Pasillo

Pasillo is a song genre of the northern Andes, national genre of Ecuador and deeply rooted in Colombia and Venezuela, descended from the European waltz as it was transformed in nineteenth-century salons. Sung in Spanish to guitars, requinto and sometimes piano or string trio, it carries intensely romantic, melancholic verse — lost love, memory, the homeland — in a lilting triple meter that quickens in its Ecuadorian form. Singers such as *Carlota Jaramillo*, the queen of the genre, and *Julio Jaramillo*, who carried the pasillo "Fatalidad" across Latin America, made it the defining sound of Ecuadorian musical identity.