In September 2010 I was sixteen years old, two years from finishing High School and already set on studying music as a bachelor’s degree. I attended Jazz al Parque, a yearly public event organized by the city of Bogotá and dedicated to jazz, or at least jazz-related music. Far from listening to jazz standards, I discovered the music of Asdrúbal, a band from Bogotá combining elements of Colombian traditional music, free jazz, punk, and contemporary music. Acosta (2007) has mentioned Asdrúbal as an example of a band that was “blurring the lines between popular and academic music”, something that he said was only starting to happen in recent years. It even took part in the Colón Electrónico series, demonstrating not only that they, like other bands and musicians, were capable of crossing the borders between ‘popular’ and ‘academic’, but that the musical community itself was opening up to this and including such bands in spaces that were previously reserved for contemporary academic music. The band consisted of Carlos Tabares on trumpet, Marco Fajardo on clarinet, Daniel Restrepo on bass, Ricardo Gallo on piano, Jorge Sepúlveda on drums, María ‘Mange’ Valencia on saxophone and clarinet, and Alejandro Forero on guitar.

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In 2004 Forero, inspired by the New Yorkers Bang on a Can, came up with the idea for a collective of musicians that functioned as a platform to carry out their projects: La Distritofónica. Most members of Asdrúbal were also part of this new collective, namely Jorge Sepúlveda, Ricardo Gallo and ‘Mange’ Valencia, who were also joined by Eblis Álvarez, Juan David Castaño and Javier Morales. Valencia comments that “the idea was to get together and support each other under a bigger name and have the sound of what we did associated to it” (M.A. Valencia, personal communication, 2022). They set up their own record label and released the first album of Asdrúbal as the first album of the catalogue which by now has forty-one titles. Many artists and bands released albums under the La Distritofónica label and although not all of them were official members of the collective, they came to be associated with the sound and the community that the collective represented. Since then, new related record labels have appeared such as Festina Lente Discos, Sonalero and Matik-Matik (a label that grew out of the legendary venue which will be discussed later), as well as joint efforts between these which have resulted in the hybrid labels MDF and MSF. Altogether, these catalogues include over a hundred published albums which represent a musical community that also includes people such as Juan Sebastián Monsalve, Pacho Dávila, Kike Mendoza, Holman Álvarez, Santiago Botero, Pedro Ojeda, Mario Galeano, Juan Manuel Toro and Urián Sarmiento, and bands like Curupira, Primero Mi Tía, Suricato, Bituin, Andrés Gualdrón y los Animales Blancos, El Ombligo, Mula, and Meridian Brothers.

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In 2009 ‘Mange’ Valencia organized the Festival Distritofónico, a one-day festival featuring five bands from the collective. Some years later, in 2012 she relaunched it as a bigger, longer festival, programming several days of music that featured artists ranging from electronic experimental song to contemporary academic music, passing through jazz and traditional Colombian music. Some were members of the collective, while others were related local artists and international guests, something which was valuable for the musical community, since it opened up to others, both artists and audience members. It was a shared space, where people could meet to listen to, create and discuss different musical practices that might otherwise be excluded from each other.

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