Gustavo Cortiñas Channels Ancestry and Healing on New Album The Drum Also Sings
Out June 5, 2026 on Desafío Candente Records
Desafío Candente Records announces the June 5, 2026 release of The Drum Also Sings / El Tambor También Canta, the latest album from Chicago-based drummer and composer Gustavo Cortiñas. The record features fellow drummers Dave King and Isaiah Spencer, alongside vocalists Angelina Suyul, La Paula Herrera, Maryta de Humahuaca, and Angel Bat Dawid.
Conceived during a period of personal and collective difficulty, The Drum Also Sings uses the drum as both an expressive and introspective tool, a way of sitting with sorrow and joy simultaneously. Cortiñas draws on community, spirituality, and ancestry as sources of resilience, and insists that this message of healing should come from many voices, not one. The result is an album built on plurality: three drummers constructing a wide palette of phrases, grooves, and textures, and four women from across the Americas contributing song, spoken word, improvisation, and prayer. “This project emerged from cultivating an inner dialogue in moments that can sometimes feel hopeless, using the drum as both an instrument of expression and a tool for introspection,” says Cortiñas. “This music is made for healing.”
Paying homage to Max Roach and the tradition of melodic drumming he championed alongside Papa Jo Jones, Roy Haynes, and others, Cortiñas also dedicates the record to his mentor Johnny Vidacovich, a musician he describes as one of the most melodic players ever to draw sound from the drum.
Cortiñas has consistently used his work as a platform for ideas that extend beyond music. Desafio Candente (2021) was a sprawling examination of heritage, folklore, and colonialism featuring over 30 collaborators from 11 countries. Kind Regards (2022) explored the immigrant experience on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. The Crisis Knows No Borders (2025) took on climate change and global interdependence, earning a place on Downbeat’s year-end best-albums list and recognition from the Chicago Tribune, which named Cortiñas its Chicagoan of the Year for 2025. The Drum Also Sings marks a turn inward, though no less engaged with the world.
The album opens with “Etinel skotol t’ixt’unel / La Espontaneidad de los Latidos / The Spontaneity of Heartbeats,” featuring Angelina Suyul of Chiapas, Mexico, whose spoken word in Tsotsil traces the drum’s origins back to the first heartbeat, a rhythm that preceded all others. “Mother Tongue / Lengua Madre” draws from the blues tradition, that age-old practice of meeting sorrow with defiance. Woven throughout the tracklist are three collective improvisations, the “Dialogue with the Ancestors” suite, each growing from a phrase by a master: Max Roach, Papa Jo Jones, and Roach’s tribute to Big Sid Catlett.
“Tu Resiliencia es Resistencia / Your Resilience is Resistance” features Chilean vocalist La Paula Herrera in a meditation on collective struggle and the memory embedded in resistance. “Duraznito / Little Peach” is a lullaby Cortiñas wrote for his newborn daughter, Violeta León. “Añay Pachamama,” sung by Maryta de Humahuaca from Jujuy, Argentina, is a Quechua prayer of gratitude to the earth, the mountains, the rivers, and the wind. “Fellowship / Comunidad” draws on ancient percussion traditions to evoke the vitality of collective celebration. The album closes with an 11-minute setting of Psalm 23, featuring Angel Bat Dawid on vocals and clarinet, a passage through shadow and into stillness.
Across its ten tracks, The Drum Also Sings moves between grief and gratitude, personal tenderness and collective resistance, ancient ancestry and urgent present. It is an album that trusts the drum to carry language it cannot always speak plainly, and that finds in rhythm a form of care extended outward toward community, toward the earth, and toward those who will come after.
The Drum Also Sings is out June 5, 2026 via Desafio Candente Records.