Argentine accordionist, composer, and researcher Alejandro Brittes, who will tour in the US this October, has been declared one of the foremost contemporary chamamé ambassadors and innovators. Born of the centuries-long interaction between ritual practices of indigenous Guaraní and the Baroque music influences brought by Jesuits in the Mission period (16th to 18th Centuries), chamamé can be conceived of as a ritual that seeks to communicate with the Earth and the Universe and maintain harmony among humans, through music and dance that lead participants to moments of ecstatic trance. Often this ecstasy is viscerally expressed by participants through a sapucay, a piercing, spontaneous ancestral yell to release strong emotions pent up inside.