Salsa’s real home? It’s L.A.

latimes.com

Salsa’s real home? It’s L.A.

Dozens of orchestras help the style thrive. The beat of the city is Afro Caribbean.
September 13, 2007

Tutor a student such as myself. Ken Baldwin, a soft-spoken Japanese American, laid out simple patterns with precise instructions, focusing on the power of salsa to inspire your soul, and less on the showy pirouettes most students expect to learn.

But in Los Angeles, it’s often what you learn to appreciate after the dance lessons that’s just as magical: a performance by a superlative salsa band. The lively variations on the feverish combination of Afro Caribbean music’s percolating percussion and funky brass riffs run like threads through the fabric of a city where salsa thrives thanks to dozens of orchestras that, against all odds, continue to ply their trade.

“I know it’s kind of incredible to say this, but Los Angeles has more of a salsa scene than New York these days,” says Oscar Hernández, leader of the Spanish Harlem Orchestra, the most successful and respected salsa combo in the U.S. “In New York, the quality of the music may be a bit higher, but the generation that supported salsa 30 years ago has moved on. In L.A., Latinos from all walks and nationalities are getting into this music, which explains why the scene is bigger here.”

The variety of available soundscapes is actually breathtaking.

Consider:

* After a number of years following the aggressive Cuban style known as timba, Son Mayor has recently returned to the classic sound of ’70s New York, when artists such as Willie Colón and Ray Barretto took the movement to its creative apex by combining the raw danceability of Afro Cuban styles with big band jazz and gritty R&B influences. Son Mayor’s version of the Roberto Roena classic “Con Los Pobres Estoy” is, in the words of bandleader Erasmo “Eddie” Ortiz, “brutally violent.”

* Led by conservatory-trained trombonist Denis Jirón, Rumbankete anchors its epic sound on majestic layers of trombones — following the aesthetic of pioneering orchestras such as Eddie Palmieri’s La Perfecta and Manny Oquendo’s Conjunto Libre. Rumbankete’s cover of the Libre standard “Alabanciosa” is a sophisticated delight.

* Favoring a lighter, more elegant sound, Charangoa is the modern version of a typical Cuban charanga — a tropical ensemble that combines joyous violins with acrobatic flute solos. The ultimate charanga band was Cuba’s Orquesta Aragón. Charangoa follows its sunny, ever-smiling parameters.

* The chocolate-voiced Ricardo Lemvo, a native of Congo, has fused the rootsy vibe of classic Cuba with the spiraling guitars of Congolese rumba. The result is dance music at its most transcendental. Lemvo is the only local bandleader who regularly releases high-quality CDs of original material.

* Led by Costa Rican trumpet player Oswaldo Bernard, Opa Opa is noted for the voracious appetite with which it embraces all shades of the tropical palette: The band performs Dominican merengue, Cuban boleros, Puerto Rican bomba and Colombian cumbia with equal panache.

* Sponsored by Albert Torres, the dancer and promoter who is almost single-handedly responsible for the creation of the local salsa scene, former auto mechanic Johnny Polanco has developed into a talented multi-instrumentalist and leader of a well-oiled ensemble that performs virtually every day of the week. Their cover of Spanish Harlem Orchestra’s 2004 scorcher “Un Gran Día en el Barrio” is almost as good as the original.

The list goes on: Yari Moré. Chino Espinoza y los Dueños del Son. Orquesta la Palabra. The Echo Park Project. Susie Hansen. Octavio Figueroa y la Combinación. Luis Centeno y su Orquesta Melaza. And many more.

Hernández, a quintessential New Yorker, rose as one of the most talented pianists and arrangers in the field during the ’80s, when he recorded seminal albums with Barretto and Rubén Blades.

Last year, Hernández got married and moved to L.A., where he spends most of the time when he is not touring with the Spanish Harlem Orchestra. During this year’s edition of Albert Torres’ Salsa Congress, he was invited onstage by venerable Puerto Rican combo La Sonora Ponceña. The prospect of a local orchestra led by him could revolutionize the entire scene.

“I’ve thought about forming a local band that I could play with whenever I am in town,” he says. “The problem is that many of the salsa musicians in L.A. are underpaid and disrespected. They are in a situation where they play four sets a night and get $80 for their effort. I refuse to work on that level. With the Spanish Harlem Orchestra, the musicians are well paid. I’ve made it a point to emphasize quality over quantity.”

Tropical bands have been criminally underpaid from the very inception of the genre. But the musicians carry on, undeterred. The cliché, in this case, applies: It’s all about the music.

“The local bands, we’re all on the same boat,” Opa Opa’s Bernard says with a laugh. “None of us is rich, but we all take turns performing in the few available venues. You don’t play this music for the money. You do it for love.”

Says Rumbankete’s Jirón, who has performed with Kanye West, Sting, Queen Latifah and the L.A. Philharmonic: “Having my own salsa band plays a different role in my life. It’s like therapy.”

