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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 Stone in November that she almost stopped making music after Diaz’s death.
“For several months I didn’t know how to perform on stage without him, or how to write music without him,” Reyna said “He always trusted that I would do what was best for both of us. So that snapped me out of my imposter syndrome, but it left me with the question of, ‘How is this going to continue? Is this fair, is this what he wants?’ But the answer was always a resounding yes.”
Reyna Tropical is one among many of Reyna’s musical projects. Along with providing support to bands and performers including Karma Rivera, Raveena and Sleater-Kinney, Reyna is a member of the Cumbia trio Savilá, a group Portland music insiders voted WW’s Best New Band in 2018. Savilá last performed live together in 2022.
While she usually stays in the music world, Reyna makes music-related appearances outside it as well. Reyna is famously the founder of She Shreds Media, which reports on female and nonbinary guitar players. She also appeared in Dave Franco and Allison Brie’s Portland-filmed Amazon movie Somebody I Used To Know, playing bass in Franco’s fiancee’s band.
See Reyna’s recent performance below, and catch Reyna Tropical at Wonder Ballroom on July 12.