The Peruvian cumbia band Los Mirlos play a Tiny Desk Concert

Los Mirlos have taken cumbia amazonica into NPR's office. The band played a Tiny Desk Concert released on 17 September, more than fifty years after Jorge Rodriguez Grandez started the group in his home town of Moyobamba in northern Peru.

The style they play has a specific geography. Cumbia began in Afro-Colombian communities and spread across the Spanish-speaking world, picking up a local accent everywhere it landed. In Peru it took hold among oil workers deep in the Amazon, and what came out of that is identifiable in a bar: electric, reverb-soaked guitar that owes as much to surf records as to anything Colombian.

The set ran to five songs. They played La Danza de Los Mirlos, La Fuga del Jaguar, Llanto en la Selva, Las Noches and a pairing of La Pandilla with Dona Guillermina, a sequence that covers the band's best-known material and its deeper catalogue in the same half hour.

Seven musicians made the trip. Jorge Rodriguez Grandez sang and played tambourine, Jorge Luis Rodriguez took guitar and keys, Danny Jhonston played guitar, Urbano Ramirez bass, Roger Rodriguez guiro and maracas, Carlos Rengifo congas and bongos, and Genderson Pinedo drums and timbales. Three Rodriguez names on one stage is not a coincidence: this is a family band as much as a group.

Between songs they talked. Producer Felix Contreras writes that the band used their time behind the desk to trace a route through small towns and cities across the Amazon, telling stories and declaring their affection for cumbia and for the tropical country they come from. Calling them cultural ambassadors is his phrase, and on the evidence of the set it is not an exaggeration.

The session sits inside a bigger programme. El Tiny, NPR's Latin Music Month takeover, runs from 15 September to 15 October and spans jazz, Tejano, norteno and ska; Los Mirlos are the Peruvian entry in a month that deliberately refuses to treat Latin music as one thing.

Fifty years is the number that makes this notable. Bands that last that long usually coast; Contreras describes a group still pumping out cumbia grooves without visible effort, which is a different proposition from a legacy act being wheeled out for an anniversary.

NPR did not say whether the audio will be released separately from the video. Our other latin coverage includes the death of the Colombian singer Toto La Momposina, and the Tiny Desk has been used to similar effect by Napalm Death, who opened a circle pit in the same office.