The Washington Post - 23.08.2019

B6 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.FRIDAY, AUGUST 23 , 2019

wood.

By 8, Celso was dumpster-div-

ing outside mansions and super-

markets, collecting fruit that he

and an older man washed and

resold in their neighborhood, ac-

cording to the Mexican newspa-

per Milenio. He later worked as a

smelter, a tortilla dealer, a corn

miller and an upholsterer.

With songs such as “Reina de

Cumbias,” “El Tren” and “Como el

Viento,” Mr. Piña reached an

increasingly international audi-

ence, performing almost every-

where but Oceania. He was fea-

tured on the Gloria Trevi pop

song “Sufran con lo Que Yo Gozo”

and planning a record with DJ

and producer Camilo Lara, al-

though he said he wanted to

retire soon, before his faculties

diminished — but only after per-

forming in Australia.

“Celso is the last of the idols of

the people, perhaps the only one

who was loved and respected by

all: the rockers, the pop fans, the

rappers, the electronic music

producers,” Lara told El País on

Wednesday. “He experimented

with everyone — that’s why his

legacy is so vast. He was more

punk than any punk, the rebel

and savage that many rockers

wanted to be.”

Mr. Piña had five children and

continued to perform with his

three brothers, even as the rest of

his lineup shifted. “Family should

always be united, at least that’s

what Mamá would tell us,” he told

the American-Statesman in 2013.

Complete information on survi-

vors was not immediately avail-

able.

In interviews, Mr. Piña re-

counted the difficulties he faced

early in his career, including a

restrictive recording contract

that led him to go silent for

several years until he was able to

sign with a new label. Listeners in

the 1970s often asked why he

played music that no one else

played, let alone heard on the

radio.

But almost always, Mr. Piña’s

response was the same. “Why am

I going to play the same thing

that everyone else plays?” he said,

according to Osorno. “Music is

music.”

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perfect compromise between the

worlds of roots and rock, two

generations, classes and societies

playing together with mutual re-

spect and making music that

sounds completely organic and

unforced,” wrote a reviewer for

Sing Out!, an American folk mag-

azine. “There is none of the

self-consciousness or pretension

that such fusions tend to have

north of the Rio Grande.... I

wish I could describe it better,

but there is nothing else that

sounds like this. A true master-

piece.”

Celso Piña Arvizu was born in

Monterrey on April 6, 1953. His

father worked at the children’s

hospital where Mr. Piña was later

hired, and he made instruments

for his children out of iron and

approached by Julián Villarreal,

a former bassist with the genre-

blending Monterrey rock group

El Gran Silencio.

“How do you feel about doing

something kind of crazy, funky?”

Villarreal asked him.

Their conversation inspired

Mr. Piña’s 2001 record “Barrio

Bravo,” which received a Latin

Grammy nomination and fea-

tured contributions from Mexi-

can artists including Café Tacu-

ba, Control Machete and Santa

Sabina. The album opened with

“Cumbia Sobre el Rio,” later fea-

tured on the soundtrack of direc-

tor Alejandro González Iñárritu’s

film “Babel,” and spawned con-

cert tours across Europe and the

Americas.

“In a way, the album is a

according to Osorno, until a 2004

breakthrough — when Gabriel

García Márquez, the Nobel Prize-

winning novelist, was filmed

dancing to Mr. Piña’s accordion,

drum and guacharaca band dur-

ing an event at the Monterrey

Museum of Contemporary Art.

The moment drew wide coverage

in the Mexican press and seemed

to solidify Mr. Piña’s stature in

the country. “The accordion reb-

el,” as he was long known, was

now mainstream.

By then, however, Mr. Piña had

stepped far outside the bounds of

traditional cumbia, reinventing

his band, Celso Piña y su Ronda

Bogotá, as an avatar of Latin

American musical fusion. In an

interview with the Austin Ameri-

can-Statesman, he recalled being

the city’s traditional music dur-

ing the 1980s, according to a New

York Times account by Mexican

journalist Diego Enrique Osorno.

Rooted in a country thousands

of miles away, Mr. Piña’s songs

were initially scorned by local

elites and authorities, with con-

certs sometimes shut down by

the police. “My music provoked

the madness of the people,” he

said last year. They also spurred

something like peace: Amid re-

ports that rival gangs in Monter-

rey stopped fighting only at the

sound of cumbia, the writer Car-

los Monsiváis dubbed Mr. Piña

“the accordionist of Hamelin,” a

reference to the Pied Piper whose

music lured away rats.

Nonetheless, he received scant

airplay or newspaper coverage,

BY HARRISON SMITH

Celso Piña, a self-taught Mexi-
can accordionist who turned his
hometown of Monterrey into an
unlikely oasis for cumbia, the
Colombian dance music, then
became a Latin music superstar
with his fusion of rock, reggae,
ska, hip-hop, tropical music and
Northern Mexican rhythms, died
Aug. 21 at a hospital in Monter-
rey. He was 66.
The cause was a heart attack,
his record label, La Tuna Group,
said in a statement. Mr. Piña was
in the midst of a North American
tour, with a performance this
past Saturday in Milwaukee and
an Aug. 30 show scheduled in
Arlington, Tex.
In what was apparently his last
tweet, he wrote Wednesday in
Spanish: “There is no one who
resists cumbia.” The tweet in-
cluded a video of one of his
biggest hits, the semi-autobiog-
raphical dance tune “Cumbia So-
bre el Rio,” in which Mr. Piña’s
group sings in Spanish: “From
Monterrey, a Colombian cumbia
for everyone.”
The truth of that statement
was almost unimaginable when
Mr. Piña began performing in the
1970s, on a two-row accordion his
father had once given him as a
gift. In Monterrey, a sun-baked
industrial city in the foothills of
the Sierra Madre Oriental, polka
and waltz tunes had long domi-
nated clubs, dance halls and
neighborhood parties, brought
by German and Czech immi-
grants a century before.
But Mr. Piña found himself
enchanted by the music of Co-
lombian accordionists Aníbal Ve-
lásquez and Alfredo Gutiérrez,
masters of that country’s val-
lenato and cumbia folk styles.
Listening to their records on
repeat, he spent three months
learning his first song — then was
told by his father he needed three
more months of rehearsal.
With his brothers Eduardo,
Rubén and Enrique, he serenad-
ed girls in his Monterrey neigh-
borhood and, at 20, left his ad-
ministrative position at a chil-
dren’s hospital to become a full-
time musician. Slowly, cumbia
began to take hold, elbowing out

