SalsaDiary's Revival

I'd wondered whether this day would arrive. Would I ever feel it necessary to post in salsadiary? To articulate thoughts on dance? Or had things moved on, and there no longer be any need to do so?

The intervening two years have been eventful; all the more reason to make the time to reflect - call it a part of Continuous Professional Development (CPD). And now that there's time to draw breath, the chance to write in this way is gladly taken, even as I sit here in the marvellous Diamond amongst university students preparing for their final exams. There's plenty to say. In the intervening space where this blog has been silent, there's been:

• The birth of Parranda
  A latin dance club night with friends Esref and Steve
• A return to regular dance instruction
  Transferable skills-based workshops on Caribbean dance
• Loads of concerts and venues visited
  Supporting live music and fellow promoters (to be reviewed)
• Fulfillment of a writing commission
  An entry for the international volume of the Encyclopaedia of Popular Music of the World (EPMOW)
• Leading-edge dance research
  Following on from my presentation at the CID-UNESCO 32nd World Congress on Dance Research, answering the question "Can the gender and cultural bias inherent in salsa's social dance instruction be eliminated, and its effects counterbalanced?"
• Plenty of dance literature
  Encountered during the course of the EPMOW commission (to be reviewed)
• Tons of music
  Acquired to support my return behind the decks for Parranda (to be reviewed)

Some of these will be back-filled to the relevant date, and will have a more retrospective feel to their composition. This is to be expected. The rest will flow a natural course. Here goes...

Loo

A Place Or A Name?

I've been using Facebook as a research resource for a project I'm working on: looking at salsa all over the world, with an especially keen eye on communities where salsa is not indigenous like Asia and Australia. I signed in one morning to find that Bosco had left me a question about an experience he had in India which triggered a flurry of dialogue. Here's the (edited for brevity) wall-to-wall:

[begins]

Jose María Bustos:
Loo, as a musician I gotta ask you, while playing in Mumbai a woman walked up to me and said she loved my music, but why was it 'all on two' ? I glared at her and explained that there is no such thing as 'on one' or 'on two' music its all the same, but you can choose to dance it on one or on two.

Who has started this rumor that muscians actually sit down and say 'oh, lets write an 'on one' or an 'on two' track today. Its mambo, cha cha, timba whatever but never one or two. Can I get a witness on this!? or an I missing something here?

Loo Yeo:
I don't go out to write songs for 'on1' or 'on2', I don't know of any artists who do. However, you can certainly take a song and interpret it in a way that certain 'clans' of dancers would associate with. I'll be brave and say that the association occurs at the dance pedagogic end.

Very interesting experience you had there! What music did you play?

Also, I'm able to give you a more thorough response via a blog article. Mind if I address it by opening using the below (above in this case) as a quote?

Jose María Bustos:
Please do, by all means! Frankly I see it being bad for salsa if dance school perpetuate this notion and bad for music sales as well. You are correct it is a dance school notion and should be nipped in the bud!

Jose María Bustos:
Johnny Cruz, Bobby Valentin, Cheo Navarro, Willie Rosario, Issac Delgado, Hector Ramos, Mulenza, Eklan...

Loo Yeo:
hmm. You kept to Puerto Rican/Nuyorican salsa mainly? Was the Issac material pre-timba?

Jose María Bustos:
Dude, I play NYC style and the Issac is post Timba, as he's now amercianised himself with a more Miami sound, beat and arrangements. But I can mix it up with the best of em! Which brings me to Soneros All Stars 'La Timba Soy Yo' This is... ...my kind of Timba!!

Loo Yeo:
I think I understand more about the context of the lady in Mumbai's question. NYC salsa could have been associated with On2 purely on a geographical basis; instead of understanding which musical features should be significantly prominent (irrespective of source location) which might best suit an On2 style.

[ends]

NYC style. NYC salsa.

If we're talking dance then are we referring to Eddie Torres On2? Palladium or Power 2? How about Boogaloo? That's a style born of the great city. And Pachanga too. Both the last two are ostensibly On1...

And is the concept of synchronising a movement with beat two specific to NYC? Is "{anything}2" a NYC trademark? What of contratiempo or en clave which have been Cuban phenomena for more than a century?

What sort of music is New York salsa best danced to? Is it that which simply comes from New York? Fania, RMM, salsa dura, salsa romántica, DLG, Yerba Buena, La Excelencia, Orquesta Broadway, Wayne Gorbea?

