"A potent mix of Latin American folk music and jazz"

- Jesse Hamlin, SF Chronicle

"Using various methods of artistic expression, Quijeremá is more than just a band. They are poets and multi-media designers.
Combining sounds from almost all over Latin America, their music contains a multi-cultural vibe that is guaranteed to impress anyone."

- SFReMezcla

Quijerema is a fine-tuned San Francisco Bay Area based quintet that has been recreating the concept of mixtura in World Music.

The ensemble infuses their original contemporary Latin American compositions with a deep sense of unique ancient musical traditions. New with primal, the real and ethereal permeate each performance—an amalgam of Quijeremá’s mastery of traditional music and the present. Still, the blending of rhythm, texture, and color in their music is seamless, transparent and one-of-a-kind .

As writer Willy Lizarraga states, Quijeremá “...manages to render a whole constellation of South American rhythms into a jazz idiom... how the cueca from Chile, tango from Argentina, waltz at its most Latin, landó from Peru, joropo from Venezuela, huaino from the Andes fuse into a musical continuum whose identity, no matter how jazzy, always remains rooted in the deep South, not of the U.S. but of the Americas.”

Members of the ensemble play over thirty instruments, and have performed worldwide and appeared on regional, national and international radio and television.

Founded in 2002, Quijeremá is:

Quique Cruz (Chile: strings, Andean wind instruments & percussion)
Jeremy Allen (USA: bass & percussion)
Maria Fernanda Acuña (Venezuela: percussion & venezuelan cuatro)
Elijah Samuels (USA: saxophones, clarinet)
John Calloway (USA: piano, flute & percussion)
 
Quijeremá performs in theaters, festivals, museums, cultural centers and corporate events. They also perform and conduct workshops for schools, libraries and other educational institutions. In addition to performance, Quijeremá specializes in scoring music for film.