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7	Mixing it Up Gilberto Santa Rosa reaffirms his top spot in tropical music while claiming new ground as a balladeer. read more...

What’s in his MIX?

Gilberto Santa Rosa speaks about his latest release Contraste while taking measure of his career and the music that made him.

By Victor Cruz-Lugo

By the time salsa mega-star Gilberto Santa Rosa was 14 years old, he’d already experienced the thrill of entertaining a crowd while singing for an orchestra. Today, more than three decades later, he has emerged as one of the leading salsa singers of his generation. With the recent release of Contraste (Sony/BMG), a double-CD featuring eight blistering tropical tracks and nine pop ballads, Santa Rosa reaffirms his top spot in tropical music while claiming new territory as a balladeer.
Even as this well-wrought salsa release reveals an artist at the height of his vocal and physical prowess, it also marks a crossroads for Santa Rosa. At 46, he openly discusses topics like his diabetes. He also challenges younger generations of tropical musicians to find their own voice within the genre.
Hispanic caught up with Santa Rosa at the offices of Sony/BMG in Miami Beach while the San Juan, Puerto Rico-born sonero promoted Contraste.
Santa Rosa today looks at once younger and older than one might remember him on previous CD covers. Gone is the moustache, revealing a wised up, but also boyish, olive face. And while he’s got the healthy heft you’d expect of a salsero living the good life, his movements, like his vocal phrasing, remain as spry and graceful as a cat’s and suggest a man of self-discipline. Watching him, there’s no surprise he is known for scorching two-and-a-half-hour music sets.
An impromptu request from a perky Latina television interviewer quickly reveals the quickness of Santa Rosa’s mind and the natural fluidity of his motions. In one take, he wraps up a plug for the Spanish-language television show, then thoughtfully transitions into a sit-down chat with Hispanic.
It’s an achievement that may appear incidental, but it actually reveals a lifetime spent before an audience, as well as his quiet determination to live up to his moniker, El caballero de la salsa, the Gentleman of Salsa.
Here’s what Santa Rosa had to say about his career and the music he loves:

Hispanic: What about Contraste is new, and what is typical of Gilberto Santa Rosa?
Gilberto Santa Rosa: What’s typical is the Gilberto Santa Rosa romantic salsa song. As a singer I really emerged in the mid-1980s. So I arrived as a salsa singer who had all of the qualities of the traditional salsa singers [from the 1970s], but I learned that I liked singing romantic songs and that I was good at it.
So what you’ll hear is my particular sound, and it’s a mixture between the old and the new. It’s salsa romantica with a very classic approach.

HM: Do you feel a debt to the soneros of the past?
GSR: I wouldn’t call it a debt, so much as a connection. I started singing [professionally] in 1976 ... so I feel a strong connection to [that older sound] ... in fact, I use it as the base to create the music I play now. That’s why you feel that connection in the music.

HM: Where’s the moustache?
GSR: Brother, I got rid of it March 2007. It had too many white hairs and I’m not the type to go around with a painted moustache. That’s just not me.

HM: Why so much interest in the life of sonero Tito Rodriguez, from the age of the bolero and the mambo?
GSR: My mother was a huge Tito Rodriguez fan ... He lived for a time in Puerto Rico and had a television show there. I watched the show when I was 8 years old in 1970, and he entered the universe of my childhood as this overwhelming television personality. And then there was the voice ... Technically, it had limitations, but he sang with great style and a unique approach that impacted me ... and he proved himself as a top singer in a variety of forms...
If you look at my career ... it’s the same kind of approach: He led his own orchestra, he was great with the public, he sang and dressed impeccably, and he knew how to present himself.

HM: What’s your favorite object in your Tito Rodriguez memorabilia collection?
GSR: The burgundy tuxedo Tito wore on the cover of his greatest bolero hits album. It was my mother’s favorite record of Tito’s and I received [the suit] as a gift from Tito’s son [percussionist and bandleader Tito Rodriguez, Jr.].

HM: What was the toughest point in your musical career and how did you survive it?
GSR: It was around 1996. I made a professional decision to dissolve my orchestra and then the trouble started. I thought, ‘Hey, all I wanted to do was sing and play the maracas, what’s this piece of paper that’s saying I’m in a lawsuit?’ It was the first time in my life, and I know it’s hard to believe, when I thought, ‘Hey, this thing about being a music artist has a dark side.’ But I got through it by not allowing myself to react on instinct. I kept my eye on the problem, yes, but at the same time I turned my back from it, and I didn’t feed it.

HM: We’ve had many different stages of tropical music over the decades. How do you see the future of salsa?
GSR: First of all, I believe in this music. But to believe in it also means realizing where it needs to be reinforced. What we need is new blood, new ideas in this music.
If you look back ... it’s always been the same music, with new approaches: Cubop, mambo, salsa romantica. Same thing, fresh ideas. The great strength of the young artists on the scene is that they choose to be salseros. The great weakness is that they want too much to please the fans. Why do I say this? Because they are repeating a formula, and it’s time that they presented a new one.
Look at the 1970s, when there were all of these amazing groups doing things differently, like the Lebron Brothers, for example. You knew it was tropical music, but there was something different here. You’d listen, and say, ‘Caramba! This isn’t Tito Puente or Tito Rodriguez, but there is something to this!’
And look at Willie Colon, who is the sound of salsa. He was the kid who had a new vision, a new form, and a new way of doing things. That’s what we need today, a new representative sound.
I’m trying to do this in my own way. But for me, it’s about maintaining a connection to the past. But the new guys need to find a new approach, so that their sound is uniquely the sound of their generation.

HM: You’ve had your share of success. What goals do you have left?
GSR: There’s a lot left to do. There are many places in Latin America where I haven’t brought my music and I’m looking forward to [performing in those places]. I want to get to know things going down, as opposed to up, so to speak. I want to go to Argentina, to Chile, to Uruguay. And if it happens, great! If not, then I’ll sit down and strategize about where I’m going during this next phase of the music.