Ticket to Cuba

To this day, the biggest source of frustration for salsa singer Hansel Enrique Martinez is that he cannot return to his native Cuba.

“Every time I see beautiful images of the island on television, I get a mixture of rage and nostalgia for not being able to be there,” he said last week in a telephone interview from Miami. “I left Cuba at age 7, when my family moved to Miami, and have never been back since then.”

Yet Martinez found a superb remedy for his acute nostalgia. Together with singing partner Raul Alfonso, he has helped keep the musical tradition of his country alive through a series of superb salsa albums, many of which yielded hit singles within the genre.

Known as Hansel y Raul, the duo will offer a rare Los Angeles performance tonight at Sportsmen’s Lodge in Studio City.

Martinez and Alfonso met in the 1970s as members of the New York band Charanga ’76. Unlike the trendy groups of the time, which played aggressive salsa laden with brass, this group favored the Cuban style known as charanga. A combination of African percussion and French and Spanish influences, charanga is based on the sounds of the flute and violin.

It is the most elegant style in all of Afro-Cuban music, marked by its infectious rhythms and refined melodies.

“What we did back then was completely different from what everybody else was doing,” Martinez said. “The charanga songs are rich in harmony, and we were extremely successful.”

They were so successful, they felt the need to leave the band and call the shots themselves, creating the trademark Hansel y Raul sound. “As soon as we formed the duo, we added a trumpet and a trombone to the mix,” Martinez said. “By the mid-’80s, though, we had really strayed away from our roots. We had become a salsa orchestra with strings. I call it ‘The Dark Era of Hansel y Raul.’ ”

Still, the hits kept coming. In 1987, the duo was nominated for three Grammys after releasing the hilarious “Maria Teresa y Danilo.” The slice-of-life story of a couple’s unspoken acts of betrayal that come to light when their daughter decides to get married, the song was as danceable as it was a quintessential expression of Latin culture. To this day, it is the most requested number in their repertoire.

Now the duo is planning to return to more authentic turf with an upcoming recording, “100% Cuban,” that will include traditional charanga material. Copacabana, a new Warner Bros. imprint devoted exclusively to tropical music, plans to release it in late August.

“We’ve only added a couple of trombones,” Martinez said. “But it was like putting a bit of perfume on the songs, so that they smell better.”

BE THERE

Hansel y Raul tonight at 10, Sportsmen’s Lodge, 4234 Coldwater Canyon Blvd., Studio City. $20. (310) 450-8770.