A Confluence of Circumstances

Eric Alfonso is a Cuban timbalero of several decades experience. For quite a while now, several members of our salsa band have been getting about a bit and Dan and Nathan, timbales players themselves, have become well acquainted with Eric and his musician colleagues in Salsa Celtica. Taking advantage of a gap in Salsa Celtica's touring schedule, the both of them invited Eric down south to sunny Yorkshire for a weekend of rampant Afro-Cuban noise-making, where he guested in one of our practices, and led a day-and-a-half of tuition.

It was an enlightening and much-needed injection of knowldege from an old hand. There are things one can't pick-up from books or YouTube - subtleties... nuances that one must experience in the flesh. To say that his trip made an impact is a little bit of an understatement. But what's really nice about the guy is that he wanted to see us do well; because he recognised instantly our musical approach as stemming from a genuine desire to understand the roots of his culture.

Since his visit, percussion development has been growing in cohesion and direction; so much so that our practice format has been amended slightly to capitalise on this, in the same way as we had made changes to the benefit of our melodics months ago. One of his main drives was in the use of breaks in our arrangements to build tension and add definition to our numbers. Although I had identified and written about this myself (see previous post), it required someone external to the band to provide the crucial impetus.

And I'm glad we're finally rolling on it.

But I would be doing 4de12 an injustice and leaving you the reader with the wrong impression if I didn't elaborate further. I believe that we are now in a stronger position to take on Eric's advice than we were just a couple of months ago, because of a confluence of circumstances: a line-up change with Wib moving onto bongó and Jim coming in on conga; Dan having built up more experience on timbales; listening to and learning from the recording and editing of timbales in our upcoming album; and feedback from our Leeds charity gig which we recorded off the desk.

The latter, good as it was, highlighted several avenues of development including the benefit of increased break arrangments - there being a marked contrast between the numbers that had them, and those that didn't. Suffice to say that we've got enough to keep us occupied until Eric's next visit.

Loo Yeo