week, but every other week, just trying to work on these songs and trying to make sure we’re all OK together. So [we] took that time.
Ramirez: We were each other’s bubbles during the pandemic. Remember that? They had the bubbles, “stay in your bubble.” So we stayed together during that pandemic.
Miller: You’re a big bubble! [Laughter]
Ramirez: It was a big burbuja, and we kept on coming back together to get the flow going. There were obviously challenges during that time, and we kept on meeting up and working on these same ideas. And new ideas fleshed out of those kind of like a branch of a tree, right? We just kept on flowering and flowering. And that time naturally kind of delayed us, but we got to where we are now.
Fimbres: Yeah. And honestly, as a band, as OPT, our intention was always to be a dance band. That was always our thing. So we would come with these different things like psych rock, psychedelico rock, like listening to Los Saicos, and then listening to Mulatu Astatke, and then Orquestra Polirino. So all these different elements, the different essence, Juan Gabriel, all this stuff, and we’d try to mesh it together with what we love. And what does that sound like for us in the Pacific Northwest? And that’s why I always emphasize, we are our own subgenre of cumbia; like we are a Northwest cumbia band.
Miller: But I’m interested in what you were saying there. So you have all these influences, and I mean, one of them is Ethiopian. You’re sort of all over the place, but with a real focus on the cumbia tradition or traditions, because even those, there’s 15 different countries that (I made that up), that claim cumbia that have their own version. So even within that, it’s like kind of a whole world.
Fimbres: Exactly. Even in Mexico there’s like subgenres of cumbia.
Miller: And in Texas.
Fimbres: Yeah, yeah, everywhere.
Miller: But you want this to be a dance band. Why?
Fimbres: Oh yeah. Because dancing makes you feel good. And I want … You know, life is already so gloomy and rough, and we get it. It’s great to be sad and it’s great to be angry, but it’s also really good just to shake that out and just dance and just have a good time. Life is too short, and you never know what happens. RIP Dolly Parton. You just never know. So life is too short and I love to dance. I personally love to dance. [Laughs]
Miller: We’ve just heard two originals, but you also do some classic cumbia songs from the ‘50s and ‘60s.
Fimbres: Absolutely. That’s what we call the abuelita. We call the grandma vibes. If you impress your grandma, then you’re the best man in the world. Like if your grandma gets up from the seat, like you got something going.
Miller: You have grandmas in the audience?
Fimbres: Oh yeah! [voices in the background in agreement] Yes. Grandmas and grandkids. [Laughs]
Miller: Dancing together?
Fimbres: Yeah!
Miller: That’s beautiful. What are we going to hear next?
Lindbeck: So next I have the honor of singing “Soledad,” and this is by Lucy González in the Combo de Galleros?
Fimbres: Combo Los Galleros.
Lindbeck: Combo Los Galleros. Sorry, nervous. [Laughs] Why is it more nervous to be in the studio than it is to be on stage? I don’t know. [Laughter]
Miller: Well, you’re performing for like four people, which is super weird, I think is why.
Lindbeck: So yeah, we covered this song. This is the song that we’ve played from day one, and Ana and I used to sing it together. I don’t know, it’s such an honor every time. So this is for Lucy González.
[“Soledad” by Lucy González and Combo Los Galleros playing, performed live in studio by Orequestra Pacífico Tropical]
Miller: Can you just play that whole song again one more time? [Laughter] So much fun!
Fimbres: It’s such a great song.
Miller: “Soledad.” That’s not on the new album “El Poder” by Orquesta Pacífico Tropical. But as I said, they’ve been playing it from the very beginning – for 14 years. A lot of bands, most bands, don’t last 14 years. Probably, most don’t last four years.
Fimbres: This is true.
Miller: Why has this one survived?
Fimbres: It’s been a rotating cast as well. I would say … Raise your hand if you’re an original member. [Counting] One, two, three, four, five…
Miller: That’s half of you. Yeah, that’s not bad.
Fimbres: That’s half of us. Yeah, that’s not bad.
Miller: And even that, six people from then, that’s even bigger than most bands to begin with, most like rock bands or pop bands. So even that says something. Why do you think it is?
