29 March 2009 - If you are a fan like I am, you will be happy to know that Cholo has an album on iTunes. He is also on Facebook and Myspace. So much has changed in the last month or two. On his "www.cholovalderrama.com" he has 12 videos. You really have to be into folclorica music to appreciate his style. If you give it time, you will find that the música de llanera is a style of music that you can listen to at any time; however, if you are mentally down, it will boost you up because of the energy of the songs. He won the 2008 Latin Grammy for the category of Llanera Music.
It is 9 February 2009 and I spent some time on Cholo's web site. There are some links below that are no longer functional. I am no longer a Live365 subscriber. Yahoo Music died and I was transfered to Rhapsody. Rhapsody is a problem because I have to run it as administrator, which I think is a security problem. That doesn´t stop me from using it to find new music using their streaming service.
If you are a Live365 subscriber, his station will play using the mp3pro codec. This is a big improvement. You almost get hi-fi sound at 32kbs. I was kind of sorry to see his current options because my favorite animated gif of the vaquero roping the large bull is gone. Instead of having music on his main web site, he used to have a link to ArtistLaunch.com. There are songs in mp3 format that you can play. The links look like "name.mp3.m3u". There may be an easier way but the only one I found was to install Winamp-5.1. If you click Winamp, you will go to their site where you can download either the free version or the Pro version for $19.95. Once you have something that will play an mp3-list, you can listen to Cholo and his friends sing. I have a DSL line with a download speed of 768kb. I had no problem playing his songs at the "hi" rate.
On 28 January 2002, I received an email from Mp3.com. They had a number of artists in their promotional list. One of them was Orlando "El Cholo" Valderrama. This used to be a link to Cholo's web page on mp3.com but that service has been cancelled. There is a free/pay service on Live365 called Quitapesares Stero that plays music from the Llano. Was I surprised, the broadcaster is Cholo. Cholo's music has a unique sound because it is of a style common to the Llano region of South America. The main muscial sounds are from an "arpa", "quatro", "maracas", and others. If you don't have a clue what they are and I didn't, visit Llanera.com. They have redone their web site and you no longer have to use Internet Explorer to see the real thing. The other thing is that I cannot link using their current techniques. The Llanera.com site has a write up on each of the "Cantautores" but you have to go to the music page and then choose the artist. It also shows people dancing the Joropo. I can imagine a pretty señorita twirling her skirt with the simple movement and there must be more to it. Since we are talking about a region, you would expect some new words to be introduced and they have a diccionario Llanero (dictionary) to help you with the regional words that you will find to be new.
On 15 July 2002, I noticed that Cholo has a new web site. The pages are all dated 15 JUL 2002. The new site is http://www.cholovalderrama.com. It is a non-complicated site with a few graphical effects. It has what I call a clean appearance, which I rate highly. The image of Cholo on his new site is very similar to what I have been creating when I have done some new scans. You scan hi-res and reduce the image size by choosing the jpeg conversion loss. It produces a very clean, sharp looking image. I think people forget that when they make a web site too complicated, the enhancements do not work without a lot of network bandwidth. He now has images of his performances and the text (letras) for some of his songs. As a learning experience, I translated his biography with the help of Bablefish. As you can imagine, the original translation by Bablefish was kind of rough. I have tried to smooth it up and may have made translation errors.
A long time ago, I spent several days looking for an image of him performing in Bogota. He was standing on a stage in what looks like an opera house singing and playing a quatro. You could not see an open seat in the theatre. I tried to learn more about him and the Llano but there were not a lot of sites listed in the search engines. That prompted my starting this web site. I knew from my Apache access logs, that Google, Inktomi, and other search engines around the world were indexing my web pages on a frequent basis. So, I created a web page on an artist that I enjoy listening to and provided keyword search capabilities for people that also found his songs enjoyable. I also moved my comments on the Llano region of Columbia and Venezuela to its own web page.
Some time ago, he had a discos web page that had an animated gif that got my best laugh of the day vote. A cowboy was on a sleepy looking horse that is eating grass. The cowboy proceeds to rope a very large Bull and the horse has this horrified expression on its face as the cowboy is pulled out of the saddle by the bull. My idea of what a large bull would look like in the Llano was on the Arauca's old Ganadera (livestock) site. You had to visit the main site, choose "Economia" and then choose "Produccion Ganadera" to see this large show animal. I was raised on a farm/ranch we had some milk cows (vacas) that were this tall but were a longs ways from being this large. You didn't get around bulls (toros) this large without putting your life at risk. I miss these web sites.
The Llanera.com has music from a number of cantantes (singers). There are several pages of songs by various cantantes. The page is titled "Música Llaneras". It is kind of strange to see "interprete" used to describe the performer.
There are also some "Leyendas llaneras" or Llanero stories. One that brought a smile to my face was "Florentino y El Diablo". When you "Escuchela" or play it, you get to listen to the story of the encounter of Florentino and The Devil. This is another one of the forms where you have to visit the main page or "Leyendas..." and then select Florentino's story.