Seb's Hong Kong Salsa Blog

Archive for the ‘reviews’ Category

Despite the position I have previously regarding DJs playing salsa covers in dance clubs, I in fact rather enjoy listening to interesting covers on occasion, and even play a few once in a while when I DJ. I have recently come across a rather interesting 2009 album of salsa covers.

Venezuelan band Caracas Soul Connection have released their first album: Canciones Del Alma (Songs of the Soul), exclusively composed of salsa covers of classics of Soul, R&B and Pop.

Among the songs covered: Killing Me Softly With His Song, Ain’t No Sunshine, Just The Two of Us, Me and Mrs Jones, You are the Sunshine of My Life… One interesting point, which helps the feeling of odd familiarity you get when listening to this album, is that most songs actually start off with vocals in English, switching to Spanish as the energy and tempo pick up.
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I’ve been a longtime fan of internet salsa radios as a means to expand musical knowledge, especially as I am partial to listening to music while I work. My old-time favorite station was DJ Alvaro’s (of Barcelona) “Classic Salsa” station on Live365, which I regrettably stopped listening to when it turned VIP, and which I recently found out has stopped broadcasting altogether.
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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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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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