Books don't live and die by awards. You don't listen to an Hector Lavoe album because it won some awards.
I just feel so sexy when I'm salsa dancing and wearing the salsa clothes. I love dancing, and the salsa is just so sexy.
I'm a big salsa fan!
Growing up in Caracas, Venezuela, the ubiquitous music is salsa, cumbia, merengue, a little bit of samba.
Being a hotbed of international travel, of course Panama's music is as diverse as its population. Throughout the '60s and '70s, it wasn't uncommon to hear intricate mixtures of calypso, jazz and cumbia throughout the isthmus.
In Puerto Rico, I played in all kinds of bands that played salsa and merengue. That's how I saved the money to come to the U.S. We used to play El Gran Combo tunes. Half the band was my friends - we were around 15 - and the other half was my friend's father and his friends from the hospital where he worked. They were all, like, 50.
What really swings is the music of the United States, Cuba, the Caribbean and vicinity, and, of course, Brazil. The rest is all waltzes.
Jazz flute's funny. And I'm a big Latin music fan, Tito Puente, Tina Cruz, all that stuff.
Some people's parents listened to the Beatles... but my family is Alquimia, Celia Cruz, and Carlos Vives - this old, rich Colombian music. I loved hearing that while I was growing up.
Start dancing immediately. Run to the closest dance studio, and study the style of dance of the music you love. If you love hip-hop music, go to a hip-hop class. If you love salsa, take a salsa class. It will become infectious and you'll keep going back.
I come from a pop background, but I'm also a Puerto Rican and I do feel this music. My approach to salsa is a humble one, and I defy anybody to prove that I'm faking it.
Into La Bombonera danced the most agile, rhythmic, beautiful, sensuous people I have ever seen. And that was just the fans.
Congolese rumba was so huge in Africa that everybody was inspired by it. But my African roots brought me this music. In every African family, parties in Brussels, we used to listen to this kind of music. And salsa music as well.
I'm a huge salsa fan. I actually have a salsa on my album, 'Formula Vol. 2,' featuring Marc Anthony.
I'm going to try to do as many styles as I can. A salsa number, rock and roll, country.... I've talked to a million people about it. Obviously, I'd love Prince to do it. I'm sure he'll produce the whole album for me.
And, he'd seen me in Panama, and he talked about maybe doing something in New York so I hooked it up when I came here and I recorded in 1969 my first album with Pete Rodriguez.
I want people to hear musicians like Joe Cuba. He has done things to whole masses of Puerto Rican people. The music is fantastic and important.
I grew up in a house where we danced all the time because we're Puerto Rican.
At rehearsals, I began conducting the band, counting them in without thinking. I guess it came from watching salsa legends like my uncle and Tito Puente, who was very much the leader of his band on stage.
I'm not a salsa singer who wants to sing in English, and I'm not this American kid who wants to sing Spanish.
I was always interested in trying to find how different genres would affect the lyrics that I'd written. Salsa is where most of my songs have been recorded, the genre of salsa. It's very frenetic, fast-paced. And I felt that the lyrics sometimes were being lost.
You know you're a hopeless record nerd when your time travel fantasies always come around to how cool it would be to go back to 1973 and buy all the great funk and jazz and salsa records that came out that year on tiny obscure labels and are now really rare and expensive.
The rise of salsa was such an important time in musical history, not just in Latin music but music in general, because these guys created a new sound.
'La Lupe' is my passion project. I've done it as a one-woman show, but I'm raising money to turn it into a film. It's a story of a Cuban singer who became the Queen of Latin Soul, the first woman on the N.Y. salsa scene.
I love Celia Cruz - she was also a huge part of my childhood. She's an iconic woman.
