Finding Salvation in Salsa

Albert Torres’ journey into what would become the salsa dance craze began three decades ago inside his cramped bedroom in a brownstone apartment in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.

There, to the pulsating rhythms of Latin music, the 7-year-old boy would practice his steps for hours on end, using the cord from the Venetian blinds as a partner.

“My parents could be arguing outside, but it wouldn’t bother me,” recalled Torres, now 42. “As long as the door to my room was locked and the music was on, I could be in my own world.”

As he grew older, Torres’ search for his own world led him to a life of drugs, alcohol and gambling. He would end up contemplating suicide as he faced jail for embezzling thousands of dollars from a drug rehab program.

Eventually, he would find salvation and success by returning to his first addiction: those Afro-Cuban rhythms of his youth.

Today, this New York native of Puerto Rican descent is the No. 1 promoter of salsa music in, of all places, Los Angeles--the heart of an exploding salsa scene on the West Coast, where audiences of every age and color are packing the clubs.

Torres seems to be everywhere, putting together concerts; managing bands; choreographing dances; throwing back his head on a crowded dance floor in the 1992 movie “Mambo Kings”; stepping out to do a number at the Oscars the next year; flying in hot bands from Cuba to the dismay of Castro-hating exiles; twirling Vanessa Williams in “Dance With Me”; dancing in a Coors Light commercial; kicking off the annual summer Dia de San Juan Festival at the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre; shelling out cash to help sponsor L.A. Salsa Kids in competitions in Puerto Rico.

A Precise Yet Intimate Dance

You can also find him most Sundays in the basement of the Boathouse restaurant on the Santa Monica Pier teaching salsa’s intricate spins, dips and shimmies to a diverse group of left-footed novices at $5 a pop.

“Salsa brings people together,” he told a youthful audience at the Boathouse one Sunday. “We have to preserve it and pass it to the next generation.”

The physical intimacy of the dance drove Ben Colvin and Monika Tesdahl out to the pier one Sunday afternoon for a lesson.

“We want to learn how to dance together, as partners,” said Ben, a 30-year-old artist who stood with his arm around Monika.

“We tried swing, but that didn’t work,” said Monika, an office manager, glancing at Ben. “This is more sensual.”

That’s what the music is all about, says Torres, who usually begins his sessions clapping out the beat and exaggerating the steps for the beginners to see moves that would otherwise be a blur.

“Salsa,” Torres said, trying to make you feel the precision, “is dancing on a dime and leaving nine cents change.”

When you take a lesson, you get a slice of history. You hear how the roots of salsa lie in the mambo rhythm, in turn traceable to the time when the stylistic dancing of the Spaniards who colonized the Caribbean was fused with the intricate, throbbing rhythms of the slaves they brought from Africa.

The music forged a caldron of feelings that centuries later would explode among all groups of people in the 1950s Latin clubs of New York City. There, Torres’ mother was a dancing sensation, slipping into the Palladium at the age of 15 to mambo, merengue and cha-cha.

Torres, the oldest of three, never knew his father, who was also part of the club scene but vanished into an addiction to heroin. His mother and stepfather moved the family to North Carolina, where the marriage lasted a year before they parted and his mother left for Puerto Rico with the children.

It was in the tourist hotels in and around San Juan during the hustle dance craze of the ‘70s and the birth of salsa that Torres left school and explored dance as a career, winding up in San Francisco by the early ‘80s. This was also the time when he fell into a life of drugs, giving up dance and selling cocaine to support his habit.

Eventually, he lost all contact with his family.

“For about four years I didn’t know if he was dead or alive,” said Luisa Velez, Torres’ 60-year-old mother, who lives about 40 minutes outside San Juan. “I went to California a couple of times looking for him. Every time I heard there was a corpse somewhere, I thought it might be him. It was horrible.”

Torres’ road to recovery began in 1985 when he stopped using drugs and enrolled in a 12-step program. Later, he would become an intake coordinator at the Exodus Drug and Rehabilitation Center at Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital in Marina del Rey. He rekindled his love of dancing. He landed his first role in a movie when actor Armand Assante walked into a Westside club recruiting dancers for the movie “Mambo Kings.”

