POP MUSIC REVIEW : Ruben Blades: Salsa Glitters With Promise

In many ways, Sunday’s vintage Ruben Blades concert at the Ventura Theatre could be seen as a good omen for West Coast Latin jazz and salsa.

Not because Blades or salsa is new to this edge of the continent. Blades’ mission of broadening salsa’s boundaries by fusing it with new jazz and world-beat inflections and a rich tradition of Latino narrative balladry has grown synergistically with his movie career. Moreover, the New York salsa veterans still tour here, and the handful local bands, many with deep jazz roots, are surviving with modest success.

What Panama’s hybrid salsa-jazz-movie superstar instead brought to his enthusiastic fans was the promise of more live performances at smaller clubs like the 1,000-capacity Ventura and the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano--where he plays Wednesday--at least as long as his Hollywood career holds out.

Despite periodic sound problems, which made it difficult to hear his voice, it would be hard to imagine Blades not setting higher standards for local salsa. The addition of Papo Vasquez and Reinaldo Jorge on trombones, has had a humanizing effect on his 11-piece band, Son del Solar, lending flashes of heat and color to the jazzier, cooler, overtly synthesized sound in songs like “Nacer De Ti” (“Born From You”) and “Patria” (“Motherland”), Blades’ best love song to date, from his latest album “Antecedente.”

Coupled with the brutal accuracy of Robert Ameen’s drumming and Blades’ return to his extroverted, almost objective storytelling style, his fans needn’t badger him with requests for songs from his early days when Blades changed salsa’s face by recording “Pedro Navaja” in 1978, the music’s best-selling single ever.