About The Performers
Cuñao is a Los Angeles-based Latin Folk group. The group uses its multi-ethnic background & influences to create evocative, poetic songs that transcend time and leave listeners with lush images. Cuñao puts a global twist on their Latin sound by exploring African rhythms, Eastern European melodies and American Rock aesthetics.
The band started in the spring of 2014, as a pick-up band for a birthday party. After a few rehearsals and learning a few cumbias they played their first show. They immediately began work on their album “Sangre Y Arena” which was released in October 2015. The lineup solidified their sound as a Latin Folk group with a global flair.
Cuñao regularly performs in festivals and community events in the Los Angeles and Southern California area such as Hollywood Forever Cemetery’s Día De Los Muertos in both 2016 & 2017, San Pedro Día De Los Muertos Festival, Lummis Day Festival in northern Los Angeles 2016 among many others. In May of 2015, the band was commissioned to score a dance piece by Choreographer and Artistic Director of the Wooden Floor Academy Melanie Rios Glaser. The group composed music for her piece Playground and Playground II (2016) and performed live at The Irvine Barclay Theater at U.C. Irvine.
The band has been featured by media outlets such as The L.A. Times, Univision, NPR Alt. Latino, Sounds-and-Colours Magazine, and others. More recently, the band was commissioned by Santa Ana Sites to work on “Cancion Del Inmigrante”, a multi-media folk opera to be performed at The Bowers Museum in May 2018. In February 2018, they performed as a showcase artist at the 2018 Folk Alliance International Conference in Kansas City, MO. They also collaborated with Dominican artist Alih Jey on her new album “Soy De Peña” released in May 2019. The album is a collaboration between Alih Jey and Cuñao and features song written by Alih’s father, Anibal de Peña, a musical icon in the Dominican Republic. Together with Alih, Cuñao played the Official BMI Showcase at SXSW in 2019 in support of the new album. In November 2018 they released a fun Holiday EP titled “Invierno Tropical” featuring not so well know Christmas songs in Spanish and German, as well as a Hanukkah song. In the summer of 2019, Cuñao released a tropical cover version of Barbra Streisand’s Woman in Love, as part of Universal Music Group’s celebration of Gibbs Brothers & Bee Gees Catalog. For their contribution, they translated and made a tropical version of the Streisand classic, that the Gibbs Brother penned.
The group continues to finalize their next full-length album to be released in 2020.