And then he blew it again. Unable to control his gambling, he began stealing money from the treatment center--$32,000, by his estimate--to cover his losses. In 1994, he was finally caught.

“I was living sober, but gambling everything I could get my hands on,” he said. “The joke around the treatment center was, ‘If it’s 3 o’clock, don’t bother Albert. He’s talking to his bookie.’ ”

Some Traditionalists Are Not Impressed

Torres was asked to resign. In despair, he said, he put a gun to his head and almost pulled the trigger. “I went to a Gamblers Anonymous meeting and they said killing yourself is not the answer. They said the money could be paid back. That’s when I started slowly putting the pieces of my life back together.”

Torres pleaded guilty to embezzlement. He was sentenced to 30 days of community service and ordered to pay back the money.

“I was working 24 hours a day, cleaning Venice beaches and putting on concerts,” he said. “I became the most sociable guy without a social life. My life is dedicated to dance.”

Those who have seen him through the turmoil say he has turned a corner, emerging with a sense of humor about his life, about dance and about what he needs to do with his life.

“He listens. He’s a great communicator and not one to shut people out,” said Laura Canellias, a longtime dance partner.

Salsa traditionalists, particularly those schooled in New York, are less complimentary. One of them, Mike Bello, director of music and promotion at Salsaweb Internet magazine, sourly allows that Torres is at the top of the heap in Los Angeles “for good or bad.”

What frosts people like Bello is that Torres teaches novices a style of salsa that is not rooted in the pure mambo rhythm, which is based on the offbeat, also referred to as the “2-beat.”

Americans raised on the 4/4 time of rock and funk, with their emphasis on the first and third beats, sometimes have trouble moving to the Latin clave, the fundamental rhythm instrument in Afro-Cuban music, which emphasizes the second beat.

For that reason--in much the way a bilingual teacher tries to help children learn English in their native Spanish--Torres focuses on teaching salsa with the traditional 4/4 emphasis, trying to get dancers hooked in the hope that they will make the transition to the 2-beat once they become comfortable.

New York purists are outraged at the thought.

Bello--whose business card identifies him as “the mambo fello”--doesn’t even regard salsa as a true dance, but a rip-off of the mambo. “Because someone called it salsa doesn’t make it different,” he said. “It’s like saying hamburger is French fries.”

To walk into a Latin music club and see couples dancing in the style advocated by Torres makes Bello sick. “I have no enjoyment. . . . There have been nights that I don’t dance at all.”

Thursday night at El Floridita, a Cuban restaurant in Hollywood, few were paying attention to that distinction as salsa devotees crowded the dance floor to the music of Johnny Polanco y Su Conjunto Amistad, a band managed by Torres.

“This music is a way for men and women to feel and touch each other without getting into trouble,” said Polanco, a Bronx native, with a wink. “I’ve seen couples after dancing want to go out and have a cigarette.”

As Polanco played one of his signature songs, “I Like It Like That,” the crowd swelled. The club owner, Armando Castro, was standing outside the door looking nervous.

“There are just too many people,” Castro worried as busloads of customers in a KLON-FM Latin Jazz Club Caravan were unloaded on his doorstep.

Castro acknowledged a debt to Torres for his dedication.

Salsa’s No. 1 Promoter

“He’s the No. 1 promoter of salsa because he has pure guts,” Castro said. “He’s not afraid.”

Castro said he respected Torres for being one of the first to bring bands directly from Cuba despite possible threats from Cuban American groups.

Torres recalls the grumbling when he brought Los Van Van, a world-renowned Cuban ensemble, to Los Angeles. There were about 15 pickets outside the club, he said.

“When the show started, some of the protesters put down their signs, bought tickets and came inside.

“I said to one, ‘Hey, didn’t I just see you outside raising a fuss?’

“He put his finger to his lips and said, ‘Shhhhhhh.’ ”

He was in Albert Torres’ world now.