Seb's Hong Kong Salsa Blog

Archive for September, 2010

As a lover of old-school salsa, I have generally been disappointed at the quality of recent productions of salsa music.

That is, until last year, when I took a good close look at new releases, and discovered a number of quite worthy contenders.

The list below references some recent releases that I found interesting and want to recommend for salsa lovers.
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Back around summer 2003, I spent two days in Paris, transiting on my way back to Hong Kong. Inevitably, I had to check out some salsa clubs, meet new people, hear new music.

Unfortunately, it was so long ago that I don’t remember the names of the clubs and who the djs were. But I do remember one of the clubs, in which they played mostly Cuban music, but at one point, played some hard-core salsa, and in particular one song that had me running to the DJ booth to ask what it was. The DJ said it was Traigo Un Tumbao, by Fuego ‘77, and if I liked that, I should also check out Impacto Crea.
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For years now, I had been trying to find the name of a couple I recalled seeing in a performance that I had found extremely memorable. I finally found out that I had it myself, in a long-forgotten dvd. And I am sharing it with you.

To give you some context: the couple is performing to Celia Cruz’s song “Salsa de Tomate” which translates to “Tomato Sauce” (not a reference to dancing, but to the sauce). The theme of the song is about cooking a turkey (for the holidays, I presume) and the chorus is “put more tomato sauce on the turkey”. It’s a fast, up-beat and fun song, one of my favorites by Celia Cruz.
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Lebron was a band that I initially actively disliked. My early exposure was dominated by my impression of their most famous song, Salsa y Control, which seemed boring to my then-on1 mind, and too many songs that seemed to sound the same. Over the years, however, I revised that initial opinion, as I looked more closely at their music, and learned to better read the subtleties of salsa music.
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It isn’t often that I encounter great documentaries on salsa. In my opinion, salsa is generally misrepresented in mainstream media be it in movies (Dirty Dancing 2 – YUK!) or dance TV shows (I’m yet to see a single choreography on either Dancing With The Stars or So You Think You Can Dance that I feel represents what salsa really is).

By the way, talking about SYTYCD, they had Maria Torres (Eddie Torres’s wife) choreograph a Hustle routine this last season. Couldn’t they have her (or even better, Eddie Torres himself) do a mambo routine for the show ?????

Back to the original topic of this post, though: documentaries on salsa. A few weeks ago, a friend in China asked for my help in finding an online copy of a TV documentary about the history of mambo and salsa, that he wanted to show his students. It turns out that PBS, the TV production company, had actually posted the entire show onto their site.
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One of my favorite salsa artists, one that I never fail to place in a set, in one form or another, whenever and wherever I DJ, is the great pianist Larry Harlow.

Active since the sixties, in the glory days of Fania, he was the first pianist to be part of the celebrated Fania All Stars band. Known as El Judio Maravilloso (the marvelous Jew), he produced over 260 albums for the Fania label and others.
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