Musicians are not the only ones who find therapeutic elements in this music. “I can have the worst day ever, but the moment I get on the dance floor, it all goes away,” says Lisa Bellamore, a publicist who learned salsa dancing when she lived in Boston. “The environment seems incredibly soulful to me. It’s a space where it’s OK to let go. When you hear those bass lines — that beat that drives everything in salsa — you have no choice but surrender to it.”

According to Son Mayor’s Ortiz, it is the support of the dancers that keeps the local scene moving.

“We owe our very existence to them,” he offers. “And they’re not only Latinos. Many of our fans are Anglos who got the salsa bug, and when we play at Alhambra’s Granada, there are a lot of Asians on the floor. I think it’s great that all these different ethnic groups are having so much fun with our music.”

As the months went by, my lessons at Mama Juana’s began to pay off. The circle was beginning to close: My dancing was somewhat adequate. I would not embarrass my wife and daughter at family parties anymore.

Most important, my love for the music was stronger than ever. Performances by the likes of Son Mayor and Polanco reinforced my notion that salsa is the quintessential expression of the Latin American experience. It has humor and tragedy, eros and Thanatos, academic virtuosity and streetwise sensibility. At its best, salsa rocks harder than rock.

On a recent return to Mama Juana’s, I asked Baldwin about that special moment in the basic step — the hesitation on the four count.

“The pause is like that moment when you throw a ball in the air — it’s not going up anymore, but not coming down either,” he says. “For a second, the ball is floating, transferring its energy from rising to falling. The energy is still there, but it’s suspended in the air, weightless.”

Suddenly, he looked surprisingly serious.

“Don’t come back here on Wednesdays,” he said sternly. “I don’t want to see you in the beginner’s class anymore.”

He added with a smile:

“From now on, you are an intermediate student.”

Toronto Film Festival

A couple of reports on the Toronto International Film Festival. The Iraq War is at the forefront this year as some of the featured movies focus on the murderous and tragic consequences of the US occupation.

canadianpress.com

Movies about Iraq war plentiful at Toronto film festival

TORONTO (CP) — Elliot Ruiz is movie-star handsome and delivers a memorable performance in “The Battle for Haditha,” one of a crop of war-themed films premiering this year at the Toronto International Film Festival.

So where did the docudrama’s director, Britain’s Nick Broomfield, find the 23-year-old Philadelphia native who’s already caught the attention of Will Smith’s production company? In the U.S. Marine Corps.

All the marines in “The Battle for Haditha,” in fact, are played by real-life military men, including Canadian Eric Mehalacopoulos, who joined the marines when he was 18 after moving to the United States. Both Ruiz and the Montreal-born Mehalacopoulos have had tours of duty in Iraq.

That actual marines would be interested in acting in a film that had the potential to portray them as a band of psychopathic killers speaks volumes about the political climate four years into a prolonged and bloody conflict that’s killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and almost 4,000 American troops.

“I didn’t want the film to make the marines look bad,” the 26-year-old Mehalacopoulos says over coffee at a downtown hotel. “But I do think the war’s wrong. I’m not going to lie. I don’t think it’s right. There’s a lot of people dying.”

War-themed movies are plentiful at this year’s festival, including Brian DePalma’s scathing “Redacted,” talk-show host Phil Donahue’s directorial debut “Body of War,” and Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah.”

But with the exception of DePalma’s film, which explores the rape of a young Iraqi girl by a group of monstrous marines, there are precious few flinty-eyed villains to be found in battle fatigues patrolling the dusty, deadly villages of Iraq.

The true ogres, most of the filmmakers suggest, are the ones in Washington who sent the troops into Iraq and are calling the shots.

Even in the Reese Witherspoon-Jake Gyllenhaal movie “Rendition,” a film not about the Iraq war but the assault on civil liberties in the aftermath of 9-11, it’s Meryl Streep’s CIA director who seems even more of a sociopath than the men she hopes are torturing the truth out of terror suspects in Egypt.

While some of the marines in “In the Valley of Elah” are most certainly psychopathic, Haggis makes it clear that it was their time in Iraq that has caused their transformations from dutiful sons to short-fused killers.

And “Body of War” is a sympathetic look at 25-year-old Tomas Young, paralyzed from a bullet to his spine after serving in Iraq for less than a week. He signed up after 9-11 thinking he was going to Afghanistan, but ended up in Iraq instead.

Broomfield’s film masterfully manages not only to show the war from the Iraqi perspective, but to humanize the marines, even as they execute 24 innocent and unarmed Iraqi men, women and children in retaliation for a roadside bomb that killed one of the U.S. men.

The film doesn’t truly vilify anyone, not the men who plant the bomb nor the jittery soldiers who commit a terrible crime in a moment of madness – but who were, in fact, following standard marines procedure to take out everyone in a house if it’s believed to be “hostile.”