What about El Gran Combo or Sonora Ponceña if they'd recorded in Puerto Rico?

Reading Mary Kent's biography of Eddie Torres featured on http://www.eddietorres.com/salsa.html

[quote]
"With no concept of timing, technique or theory, his instruction consisted of rudimentary pointers: "You hear that accent? That means you break forward with the left foot and when you hear it again, you break back." This is known as dancing on two, Eddie would soon find out.
Breaking on two meant that of a four beat measure, you stepped forward with the left foot on the second beat and on the second beat second measure you stepped back on the right foot. According to Eddie's mentor, Tito Puente, that's why beat two is so popular, because it compliments the tumbao of the conga and the rhythm section."
[unquote]
©1995 Mary Kent. All Rights Acknowledged.

It's exactly consistent with what he and I talked about in '96 when I first started dancing his style: then branded "Street 2".

I've played a lot of Latin percussion since, and realise that the accent Eddie's talking about is the slap stroke of the tumbao moderno on the conga. It's played on (what European-trained musicians recognise as) beat two. New York-style mozambique, a favoured rhythm of Eddie Palmieri, also has slap strokes on beat two; as well as on the 'and of 1' and 'and of 4' every other bar.

A caballo, also interpreted on the conga for pachanga, has slap strokes on beats one and three, with a hardly-audible ghost stroke on beat two. Slap strokes are generally optional in another New York favourite, the guaguancó originally from the West Cuban ports of Matanzas and La Habana (the slaps would precede the open tones to add definition, and work a fill in the phrase).

This means that if we were slavishly to adhere to the raison d'etre of Street 2, we would mainly be dancing only songs containing a tumbao moderno and NYC mozambiques. And hence any defensible critique of a DJ playing mainly "On2" tracks would require the critic being able to distinguish the likes of mozambiques, chachachás, and guarachas from the other likes of pachangas, guaguancós and songos.

Referring again to the first line of the quote from Mary Kent - I seldom come across On2 dance instructors, or On1 ones for that matter, who have a strong enough understanding of: the rhythmic structures of salsa, and the purposes which the On1 and On2 time-steps are meant to achieve, to be able to communicate this clearly to their students.

Sadly, the gap in this knowledge is papered over with the dogma 'NYC-style salsa dance is danced to NYC salsa music'.

More regretfully, this façade hides the richness of the basic time-step and how it may be varied to interpret the breadth of salsa's music. How many dancers think that there is only one way of executing the basic time-step, and that they've learned it already?

I know first-hand that the charismatic creator of "Street 2" emphasises adaptability, not rigidity. What makes him great to this very day, even when there are others who are flashier, younger and faster, is his desire to understand the Whys and to make sure that he fulfills seriously his responsibilities as an educator - that his students are informed to the best of his ability.

An educator empowers his students to choose, and eventually to own their knowledge. I stopped dancing On2 years ago. My partners now dance with me.

I should like that the rising stars of the salsa dance-teaching scene remember that there is more to it than just the excitement of travel, glamour of performance, and the adulation at the congresses. There is the very real task of being an educator, which unarguably requires more commitment than any prolonged training for a stage show.

And I should like that their young charges continue to ask the 'why?' of them, to release their ultimate potential.

Yeo Loo Yen

Preface: The Boogaloo. José María Bustos. (Part 1)

DJ Bosco is THE purple patch
at the Singapore International Salsa Festival
©Copyright 2008 José María Bustos. All Rights Acknowledged.

A long-distance partner-in-crime, more affectionately known as Bosco, messaged me just the other day. Technology was having him in a Half-Nelson and keeping him from posting up an article he'd put together on the boogaloo. I tagged-teamed him right back listing a number of break-holds that he might deploy to counter the PC of Inestimable Evil; one of which was an offer to post the article here in salsadiary on his behalf. Bosco went for it, escaped, and quickly made off to Langkawi for a gig.

So this is it. My promise to him.

But instead of putting it up 'cold', I felt that it would only be right to put a preface it. I don't often put up articles from other people ...come to think of it, this would be the first external contribution to this salsa blog. But somehow it's appropriate that it should come from Bosco.

Bosco and I were introduced to each other in a professional setting several years ago; we were both qualifying a promising business opportunity while I was back in Singapore on Verdant's behalf. At the close of our very first meeting, it transpired that we had something very deeply in common - our need for salsa. Our families have gone on to become good friends.

