ORQUESTA MANPLESA

Orquesta Manplesa began not as a band, but as a question.

One Saturday night in Adam’s Morgan, my high school friend Joe Lostumbo and I walked into Bossa to see the local group Bongo District tear up the stage. As we watched, one of the actors I’d just met at my new job, Camilo Linares, came over to say hi. At the time he was starring as Virgil, a Colombian cartel member in a play set in 1980s Miami (still carrying Virgil’s bad-boy swagger, which completely threw us off).

As the three of us talked, the conversation turned into a challenge: “What makes us any different from those guys on stage?” We looked at each other and realized the answer: nothing at all. Between us we already had congas, bass, and a singer who looked like he had just walked off a Miami Vice set. All we needed were the missing pieces.

That night became the seed of Orquesta Manplesa. What started as a half-joke between an actor, a poet, and a life-long musician has since grown into D.C.’s youngest salsa band.