Global Salsa : Documentary film ‘Yo Soy del Son a la Salsa’ removes the kitsch cloak from Cuban music.
Madonna and the fictional Holly Golightly have one very important trait in common: They’re both mad about Cuban music.
In the 1961 movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” Audrey Hepburn’s Golightly jump-started her party--populated by a clique of jet-setting movers and shakers--with plenty of martinis and a good dose of mambo music.
Madonna is an avid salsa fan who has been quoted as saying that if she dies, she wants to be reincarnated as Cuban salsa sensation Albita.
The love of Cuban music, a fusion of traditional Spanish lyrical traditions with African drum ensembles and modern elements such as R&B; and jazz, is a bond they share with many others worldwide, from Latin America to Europe to the U.S. to Japan.
“Who didn’t dance mambo and cha-cha-cha in the ‘40s and ‘50s?” asks Rigoberto Lopez Prego, director of the historical music documentary “Yo Soy del Son a la Salsa” (“I Am, From Son to Salsa”), which had its U.S. premiere in New York Sept. 9 and opens in Los Angeles on Friday. “This is a kind of music that has conquered the world, but it’s not a recent story. It has antecedents that go back to the spread of Cuban music in the 1930s throughout the world, and beyond.”
“Yo Soy del Son a la Salsa,” executive produced by tropical music industry leader Ralph Mercado--founder of RMM Records and Video Corp., and now, RMM FilmWorks--fills in that history. The 100-minute documentary pulls salsa music out from under the sanitized cloak of kitsch that films such as “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and television performances such as Desi Arnaz’s on “I Love Lucy” cast on Cuban music, and sheds light on its populist roots and evolution.
“We thought that telling the story of the popular dance music which we today call salsa, from its origins in the hills of Eastern Cuba in the 19th century up until today, was a project that could illuminate and provide a means of expressing Caribbean Latino identity,” Lopez said.
Narrated by Isaac Delgado--a Cuban interpreter of contemporary rumba, guaracha and son, a traditional music that evolved into salsa--”Yo Soy” features interviews and archival footage of salsa legends Tito Puente, Ruben Blades, Tito Rodriguez, Celia Cruz, Machito, Benny More, Perez Prado, Marc Anthony, Oscar D’Leon and Arsenio Rodriguez, among others.
And while musicologists pop up in the film to explain the fusion of different musical forms--from the earliest changui and nengon to el son to mambo to modern-day salsa--it’s a story best told by the practitioners themselves.
“Yo Soy” brings together for the first time in one film Cuban artists living on the island of Cuba and Cuban artists who have immigrated to the United States, Puerto Rican artists based on the island of Puerto Rico, as well as Puerto Ricans based in New York, and Dominicans and Venezuelans who have made their mark on tropical music and salsa.
“I felt this story had to be told from the point of view of the protagonists, not from the outside,” said Lopez, who took his film crews to New York, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Havana, Cuba, as well as the Eastern hills of Cuba to tell his tale.
So what exactly is the musical expression of salsa, the Spanish word that quite literally means sauce, but has become a catch phrase for all things hot and fiery?
“As it’s defined in the film by the musicians themselves and the musicologists we consulted, it’s a term that surfaced in the ‘70s to define a kind of worldwide Latin dance music,” said Lopez, an award-winning Cuban documentary director, whose recent films include “El Viaje Mas Largo” (‘The Longest Journey’), about Chinese immigration to Cuba, and “Mensajero de los Dioses” (“Messenger of the Gods”), an exploration of African Yoruba religious rites in Cuba, commonly known as Santeria.
The word “salsa”--which was popularized during a 1970s Fania All Stars world tour--is said to have been first used in the context of music by Cuban musician Ignacio Pineiro in a 1920s song called “Echale Salsita” or “Put a Little Salsa on It.”
But Cuban music found its way to the United States long before the 1970s. One of the early ambassadors of Cuban music to the U.S. was Arsenio Rodriguez, the blind tres player and creator of the guaguanco rhythm who came to America seeking a cure for his blindness, and brought his infectious rhythms with him in the 1930s.
Musicians such as Mario Bauza, Machito and Israel “Cachao” Lopez helped carry the mambo era, popularizing it after World War II in New York ballrooms, until the Cuban revolution and the U.S.-Castro feud quelled America’s taste for Cuban imports with its resultant embargoes.
But instead of thwarting the growth of Cuban music, the import ban may have helped hasten the expansion of Cuban music because of a shift in musical development and influence from Cuba to New York that brought musicians such as Puerto Rican Willie Colon and Panamanian Ruben Blades into the picture.
“It was U.S. Latino musicians in New York who, when Cuban music stopped being imported to the U.S., kept it alive and helped spread it throughout the world,” said Lopez. “Contact with non-Cuban musicians resulted in an enrichment of Cuban musical forms.”
The newest generation of salsa artists includes hip-hopper turned salsero Marc Anthony, India, Cuban group Los Van Van and the exceedingly popular Albita, as well as groups from Japan, where a salsa craze has produced home-grown talent such as Orquesta de la Luz.
It’s a generation that has taken possession of a torch that has burned brightly for a long time now.
“To me, the son is a sublime expression to cheer the soul,” said 92-year-old trumpeter Lazaro Herrera during an interview in the film. “He who does not deem the son a good thing [isn’t alive].”
BE THERE
“Yo Soy del Son a la Salsa” premieres in Los Angeles Friday at the Galaxy Theater and the Laemmle Sunset in Hollywood, the AMC Pine Square in Long Beach, Universal City in San Fernando Valley and Culver Center in Culver City.