“They’re little kids, these guys who join,” Broomfield says. “I hate the way they join the army and they turn into killing machines, but you can’t blame the marines. If you teach a dog to be an attack dog, which is what they are, don’t be surprised when they attack.”

Haggis, who based “In the Valley of Elah” on actual events, notes that films usually take three or four years to get made, and that filmmakers have been grappling with these issues for a while.

“I think it’s a reaction, probably, to what’s happened in the States,” he said Monday about the slew of Iraq-related films at the festival.

“We had a president at the time who had an 80, 90 per cent approval rating and he was telling us not to bother thinking, because he’d do the thinking for us. … A man who said it’s in fact unpatriotic to question what was happening in Iraq and that we were no better than the enemy if we questioned these things. And filmmakers, artists, we don’t like being told stuff like that.”

Broomfield is blunt: he hopes his movie and others like it will persuade the U.S. government to pull their troops out of Iraq.

“What I like about all these movies is they are all agents of social change,” says Broomfield, the cutting-edge documentarian behind 1998’s “Kurt and Courtney.”

“It’s the runup to the American election so it’s an important time to influence the American public now in a way that goes beyond the television news. You can hear on TV that 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians were killed, but you don’t get the human story, you don’t get to know who these people were and what they were doing at the time. And what cinema can do is to humanize these stories and make them very real to us so we can make more informed decisions about a withdrawal from Iraq.”

From the perspective of marines Mehalacopoulos and Ruiz, Broomfield nailed it – both the state of relentless anxiety they lived with every day in Iraq and the true face of Arab culture, much of it focused on children and family.

“It’s real, all of that stuff in the movie – it’s from us and from what we went through and what we saw,” Mehalacopoulos says.

Ruiz adds: “Nick got the real thing. He didn’t take sides. You even see the terrorist who planted the bomb and then feels bad about it later. Everybody is a human being in the movie.”

…………………….

reuters.com

Toronto film festival turns gaze from war to love
By Cameron French

TORONTO (Reuters) – A quirky teen-pregnancy yarn and a love story involving a life-sized sex doll have won over critics at the Toronto International Film Festival, stealing the spotlight from darker films on war and politics.

While films with themes wrought from the war in Iraq and global terrorism have drawn a generally positive response, lighter fare such as “Juno” and “Lars and the Real Girl” have also emerged from the pack.

“Lars”, which starts 2007 Oscar nominee Ryan Gosling as a man obsessed with a sex doll, has been lauded for a clever script that turns an uncomfortable subject into a love story.

“Juno”, directed by “Thank You For Smoking” director Jason Reitman, is about 16-year-old pregnant teen who decides to put her baby up for private adoption.

“They are both comedies, and they are both very, very broad, and yet very very sweet,” said David Poland of MovieCityNews.com.

These smaller films have triumphed in the face of larger hype for Iraq-themed films such as Brian De Palma’s “Redacted” and Paul Haggis’s “In the Valley of Elah”, as well as Gavin Hood’s “Rendition”, a tense look a the practice of detaining terrorism suspects in foreign prisons.

“We have plenty of Iraq and war and blood, but I think the truth is that a combination of films that were not as impactful as people were expecting has kind of made that a secondary issue in a weird way,” Poland said.

The thematic bent recalls the flood of films beginning in the late 1970s critical of the Vietnam War, such as “The Deer Hunter” and “Coming Home”.

But with the war in Iraq still going on, some say audiences may not be ready to step back and look objectively at its consequences, an argument that may become more apparent when these films hit the box office.

“It may be that they all cannibalize each other. It may be too much too soon, way too much,” said Pete Hammond, film critic for Maxim magazine.

OSCAR RUN-UP

The festival, which will have screened 349 films from 55 countries by the time it wraps up on Saturday, is considered by many the kickoff to Oscar season, as it features the North American premieres of many films that will be considered for key awards.

Hammond said it’s still too early to get a good sense of which films will be front-runners, but he said some performances have already been generating buzz.

He pointed to Cate Blanchett, though not for the heavily-hyped “Elizabeth: The Golden Age”, in which she reprises her role as the 16th century English monarch.

While “Elizabeth” has thus far drawn a mixed reaction, Blanchett’s turn as Bob Dylan” in “I’m Not There,” has been praised.

“I think that’s a slam dunk nomination for her as supporting (actress),” Hammond said.

Also garnering a positive response has been Casey Affleck’s portrayal of Robert Ford alongside Brad Pitt in “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford,” a film that has also been lauded by critics.

Critics have also warmed to the Sean Penn-directed “Into the Wild”, and the Coen brothers’ violent “No Country for Old Men”, which was well received at the Cannes Film Festival.

Don Pedro Albizu Campos Vive !