Puerto Rican Culture Party

The Bourse de Commerce and the New York-based collective Standing on the Corner present "Puerto Rican Culture Party" a two-day festival celebrating and blending the roots of Puerto Rico’s traditional music with contemporary forms.  

On Friday, January 24, the bomba and plena group Grupo Folklorico Bomba Ashe opens the evening, bringing together musicians and dancers who uphold and transmit the heritage of Afro-Puerto Rican musical traditions. They are followed by a concert from Standing on the Corner, a collective founded and led by American-Puerto Rican musician Gio Escobar, exploring hip-hop, jazz, and funk. On Saturday, January 25, Gio Escobar hosts a DJ set that blends classic and dubbed versions of salsa and Latin soul.

Program

January 24

• 7:45pm – 8:30pm: Mbodj (DJ)
• 8:30pm – 9:30pm: Grupo Folklorico Bomba Ashe (Live)
• 9:45pm – 11:00pm: Standing on the Corner (Live)

Sound system: Matéo Garcia

Access until 10:30 PM. Bar open throughout the evening.

January 25

• 5pm – 9pm: Gio Escobar (DJ)

The Caribbean music brass band Pourkoipa Family performs several musical happenings throughout the evening.

Sound system: Matéo Garcia

Access until 8:30pm. Bar open.

Blending free jazz with experimental American rap, organ improvisations, and evangelical lyrics (he began his career as an organist in Brooklyn churches), artist and composer Gio Escobar skillfully mixes Western music standards with Latin and African-American influences. This is reflected in his radio show Puerto Rican Rumble Rock Radio Offensive on the New York station WKCR-FM, where he merges his transformed voice with salsa classics.

In 2016, Gio Escobar founded the New York-based collective Standing on the Corner, evolving between jazz improvisations, dub excursions, garage-noise sounds, and lo-fi hip-hop collages. The only constant member of the group, he invites various musicians depending on the projects and embraces multidisciplinary appearances: concerts, happenings, performances, therapeutic musical acupuncture sessions, films, and video installations. In 2022, Standing on the Corner performed at Bourse de Commerce.

Grupo Folklorico Bomba Ashe is a Puerto Rican afro-folkloric music and dance group specializing in bomba and plena, two musical genres combining singing and intense percussive rhythms, deeply rooted in the island’s history and stemming from the musical traditions of Africans enslaved in the 17th century. The ensemble is led by Roberto Cepeda Brenes, son of Rafael Cepeda, who is considered as the godfather of Puerto Rican roots music. From a very young age, he demonstrated a natural talent for dance, even reversing the traditional learning method of bomba, where percussion comes before the steps. Bringing together musicians and dancers from Puerto Rico and the diaspora, including bomba singer and dancer Gloria Lopez de Cepeda, Grupo Folklorico Bomba Ashe works to preserve and promote these cultural expressions.

Matéo Garcia, a French designer and sculptor born in 1989, explores the boundaries between scenographic design and sound creation. As the founder of GARSAC Diffusion, he designs sculptural speakers and innovative audio systems, seamlessly integrating sound spatialization into his projects, influenced by Roland Cahen. For the Bourse de Commerce, Matéo Garcia has envisioned a sound system that combines technical precision with industrial aesthetics, drawing inspiration from Tadao Ando's work as well as laboratory measuring equipment and anodized aluminum aerospace devices. Featuring dual constant directivity high-frequency horns and a bass line composed of eight equidistant subwoofers, this system ensures a homogeneous distribution of bass and exceptional performance in the lowest frequencies.