obituaries

CELSO PIÑA, 66

Cumbia star, ‘accordion rebel’ challenged musical norms

TOMAS BRAVO/REUTERS

Celso Piña in his hometown of Monterrey, Mexico, in 2008. Mr. Piña was inspired by Colombian cumbia, and his early take on the style

drew scorn in Northern Mexico, with his concerts sometimes shut down. “My music provoked the madness of the people,” he said.

OF NOTE

Obituaries of residents from the
District, Maryland and Northern
Virginia.

James Lombardi,
lawyer and judge
James Lombardi, 83, a Prince
George’s County judge, former
member of the Maryland House
of Delegates and a lawyer in
private practice in Upper Marl-
boro, Md., from 1970 to 1997, died
June 11 at his home in Annapolis.
The cause was complications
from a stroke and amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis, said a daughter,
Joyce Lombardi.
Judge Lombardi was born in
Philadelphia and grew up in Bal-
timore. He was a lawyer in the
State’s Attorney’s office for Prince
George’s County from 1965 to
1970, then a partner in the law
firm of Lombardi, Powers & Am-
ster.

While in private law practice,

he served from 1971 to 1975 as a

Prince George’s County Democrat

in the Maryland House of Del-

egates. He was an Orphans Court

Judge, a federal magistrate and

did arbitrations and mediations.

He was a Maryland Circuit Court

judge from 1997 to 2006, when he

retired. In retirement he contin-

ued to hear cases until 2018.

Edward Forgotson,

federal official, lawyer

Edward Forgotson, 85, a law-

yer who held positions with fed-

eral agencies and in the White

House and later had a law prac-

tice focused on oil and natural

gas policy, died July 4 at a hospi-

tal in Miami Beach. The cause

was respiratory failure, said his

wife, Ann Forgotson.

Mr. Forgotson was born in

Albuquerque and grew up in

Shreveport, La. After teaching at

the UCLA law school and con-

ducting research on health policy

at the Rand Corp. in California,

Mr. Forgotson established a law

firm in Washington and was in-

strumental in lobbying for pas-

sage of the Natural Gas Policy Act

of 1978. During the 1980s, he was

a fundraiser for the Republican

Party. He moved to Santa Fe,

N.M., in 1992 and to Miami Beach

in 2008.

John Merrill,

Pentagon policy writer

John Merrill, 72, a senior policy

researcher and writer at the Pen-

tagon who specialized in Latin

America over a 37-year career,

died June 10 at his home in

Keizer, Ore. The cause was can-

cer, said his former wife, Cheryl

Merrill.

Mr. Merrill was born in San

Mateo, Calif. He was a deputy

director of the Defense Depart-

ment’s Haiti task force in the

mid-1990s and retired in 2012.

Charles Church,

physicist, research director

Charles Church, 90, a physicist

and research director for the

Army Department, died July 7 at

his home in Savannah, Ga. He

had heart ailments, said his

daughter, Jane Horvath.

Dr. Church was born in Phoe-

nix and was a researcher for

Westinghouse and the Defense

Advanced Research Projects

Agency before joining the Army’s

civilian research and develop-

ment unit as a physicist in 1975.

He led several research and labo-

ratory units before serving as

director of Army research from

1995 until his retirement in 1997.

Before moving to Savannah, Dr.

Church lived in Alexandria, Va.,

where he was active in scouting

and the Fort Hunt High School

boosters club.

Edward Killham,

Foreign Service officer

Edward Killham, 93, a senior

Foreign Service officer who

served from 1979 to 1982 as depu-

ty chief of mission of the U.S.

Embassy in Brussels and retired

in 1987 with the rank of minister

counselor, died July 7 at a resi-

dence for seniors in Bethesda,

Md. The cause was pneumonia,

said a daughter, Amanda Davis.

Mr. Killham, a Chicago native,

joined the Foreign Service in

1952. In the 1970s, he served as
      deputy assistant secretary gener-
      al on the international staff for
      the North Atlantic Treaty Organi-
      zation, special adviser to the U.S.
      delegation to strategic arms limi-

tation talks in Geneva, and on the

U.S. delegation to mutual bal-

anced force reduction talks in

Vienna. He wrote a book, “The

Nordic Way: A Path to Baltic

Equilibrium” (1993).

Pamela Coleman Jefferson,

government employee

Pamela Coleman Jefferson, 72,

who spent 34 years at the Bureau

of Engraving and Printing as a

security processor — examining

money for defects — before retir-

ing in 2002, died July 3 at her

home in Rio Rancho, N.M. The

cause was complications from

dementia, said a daughter, An-

gela Shanks.

Mrs. Jefferson was born Pam-

ela Payne in Washington. She

moved to Edgewater, Fla., in 2003

from the District and moved to

New Mexico in 2014.

— From staff reports

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