Puerto Rican teens, adopted by Mexico
Kaleidoscope
Kaleidoscope started as a group of Puerto Rican teenagers led by Francisco Tirado and Orlando Vázquez. In 1967 they went to Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic for what was supposed to be a two-week club booking, decided to stay, and painted their instruments in psychedelic colors to match their new name. After winning a Dominican music festival in 1968 they recorded at Fabiola Studio in Santo Domingo. Their real audience came only after a Peruvian contact took the master tapes to the Mexican label Orfeón, which pressed their self-titled album in a run of roughly six hundred copies in 1969. Heavy radio play and Mexican television appearances followed, and a band that had never actually been Mexican became known there simply as "the Kaleidoscope of Mexico." The music turned up again decades later, sampled on Beyoncé's Lemonade.
Bombay Café