1	Film & TV Keep your eye out for up-and-coming actor Rick Gonzalez. read more...
2	Music The rhythms of salsa rebel Wayne Gorbea. read more...
3	Books Joe Conzo, Jr. documents the birth of hip-hop. read more...
4	Calendar Our monthly list of premier events throughout the U.S. read more...

MUSIC

A Piquant Constant
Salsa rebel Wayne Gorbea earns a retrospective release

By Victor Cruz-Lugo

You won't hear pianist and bandleader Wayne Gorbea on any big name salsa record label. But those in the know recognize him as one of the true living stalwarts of salsa dura, that hard-driving, musician-centric, more traditional approach to Afro-Cuban dance music.
Most recently, his career is surveyed on Introducing Wayne Gorbea’s Salsa Picante (World Music Network, www.worldmusic.net), an 11-track release spanning more than three decades of this seminal salsero’s career. Compiled by tropical music author, collector, and cover art curator Pablo Yglesias (aka DJ Bongohead), this disc forms a compelling presentation of a sound, style and personality that’s been a constant on the music scene since 1973.
With nostalgia for Gorbea’s tougher sound attracting listeners around the world, and with a few lucky breaks late in his career, this top musician has done the near impossible. He has remained an indefatigable force on the tropical music scene for the whole of his lengthy career, at the same time retaining a fierce grip on his artistic freedom. In a music environment ruled by big labels, mega-distribution deals, purely commercial interests, and even the specter of payola for radio play, Gorbea’s achievement is no small feat.
“I consider myself a Puerto Rican, or you can say, a Nuyorican, a Boricua,” says the Bronx native. “I’ve got Puerto Rican blood all the way, and it boils all the time,” Gorbea adds, revealing a clue to the temperament that kept him off the big record labels throughout the 1970s and 1980s, when many of the best salsa artists flocked to the Fania label and later to Ralph Mercado’s RMM firm.
Gorbea is prickly in a New York sort of way. But it’s that same prickliness that kept him stubbornly playing salsa with a hard Afro-Cuban edge even when the international market began embracing the softer sounds of salsa romantica. And it’s also that same unabashed candor that earned him friends at fine, pioneering smaller companies like Gabriel Oller’s SMC label in the 1970s. His independent streak also led Gorbea to form WayneGo, his own record venture in 1980. And in 1998, Gorbea beat leading artists Jimmy Bosch and the Spanish Harlem Orchestra to the punch by starting the salsa dura resurgence with his release Cojele el gusto.
Introducing Wayne Gorbea Salsa Picante opens with 2006’s hard driving title track Prakatun!, featuring Salsa Picante, Gorbea’s present core group of players with Frankie Otero on vocals and musical director Tom Levy on trumpet. The CD then dips back to 1978’s classic ode to the difficulties of going your own way in the music business, Dejame Un Lado (Save me a Side). The influence here is clearly Charlie and Eddie Palmieri, two of Gorbea’s musical heroes. This forms the basic formula of the CD: brilliant scorchers born in the recent past, living alongside classics from the 1970s and 1980s. The constants are the relentlessly driving grooves engineered to keep serious dancers and listeners marinating in a hot and tasty Afro-Cuban stew.
Introducing Wayne Gorbea Salsa Picante concludes with two live tracks from Gorbea’s 2004 release Live in New York. El Yo-Yo, the first of the pair, is a Cortijo cover that slips back and forth into Tito Puente’s timbale-blasting Ran-Kan-Kan. La Lengua, a marathon piece, appropriately closes out the CD for this artist whose career has spanned many sonic miles.
At press time, Gorbea was preparing for a gig in Amsterdam, where he’ll entertain fans more familiar with his career than most North Americans. “If they don’t dance, then I don’t get paid; they won’t call me back again,” he quips. “I have to stimulate the senses. I even play at funerals and the dead do rise!”

Dance Salsa

Sidestepper

Buena Vibra Sound System
Palm Pictures
www.palmpictures.com

Sidestepper founder Richard Blair succeeds in bringing many worlds together on a disc that for the first time captures the rhythmic range of his group, whether it is gigging in the hippest insider club in Bogota, or pulsing in London. The rhythms and spirit of Colombia are at the heart of Buena Vibra Sound System, but this extraordinary CD also draws influences from Jamaica and Nigeria, as well as South America. Here, roots music lives in perfect harmony with the trendiest dance music you’re likely to hear on the planet. Is that jazz you’re hearing, Latin funk or even reggaeton? It may be all the above—and more. The nine tracks exist in a sonic time zone of their own.

Tiempo Libre

What You’ve Been
Waiting For (Lo Que Esperabas)
Shanachie Entertainment
www.shanachie.com

One of the hottest salsa CDs to emerge on the market comes from this band comprised of eight former top tropical sidemen and led by pianist Jorge Gomez. After individually backing a variety of Cuban artists—from Albita to Arturo Sandoval—this group of U.S.-based Cuba-educated musicians have merged to launch a release of 10 sizzling tracks. Here, you’ll hear where Afro-Cuban dance music was headed all along: toward a workable synthesis of modern jazz with the feel-it-in-the-gut demands of the dance floor. Tune into this CD and hear what timba, a Cuban creation, sounds like when it’s nurtured and cultivated in the U.S.