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The demise of salsa has been greatly exaggerated
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Miami Herald, The demise of salsa has been greatly exaggerated >>
-by Jordan Levin
It's been raining on and off all evening, but the 15,000 people in the stands after a Marlins game at Dolphin Stadium, and several hundred more on the field, have stuck it out to hear the music.
By the time El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, the group that has been living up to its name as ''The Great Band'' of salsa for 45 years, roars on stage, people are dancing, waving Puerto Rican flags, and roaring back as the band sings out ``So you like salsa?''
Down in the crowd, 46-year-old Manny Rosales is dancing with 9-month-old grandson Aramis, both their round faces beaming with delight. ''Reggaeton is nice,'' says Rosales. ``But salsa is the music of Hispanics.''
''It's your roots, it's where you come from,'' says Aramis' mother, Arlene Lollazao, 26. ``Salsa is something in your blood.''
Recent conventional wisdom had held that salsa's time had passed, its vitality sapped by commercial formula, its popularity usurped by other Caribbean styles, and, most recently, its street cred and younger audiences stolen by reggaeton.
But the classic Latin dance music is proving surprisingly resilient.
In New York, the genre's birthplace, classic salsa has been making a comeback with increasingly popular salsa nights at several clubs and a cadre of fine musicians sworn to old school musical values, led by the Grammy winning Spanish Harlem Orchestra.
Longtime stars like Gilberto Santa Rosa, who plays the West Miami-Dade club La Covacha tonight, and Victor Manuelle, who sold out Madison Square Garden this winter, tour the world and remain a formidable commercial force. New groups like N'Klabe and NG2 are helping to keep the genre hot for younger audiences.
And Aug. 1 sees the release of the film El Cantante, starring Marc Anthony and Jennifer Lopez, which will bring the story of Hector Lavoe, the voice of classic 1970s New York salsa, to mainstream audiences.
In the more than 30 years since salsa's creation in New York's Spanish Harlem, the music has become a mainstay of Latin culture.
''Tropical music is music for your whole life,'' says Santa Rosa. ``Sometimes it takes a little rest, and I think that's what we've been living through. But there's a new generation of artists who are finding a way to keep this genre going.''
Says Ned Sublette, a Latin music historian and musicologist in New York: ``We don't have any other music that does what salsa does. It's music for head, heart and hips. We have this idea that dance music is dumb -- boom, boom, boom. Salsa is anything but that.''
A lack of commercial attention from record companies may have been good for salsa, forcing musicians to focus on playing live and on the music, rather than on selling themselves to labels or coming up with songs that fit on radio. Ed Morales, Latin music critic for New York Newsday, knows musicians who work out their songs by dancing to them.
''It's word of mouth and people wanting to do it,'' he says. ``This is one of the few things in the Latin music world where there's an audience being developed from the bottom up.''
The cultural bottom is where salsa started in the 1970s, as Latino musicians from poor New York neighborhoods mixed Cuban dance rhythms and big band orchestration with American urban energy and musical styles.
Artists like Willie Colon, Ruben Blades, Hector Lavoe and a host of other musicians on the independent Fania label invented supremely danceable music that spoke to a new American Latino subculture. And since so many of its musicians were New York Puerto Ricans, it also became a much loved style on their home island.
But the 1980s saw the rise of what was dubbed ''salsa romantica,'' where the experimentation, street stories and sharp musicianship of the original innovators gave way to pretty boy frontmen singing formulaic, radio-friendly romantic songs. In the mid- to late 1990s, salsa came back with a new generation of young, powerful singers, notably Marc Anthony and Victor Manuelle, and a vibrant club dance scene. That, too, lost its energy and settled into formula and imitators, making way for the rise of bachata, and, most recently, reggaeton.
So when Spanish Harlem Orchestra, with veteran session musicians playing classic, old school salsa, beat out longtime commercial stars Anthony, Manuelle and Santa Rosa in 2004 to win the Grammy for Best Salsa Album, it stunned the Latin music world. There are raves for their recently released third CD, United We Swing, with mostly original songs boasting classic salsa style, ferocious musicianship, sophisticated arrangements and exuberant danceability.
''We came along at the right time,'' says Omar Hernandez, the group's musical director and founder. ``The music had kind of lost its way for the last 15 years. People forgot about the essence of this music.
``It became formulaic, and the industry was driven by the commercial aspect. They wanted everybody to sound the same. That's a shame because our music is a lot more than that -- the development of New York City at the time [salsa was created] was unique, it lent itself to the way the music and culture developed that we took for granted. We realize now it was a special time.''
Spanish Harlem Orchestra's recreation of music from that special time is wowing audiences from Prague to Memphis -- it will play Miami's Gusman Center for the Performing Arts Sept. 22. Its audiences are largely either non-Latinos or older Hispanics longing for the salsa of their youth.
Although salsa's longevity has helped make it popular worldwide -- there are major artists from Colombia and Venezuela, salsa dance scenes in Los Angeles, Europe and Asia -- the musical culture of the '70s that gave rise to salsa has changed.
The economics and restrictions of today's commercial music world are unfriendly to a style that requires lots of musicians and thrives on unpredictable, live, dance-driven energy. The very things that make the genre great also make it difficult for it to reach the mainstream in its most genuine form.
And for music that was radically experimental when it was created, salsa today has become fairly conservative: If it's not structured a certain way, with certain elements, purists don't consider it salsa. While this helps preserve the music's strengths, it also can close it off to innovation.
Jose Conde, a Miami-reared Cuban-American musician who plays a fresh blend of Cuban and other tropical dance genres, says he and other young musicians experimenting with the style are largely shut out of the scene. ''I'm not booked in salsa clubs or festivals and I'm shunned by certain salsa DJs in New York,'' he says. ``They're very strict.''
And yet he loves and is inspired by the music.
''It's classic, it's wonderful,'' Conde says. ``The songs are great. The characters were alive and vibrant. That's never gonna die.'' 05/30/07 >> go there
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