Preview: Yeison Landero at Proctors Passport Series (presented by Music Haven in Proctors GE Theatre); Thursday, May 14, 2026
Saving perhaps its most exciting and complex music for last, Music Haven’s Passport Series wraps up Thursday with cumbia accordionist Yeison Landero at Proctors GE Theatre.
Photo provided
Invented on Columbia’s Caribbean coast as street music, cumbia forms a mighty river from three cultural tributaries: Indigenous, African and Spanish. Its lineage is more direct in the accordion-squeezing hands of Yeison Landero as the legacy of his grandfather Andres Landero, hailed as the king of cumbia in the 1950s. Yeison started playing at age seven, riding changes in the traditional music his grandfather had modernized.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Colombian cumbia musicians began importing musical ideas from elsewhere. Clarinetist Lucho Bermudez emulated American jazz clarinetist Benny Goodman with his swing band, for example; but influences flowed in both directions. American jazz-soul-pop giant Nat King Cole recorded a cumbia tune by bandleader Pacho Galan on a Spanish-language album in 1959.
More recently, Joe Strummer of the Clash hailed the cumbia style as “the punk rock of Colombia.” That same bustling South American cultural mix gave us the revolutionary jazz harp virtuoso Edmar Castaneda. An innovative, virtuoso master, Landero plays upbeat accordion with Castaneda-scale skill and daring dance-y zip.
While original Colombian cumbia traditionally cruised on party-powered beats by three different-toned drums and three flutes with different ranges, Landero leads a streamlined, amplified version with electric bass, drums and percussion, guitar and background vocals, Landero’s accordion and voice leading the celebration.
Show time for Yeison Landero Thursday at Proctors GE Theatre is 7:30 p.m. All seats $34.51. 518-346-6204 www.proctors.org
Devised to present international music indoors “between the summers,” Music Haven’s Passport Series follows the same spin-the-globe international direction as its summer shows in Central Park.
Music Haven presented Castaneda’s very international all-star big band at its summer 2025 gala on Proctor’s Main Stage, it’s rain site. Castaneda has also played everywhere else around here including both Universal Preservation Hall and Troy Savings Bank Music Hall with banjoist Bela Fleck and drummer Antonio Sanchez in BEATrio, one of the hottest bands on the road today.
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