Seb's Hong Kong Salsa Blog

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 just returned from my first visit to Japan, and what a satisfying trip it was!

At the top of my list of things to do in Tokyo had been to meet, and hopefully dance with Mitsue. To give you readers a little bit of background, I had seen her perform with Alberto Romay in the VHS tape of the 2001 West Coast Salsa Congress. Their performance had been a cuban-styled tap-dance to conga rhythms, and had blown my mind away as well as inspired my dancing for years. Although I have not found the actual LA performance on YouTube, I found a similar one (almost as good) which I embedded below:
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One of the difficulties of DJing in Hong Kong is that local culture does not encourage people to be vocally critical. In other terms, you can play music the crowd dislikes, and you won’t hear about it. To make matters worse, a too-large proportion of the crowd will dance regardless of whether they like the music or not, so you can’t really gauge your effectiveness on whether the floor is busy or not.

In this article, I’m going to share three major tips for DJs (particularly for Hong Kong DJs, who really should be aware of this).
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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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Caribbean Soul is a performance team based out of New Jersey, led by the amazing Ismael Otero, who is sometimes nicknamed the million-moves-man. Most of their choreographies display a unique musicality that incorporates irreverent playfulness with external influences (often hip-hop) and creative accenting. Although they are not the most synchronized performance team in the circuit, their performances are always entrancing and inventive.
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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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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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