Salsa & Latin Jazz Fest Has Rough Spots, Rewards

Alternately baffling and glorious, the fifth annual Hollywood Salsa & Latin Jazz Festival on Saturday at the Hollywood Bowl was a four-hour affair that showcased the strengths and weaknesses of the current Afro-Caribbean music scene.

Opening the evening with the hottest name on the bill was a particularly careless touch. As a result, half of the crowd missed the Afro-Cuban All Stars, which for all practical purposes is the acclaimed Buena Vista Social Club.

The intergenerational ensemble of Cuban players and soneros was brought together in 1996 by guitarist Ry Cooder for three albums of timeless beauty. The collections sparked a new interest in traditional Cuban music and won a Grammy.

If there was one problem with those albums, it was a certain feeling of detachment that derived from the preciousness and perfectionism of the production.

At the Bowl, though, the Afro-Cubans had no slick studio engineer to back them. This worked to their advantage, since they instinctively fell back on their decades’ worth of vocal and instrumental improvisation, making gems such as “Chan Chan” and the guajira “Amor Verdadero” shine with newly attained immediacy.

Cooder was gracious enough to join the band on stage for a tune, something he didn’t do on the previous night, when the Afro-Cubans performed a longer set at the Conga Room. Cooder didn’t strive to dazzle anybody; his guitar solo was bluesy and fluid, the work of a performer who clearly believes in musical conversations, not monologues.

The results so far: transcending.

The festive mood didn’t last long, however. New York’s DLG band managed to destroy whatever magic was in the air with its very first tune, a cacophonous transmutation of Willie Colon’s classic “La Murga.”

The group’s attempt to combine salsa with rap is misguided because the two styles are both so intense that it’ll take a master musician to figure out how to combine them intelligently. The verdict: embarrassing.

Next up was Albita. The Cuban singer is close to achieving the level of superstardom among salseros, though her potent voice is ill-fitted for the genre. Whereas she would shine performing tango or confessional pop, her stab at traditional Cuban son sounds a bit mannered, since the wistful original material requires a lighter touch. The final impression: unconvincing.

The appearance of traditional Puerto Rican salsero Gilberto Santa Rosa was welcome after so much pseudo-salsa at the festival--and it’s no accident that he was the only one who managed to get the whole crowd dancing. Although his brand of salsa is far from challenging, Santa Rosa has the chops to prove what the real thing should sound like. The result: heartwarming.

Unlike Santa Rosa, keyboard wizard Eddie Palmieri is anything but conservative. He also brought to the evening something that few salsa veterans can provide these days: a new record overflowing with explosively danceable material.

After an 11-year hiatus from salsa, the keyboardist opened his set with “Malaguen~a Salerosa,” an old Mexican tune that he’s turned into a crunchy salsa number with his usual keyboard attack and moody improvisational skills.

The verdict: Although his performance couldn’t match the emotional intensity of last year’s Ruben Blades-Willie Colon reunion, he still demonstrated that he is one of salsa’s treasures, and that his heart belongs not in the Latin jazz clubs, but on the dance floor.