See Portland Musician Fabi Reynas Band Reyna Tropical Perform on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert [Video]

If you caught The Late Show With Stephen Colbert this weekend, you saw another Portland musician’s first nationally televised performance.

Fabi Reyna’s band, Reyna Tropical, performed their recent single, “Cartagena,” as part of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’s #LateShowMeMusic discovery series. The single comes from Reyna Tropical’s debut album, Malegría—a portmanteau meaning “bad happiness,” released in March. On a softly lit, rainbow-hue bar set, Reyna stands front and center, playing guitar and backed by a DJ as she sings in Spanish about living with grief and healing in the ocean. Her breezy guitar style and smooth vocals suggests the clarity that comes with surviving a great loss, as Reyna did when her bandmate, Nectali “Sumo” Diaz, died unexpectedly in 2022.

Pitchfork reviewed Malegría favorably, calling it “an imaginative meditation on the possibilities of diasporic genre collage.” Diaz’s music posthumously appears on five of Malegría’s tracks, as does his vocals in spoken word interludes between himself and Reyna. She told Rolling …