Fimbres: It’s really a family band, honestly. It’s like, even if we were gone for a while, we just picked up where we left off. It’s really communal. And on top of all of that, all these guys are heavy hitters, like everyone is a phenomenal musician. And it’s crazy, like it’s really humbling just being in a band with such talented people.
Miller: You’re all in other bands too, some of you, most of you in many different bands, which is just the reality of being a professional musician?
Fimbres: Yeah.
Miller: What’s it like to be in a band of this size and at this sort of sonic scale? I can say as an audience member, it’s super exciting. One of the phrases I’ve seen a lot is that you make a wall of sound, which sort of makes sense except it’s like an undulating, exciting wall. [Laughter] So it’s like, I don’t know, “wall” is sort of a boring word, but a huge wash of sound that comes to us, but you’re in the middle of it. So what’s the experience of being in that?
Fimbres: It’s a good question.
Borgerson: It’s a lot of fun.
Miller: I hope it is!
Borgerson: Yeah, it’s great because wherever we go, we bring essentially a party with us, which is really fun. And I think a big part of it is just the size of the sound we can make is fun to be a part of, because it really does feel like a chamber orchestra. You’ve got all these people, and we can make a real ruckus, and wherever we go we bring a party with us, so it’s pretty fun.
Fimbres: One thing to note, too, is that every instrument is organic up here. So sometimes we’re a nightmare for a sound engineer because we have all these organic horns, percussion, all this stuff. But it’s totally worth it because it’s such a balance of an organic element with just the frenetic and kinetic energy that one has. Because it is like a whirlpool when we’re inside of this. I look at everyone when I’m playing for cue changes and just for vibes, and I’m seeing people just grooving. They see Tony doing his little Mexican, his little bouncy step. It’s just a vibe. Everyone is just grooving, and it’s really cool.
Miller: When you say organic here, what do you mean?
Fimbres: Meaning there’s no pre-recorded instruments, there’s no pre-recorded sounds. Everything comes off the cuff.
Miller: No click track?
Fimbres: No click track. Nothing. It’s purely raw, organic music.
Miller: How much room for improvisation is there in the music that you all create? I feel like the higher the number of people in the band, the harder I would imagine that is.
Fimbres: Well, everyone that looks at me because I’m the one that’s always like getting crazy. And maybe Edward can…
Bubl: We make space for Papi to have sections where he’s got more leeway. They’re kind of determined sections, and there’s little parts for guitar here and there. But you’re right, there’s so much going on that there’s not room for open-ended improvisation.
Unknown Speaker: People color their parts slightly different here and there, depending on the energy that’s coming out, but…
Fimbres: Well, but there is a push-and-pull element for sure, yeah.
Miller: And you’re pushing, it seems like.
Fimbres: I’m pushing! [Laughs]
Miller: I’m hoping you guys can take us out with one more song. It’s called “Entre La Montaña,” “Enter the Mountain.” It has these lyrics: “We enter the mountain where our ancestors dwell. We talk with them about the past and the future.” Is there a story behind this song?
Fimbres: Absolutely. With Latino cultura, specifically Mexican culture, we definitely honor our ancestors and we give thanks for just being alive. And I don’t think a lot of people think about, how did our grandparents … what was their struggle for us to get here, and what are we gonna do for our future kids? What are we leaving for them? Like let’s keep this place as clean as we can as we found it, you know? It’s like a pack in, pack out type of thing.
I feel like, for me personally, it’s really important for me to remember who I am, to ground myself, and just to be like, my ancestors are here with me no matter who I am, where I’m at. The energy is here and I can feel their presence. I feel it right now.
Miller: Thank you all very much. We’re gonna go out with “Entre La Montaña.”
[“Entre La Montaña” by Orquestra Pacífico Tropical playing, performed live in studio]
Miller: Orquestra Pacífico Tropical is Papi Fimbres on drums and vocals; Edward Bubl on keyboards and trumpet; Shana Lindbeck on vocals and percussion; Leb Borgerson on bass; Tony Ramirez on guitar, vocals and conga; Paul Matonis on clarinet; Andy Manla on accordion and vocals; Jason Elliot on trombone; Victor Nash on trumpet; Ryan Wiggans on guitar and trumpet; and Ana Rodriguez on percussion and vocals. Their third album just came out this summer. It’s called “El Poder.” They have an album release show at The Den in Southeast Portland tomorrow evening.
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