La Bamba Club Deejays Blanket the Dance Floor With Steady Stream of Salsa

“La Bamba” is not just a song and a movie. It’s also the name of a lively dance club in Hollywood--a club that provides a look into what may be salsa’s future.

None of the clues are obvious, though.

To begin with, the club’s brick facade resembles a warehouse. Once past its airport-style metal detector doorway, however, one can’t ignore the dress-to-impress clientele crowding the dance floor as they merengue and cumbia to a steady stream of salsa tunes.

At other local salsa clubs, you can spot the novices who haven’t mastered salsa’s intricate moves and syncopated clave rhythms. Not at La Bamba. The dancing is as serious as it is nearly continuous--even though all this intensity transpires without live bands.

A pair of dancing, hand-clapping deejays preside over the action from a booth above the dance floor as they lay down salsa tracks from a 2,000-record library and play salsa videos on two screens below.

What makes La Bamba so hot?

Club manager Jesus (Chuy) Martinez believes it’s the symbiotic relationship which has developed between the club’s Colombian salsa format and its Colombian patrons--one of the latest South and Central American immigrant groups reshaping a type of pop music more strongly associated with the East Coast’s Puerto Rican and Cuban communities.

More than half the club’s patrons, Martinez said, are from Cali, a city of 2 million in western Colombia that is fast emerging as South America’s new salsa capital. The remainder is represented by a cross section of Latin America and a sprinkling of Anglos.

Carlos Reinis, 21, who discovered La Bamba, 1917 N. Bronson Ave., five months ago, says it “reminds me of home. In Cali, salsa is No. 1.”

Reinis, one of an estimated 60,000 Colombians residing in the Southland, said the roughly 30 new bands formed in Colombia since 1984 are the club’s chief draw. “I’ve gone to a lot of places,” he added, “but La Bamba is the best.”

Colombia’s and Venezuela’s salsa recording stars represent one of three trends transforming the Afro-Cuban tradition. Salsa’s strongest pillar is buttressed by the merengue, a fast, body-clinging dance style created by flashy Dominican bands that has caught the imaginations of New York, Miami and even Puerto Rico’s salseros.

But, said Hector Resendez, producer/host of KPFK-FM’s salsa show, “Colombia has picked up the gauntlet. They are coming out with these groups that are just awesome.”

What the Colombian bands lack in sophisticated, jazz-tinged arrangements of mainstream salsa bands, he added, they make up with contagious showmanship and a rhythmic directness that sometimes drifts from salsa’s infectious clave pattern to Colombia’s simpler, down-home cumbia beat.

Martinez, who also hosts a weekly salsa radio show on KFOX-FM, claims he stumbled onto the La Bamba formula after opening the club more than a year ago when he witnessed salsa’s popularity in Cali. Today, the Dominican, who admits to passing as a Colombian, views La Bamba’s success from the deejay’s roost with a blend of political, culinary and sports hyperbole:

“While younger Puerto Ricans have gone to the merengue (and rock), the Colombians have held onto the flag of salsa. The league of the three rhythms (merengue, cumbia and rumba) have that piquant flavor that’s pushing this new wave. Look at the people dance down there.”