How do I know? Because ALL panpipe players from Ecuador (I have yet to find a single exception) play their panpipes with the low pipes on their left. Almost all players from Peru or Bolivia, on the other hand, play with the low pipes on their right. These two guys, the flutist and the guitarist, are probably Otavalenos from the Otavalo valley of Ecuador. They're the hardest working dudes in the Andean music business, and natural musical businessmen - other Andeans call the Otavalenos the Jewish people of South America for this reason. The Otavalenos work real hard and make a lot of money.
Now for the Believe It or Not section of this posting: The Pan Flute is an indigenous folk instrument of ROMANIA in Eastern Europe. It's NOT from South America, although similar instruments developed independently in South America - the zamponas, the sicus, the antara, etc... Think of the whole panpipe family of flutes as being genus Syrinx, with the common identifying characteristic of the family being a different pipe for each note, and no finger holes. The King of the Pan Flute, Gheorghe Zamfir is Romanian. The Andean bands started out playing their native zamponas, sicus, antaras, etc... but have increasingly switched over to Romanian style instruments - like the one featured in this video, mas o menos, riding on the coat tails of Zamfir's phenomenal popularity. Romania, sadly, does not want to take credit for what is probably their best known and loved contribution to world musical culture, the pan flute - they consider it a backward, rustic shepherd's instrument, and since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, they have been focused on catching up with the more modernized nations of Western Europe, so the government wants to shun all seeming vestiges of their backward, pastoral past.
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