In 1974, before Bernardo Palombo founded El Taller Latino Americano, he created the record label Americanto to present the recordings of proponents of La Nueva Canción (the New Song movement) including Silvio Rodriguez (Cuba), Victor Jara (Chile), Grupo Wara (Bolivia), his compositions with Damián Sanchez (Argentina). Palombo’s experience as a performer and producer became the bedrock for El Taller’s 45 year history as a presenter of world music and The Songbook of the Americas.

This program brings artists from a variety of traditions together to discuss the significance of “el canto” from the perspective of regional traditions and modern world-views. Professional recordings from each artist’s home will accompany dialogue. We envision this to be a conversation from an authentic shared space formed among talented artists and thinkers.

Friday, May 23, 2025 at 7:30pm -

This is a Spanish language event

Nery Olivares (Dominican Republic) and Mario Cancel Bigay (Puerto Rico) interview each other and share from their respective songbooks.

Nery Olivares is a musican, song-writer, and cultural historian in Washington Heights, NYC. He is originally from the Dominican Republic, where he learned to play the guitar, performed, and was inspired by the Nueva Canción movement that expressed the sentiments of the youth cultures of the 1960s and 1970s, which grew from the traditions of folk, yet was a distinct genre of its own. He moved to New York in the 1990s and found a vital musical community that he still is a part of today.

Mario Cancel Bigay is a poet, singer-songwriter, cuatrista, translator, and received a doctorate in ethnomusicology from Columbia University in 2021. His areas of interest focus on nueva canción puertorriqueña, chanson québécoise, and other forms of musical resistance from the 1960s and 1970s. He is currently a Clinical Assistant Professor in Liberal Studies at New York University, where he teaches undergraduate courses on Latin American cultures and contemporary global philosophy.