And since time, in his guise as DJ Bosco, José María has established himself as THE leading killer on the decks of the Asian salsa scene.

I don't say that lightly - I enjoy his choice of music as much as I have that of Henry Knowles or Mauricio Reyes. I'd wager that much of that sensitivity is drawn from his experience as a participant observer during salsa's golden era in New York, an asset few DJs worldwide can have claim to.

On that last count, I'll let a selection of excerpts from his biography do the talking:

"He was also a member of... the ‘Copacetic Dragons’ of which Boogaloo band leader, ‘Joe Bataan’ was a starting member of the senior division known only as ‘The Dragons’. His sister was dating an up and coming salsa trombonist known as ‘Johnny Colon’ and DJ Bosco was busy lending support to his neighborhood friend George Rodriquez (vibes), Eddie Muniz (percussion) and the late Luis Bonilla (congas) who were starting a group they called ‘The New Swing Sextet’ which is still one of his favorite bands today and recently released a killer album.

"At the age of twelve DJ Bosco talked his way into a Salsa Sunday afternoon dance hall party at Colgate Gardens by convincing the legendary Barry Rogers (of Eddie Palmieri band fame) to allow him to carry his trombone into the dance hall.

"By the age of 16 DJ Bosco was a regular at all of New York’s dance halls such as the Embassy Ballrooms, The Palladium, Basin Street East (which featured Richie Ray and Orchestra Broadway) as well as The Hunts Point Place, the club where the top musicians would go after hours (beginning at 3 a.m.) for impromptu jam sessions from which the Allegre All Stars emerged, and eventually evolved into the Fania All Stars.

"...he befriended one of the great Latin Jazz Giants and his brother - Gerry and Andy Gonzales of Fort Apache Band fame and who have gone on to play with many of the great bands of the times.

"DJ Bosco believes much of his popularity is do to these early experiences, understanding, memories and friendships with many of the top musicians of that time"

- Copyright©2008 José María Bustos. All rights reserved.

Spending time with José María is a joy, whose vivid recollections of THE iconic era are an invaluable window through time - all brought to life by his music. Bosco, with or without his DJ hat on, is an artist, a gentleman and a scholar.

Bosco> There goes all your street cred with that last line, 'mano!

(On to Part Two.)

Loo Yen

Kinesthetics, Neurolinguistics & Pictures

To add pictures or not, that's been the question.

One part of me has wanted to let the words speak for themselves - in much the same way as a novel leaves it up to one's creative mind to conjure up the imagery; certainly only a rare handful of visual adaptations have ever been able to match the books that have been played out in my mind's eye. I've felt that maybe the inclusion of a picture might unnecessarily harden a reader's imaging of a post. But then, by not doing so, I'm tilting things towards people like me.

I should explain.

It comes from a sports coaching course I did some time back which featured a large Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) component. That was when I learned that I was not as visually-driven as most. One of the early exercises involved a crude categorisation of which senses an individual preferred to use, and went like this:

1. Think of a loved one
   
2. What is the very first impression you have of her/him?
   Is it the way (s)he looks, sounds, smells, or feels?
3. What is the second impression you have of her/him?
   Is it the way (s)he looks, sounds, smells, or feels?

The first is your primary sense. The second is your preferred sense. I discovered my primary to be auditory and my preferred to be kinesthetic (touch/taste) i.e. I heard them first and then remembered how they felt to the touch. The visual image of them established itself later.

Neurolinguistics sheds an analytical gaze on the instruction of salsa and the assimilation of practices. For example, as the majority of people have the visual sense as their primary or preferred, phrases biased towards the sense of sight like "picture this" and "see what I mean?" effectively address most class attendees but overlook a specific minority. Likewise, people like myself benefit from unsighted lead-follow drills better than our visual counterparts, developing kinesthetic skills more quickly.

What I learned from the advanced coaching sessions caused me to re-evaluate and rewrite my "Teaching & Salsa" training manual, using sense-neutral terms in the main and sense-specific terms where they were best suited: the premise being that it should be as useful to the broadest range of educators. (I deployed a spread of sense terms during the opening of this post as a demonstration.) NLP has made me much more aware of the language of expression I, as an educator, should choose to use in class.

Back to the subject of pictures.

