Albita Puts Tradition Aside in a Crowd-Pleasing Show

Until now, one of the few complaints Albita had to hear about her music was that her albums couldn’t match the quality of her live performances.

But the Cuban singer’s sold-out concert on Saturday at the House of Blues was exactly the other way around: It lacked the power of her second record’s backing vocals. Which means that the show was only superb.

All the analysis of Albita as a tradition-leaning singer-songwriter falls to pieces when the electric bass goes rock, or when she precedes “Que manera de quererte,” her first hit, with a crowd-pleasing hip-hop intro.

Albita has largely buried her androgynous, edgy image, which put off a lot of conservatives in her home base of Miami, and her performance smelled like Grammy spirit--in a good sense. She now seems focused on becoming a give-people-what-people-want act, and she gets away with it because she can write, she can sing, and her band is the coolest and best coed orchestra in the world of Afro Cuban music.

The ultimate Latin artist for the ‘90s? It is hard to think of anyone who could better represent Latin dance music, and it is hard not to imagine Albita recording a tango album--after all, the roots of tango are the Cuban habanera, and Albita’s range makes her the ideal candidate to really revive tango. There’s nothing else for her to prove in her own turf.