El Condor Pasa

Los Incas El condor pasa 1963 (version originale)

El Condor Pasa (the Flight of the Condor)
~ Music of Peru ( Inca Music )

This is a song I never get tired of listening to.

I heard this song for the first time in the late 1960s in Taipei. I have
loved this song ever since, especially when I happened to come
across a group of Peruvian musicians playing it at a street fair
(San Fracisco, Boston, Munich, ..... etc).

History (from Wikipedia)

In 1913 Alomía Robles composed "El cóndor pasa" and the song was
first performed publicly at the Teatro Mazzi in Lima.

The musical group, "Los Incas" performed the song in Paris in 1960s
where it was heard by Paul Simon of Simon and Garfunkel."Los Incas"
told Simon, perhaps through ignorance, that the song was a 19th
century musical composition by an anonymous composer. Simon
became interested in the song and composed new lyrics for the
melody. The song appeared on Simon and Garfunkel's 1970 album
Bridge over Troubled Water.

In 1970 Alomía Robles' son, Armando Robles Godoy, filed a
copyright lawsuit against Simon and demonstrated that the song
had been composed by his father and that his father had copyrighted
the song in the United States in 1933. Godoy said that he bears no
ill will towards Simon for what he considers a misunderstanding.

"It was an almost friendly court case, because Paul Simon was very
respectful of other cultures. It was not carelessness on his part",
says Robles Godoy. "He happened to hear the song in Paris from a
vernacular group. He liked it, he went to ask them and they gave him
the wrong information. They told him it was a popular tune from the
18th Century and not my father’s composition. It was a court case
without further complications."


Simon & Garfunkel : El Condor Pasa (1970)


Yeh Tze