Maraca’s Salsa-Timba Mix Gets the Crowd on Its Feet

Bandleader and flutist Orlando “Maraca” Valle came from Cuba to Culver City on Friday to remind us what great salsa should sound like.

His band’s dynamic performance at Sagebrush Cantina displayed all the elements that make genuine Afro-Cuban music so addicting. It was spontaneously celebratory, rhythmically complex, lyrically clever, instrumentally thrilling.

And it made you want to dance.

Maraca, a veteran of Irakere, has spent the last few years defining his own style in the busy Afro-Cuban cosmos. He’s now hit on a successful balance between straight-ahead salsa and Cuba’s hard-driving new rhythms called timba, too fast and funky for conservative U.S. salsa fans, who complain they can’t dance to it.

That certainly wasn’t the problem Friday night at the hopping, brightly lighted cantina. Maraca even made the waiters dance. At the same time, he satisfied those demanding fans who look for unexpected and sophisticated flavors in their salsa.

Maraca’s tight, muscular and accomplished 10-piece band performed two sets, mostly from his latest album, “Tremenda Rumba!” (Tremendous Rumba). They certainly lived up to the title, which can also refer to a dynamite show or one heck of a party.

Fans stood on chairs, did sexy bump-and-grinds by the bar and formed admiring circles around the best dancers. All of it just feet from the flutist and his two top-notch soneros (improvisational singers), who stood on the floor in front of the bandstand.

The place was so compact that they performed face to face with the cluster of fans who gathered to watch them. After one of his dazzling flute solos, the bandleader would wade into the crowd, greet a friend or well-wisher, and turn to watch his band as if he was a fan.

At the end, performers and spectators were chanting together, hopping up and down, arms raised in the air. Tremenda rumba, indeed.