Los Destellos

The flashes

Los Destellos, the flashes, were formed in the Rímac district of Lima in 1966 by the guitarist Enrique Delgado Montes. Spanish Wikipedia says his sister Edith named the group with his approval, and calls them the creators and the university of Peruvian cumbia. El Peruano gives Delgado's years as 1939 to 1996, and La República says he died in March 1996, aged 58. A blog says he learned guitar from his mother at five and went electric with Orquesta Fantasía in 1962; El Comercio says he studied at the conservatory and replaced the winds and accordion of traditional cumbia with electric guitars, and quotes Hugo Levano that he recorded a jungle-flavored cumbia before Juaneco y su Combo and Los Mirlos. The 1968 core, per Musicoteca Alay, was Delgado, Fernando Quiroz on rhythm guitar, Carlos Ramírez on drums and Tito Caycho on bass.

The group played matinees at Lima cinemas from mid-1967, and recorded its first LP, Los Destellos (Odeon ELD-1735), in 1968, in October according to El Peruano, with 12 instrumental songs, timbales and a Moog synthesizer; one blog dates it 1967. They followed it with En órbita and Solo ellos (1969), "Elsa" (1970), sung by Félix Martínez and reportedly selling a million 45s on the word of Iempsa's manager, En la cumbre, Clase... aparte and Constelación (1971) and Arrollando (1973). El Comercio counts 22 albums and more than 60 singles. Constelación was reissued by Secret Stash in 2011, and Reviler's Josh Keller called it a fun, engaging record, with Delgado's guitar holding it together.

The first generation dissolved in early 1980 and Edith Delgado reactivated the group in 1984, or 1983 per the group's blog; she took over its direction after 1996, and a reformed group recorded songs for the film The Milk of Sorrow in 2009. Wikipedia credits them with influencing Los Mirlos, Los Ecos and Los Diablos Rojos, and World Music Central calls Delgado the genre's godfather. Their first LP was reissued on vinyl in 2018 by Discos Eternos and CAL Comunicaciones, from masters found in the Iempsa archives. More than 90 musicians have passed through the group.