I wonder if my ambivalence to having graphical images on this salsa blog simply stems from my personal lack of requirement for it - my imagination is happy to rampage about freely; it would probably disregard a photograph as a tether. But having read Darren Rowse's blog and associated comments, I think I should. And I feel I will.

Loo Yeo

Blogging Helps

Visitors to this blog will have noticed, apart from a change to layout, the recent addition of the "labels" navigation feature.

I do apologise for the occassional randomness of the label categories - the ideas concerning Latin Culture actively defy my attempts to put them into neat cubbyholes. Indeed, they seem to squirm with indignation. Perhaps more than a useful aid to navigation, it provides you the reader with a disturbing insight into how I think.

The same condition is beginning to manifest itself in the Salsa Quotes section of the website, which I originally wanted to keep random; thinking that the constant flitting-about of subject matter would keep me from falling into a set pattern of thinking. It does work, but it makes finding quotes along the same thread difficult to find. And I shudder to think what the casual websufer would experience.

I'm at the cusp of deciding whether to put some broad categories in place; now's the time before it gets too big and this would be a sort of Labels v2.0. I'm sure a lot heretofore unrealised connections will be made, given the extent and content of the page. Maybe I could introduce the labels a little at a time... and still keep the quotes within each category random: short range disorder, long range order.

Just talked myself into going it. Thanks blog.

Loo

Salsa Blog January

Hey.

I'm back from the break and itching to go.

The past few weeks have been excitingly kind to my salsa: I've finished reading "Music in Cuba"; watched a couple of DVDs on Yambú and Guaguancó, which deepened my appreciation of rumba no end (review coming in due course); wrote and posted three tutorials; and my pursuit of dancing on half-beats has bestowed me with information I needed for a rhythm tutorial.

On the website front, I AM going to redistribute the dance skills material to open up a new tutorial category. And I am confident that it will give rise to a more intuitive navigation structure. I've only just now finished the draft of the final dance skills tutorial on whole body cascade, and I'm considering renaming dance skills (and all the hassle it entails).

The tres playing is coming along just fine, as my callouses will attest to, and I'm starting to think that that is where my long term future in Cuban music lies. I've still got at least a year before I understand the instrument well enough to make that kind of decision.

Half the band is still away on respective sojourns, so we won't start for a couple of weeks yet. All precious time to me!

Okay, gotta scoot.

Loo

Opening Entry - Salsa Blog

Today's the day I join the modern world.

I've been somewhat reticent to start blogging, because I feel it might affect contributions to my own column, but in the end, a need to articulate unsculpted thoughts, whenever I wanted to, won out.

So let's get started.

My first thought is based on a dance experience I had last night, listening to Guillermo Rozenthuler perform at Bar Cubana here in Sheffield. Dancing with a young lady, I got a timely reminder of why I do what I do. Guillermo was already well into the song when he changed his guitar rhythm and began improvising lyrically. It took me a phrase to realise what he was getting at; and we set up a call and response between his guitar and the sound of my feet on the floor, to the calls of "zapateo" from the Latin staff.

It's always a good feeling, as a dancer taking part in the process of music making. What made it really special was the (for want of a better word) intimate nature of the atmosphere and the interaction.

Guillermo da man!
Photograph courtesy of Guillermo Rozenthuler
©Copyright 2008. All Rights Acknowledged.

As a dancer and teacher, I've emphasised that a lot over the years, to preserve the skills of dancing to live music. But it's quite a different thing to get it up so close and personal.

My second thought isn't quite so comfortable. For a few years now, my take on the history of salsa has failed to do any justice to Puerto Ricans. I admit my ignorance then, and I'm setting it right. There will be a dedicated chapter: working title "The Puerto Rican Contribution" which will definitely change, since they did more than just contribute to salsa. My current reference point is Ruth Glasser's "My Country is my Flag", which will take me to before salsa's birth. Then there'll be more and I must confess to being a little daunted by the task, given the other things I've got going on. The problem is always the initiation, so at least that's one big hurdle out of the way.

At the same time, I'm adding to the For Players section, and the writing of the Bass section should get underway today or tomorrow. I'll put down a rationale for it in a later entry.

Tonight is dancing salsa at Adelante, but I'm hooking up with an old friend beforehand at... Bar Cubana for Guillermo's second stint.

Maybe, just maybe...

Loo Yeo