Critic's Notebook; Latin Music, Where the Big Bands Live On
By PETER WATROUS
Published: December 25, 1989
In the mid-1940's, when the big bands lost their dance legs and began playing music for listening, Latin music took up both their orchestral power and the impulse to entertain with sophistication. The salsa bands of Machito and Tito Puente and, later, Eddie Palmieri and a host of others, brought jazz's harmonic sophistication and horn arrangements to the Afro-Hispanic base of Cuban music.
The Latin orchestras reproduced everything that the jazz orchestras had done, mixing often brilliant orchestrations with tunes and rhythms that grabbed their audiences and sent them spinning onto the dance floor.
Like the big bands, the Latin orchestras suggested possible dance rhythms by piling riffs on top of sharp riffs, by emphasizing the powerful thrusting of a whole orchestra in full swing, by featuring incendiary solos that ripped through clouds of horns and by letting the rhythm section muscle the dancers toward a Saturday night catharsis. And as in jazz dancing, the Latin dancers made the music concrete, with expresive movements that matched each swoop and swell of the orchestra.
The power of the big bands still resides in Latin orchestras. The greatest Latin big bands still play, sometimes until dawn, at a handful of clubs around New York City: the Copacabana, S.O.B.'s, Thursday nights at the Palladium, Monday nights at the Village Gate, Club Broadway, Studio 84, Fuego Fuego, Voices and Casa Borinquen. And as in jazz, Latin orchestras have their coteries of devout listeners, usually stage left, who hang out, listening to their heros, analyzing the music for arguments to come.
While the Latin music scene appears robust - the Palladium, for instance, regularly draws 2,500 people for its Thursday night Latin shows -the top salsa bands, which worked every day 10 years ago, are now playing two to five nights a week. There is tension between the old world, where one culture predominated, a culture by nature insulated, and the new cosmopolitan, urban culture of New York. As many Puerto Ricans in New York City pass into the mainstream American culture, their cultural tastes have changed.
Faced with the easy consumption of American pop culture and the radical change in technology, where drum machines have replaced drums, and sampling keyboards take over from more traditional instruments, music made on the dance floor and not in the studio becomes an anachronism, although a glorious one. The young people on the dance floors in clubs around New York are just as likely to be Dominicans, Colombians, Mexicans or Salvadorans as they are Cubans or Puerto Ricans.
Some salsa musicians recognize the changing terrain. On a recent Saturday night at Club Broadway, perhaps the most famous Latin club in the city, a young and gifted singer, Tito Nieves, showed it was possible to strike a sweet balance between the old and the new, blending tradional salsa with newer pop forms. Mr. Nieves, who is 31 years old, grew up in Brooklyn, and is thought by many fans to be the next international salsa star. His voice, a liquid tenor, has the classic salsa soar to it, where it will drift, then suddenly swoop, like an eagle, to catch a note.
Mixing a soft tone with clear articulation, he improvised, parting the riffs of his horn section. Keeping to medium tempos, he sang songs that stuck close to pop - always over a tough rhythm - that until the heated climax of a tune, did not use much call and response, a traditional element of salsa.
At his first set of the night, backed by a handful of percussionists, two singers, including a woman, which added to the pop sound, and a horn section of two trumpets and one trombone, Mr. Nieves had the audience jammed on the dance floor. After welcoming those from the various Central and South American communities in the audience - who are, to a certain extent, replacing the Cuban and Puerto Rican audiences around the city - he shook hands with people on the dance floor before settling into a song.
While his tunes often started out lightly, they slowly edged their way into harder grooves, the rhythm section picking up volume, the horns articulating louder riffs, and Mr. Nieves's singers answered his singing with chunky choruses.
His first set ended with the song ''I'll Always Love You,'' sung in English and Spanish. He had the whole dance floor singing along. The song, a big hit - it has even made it to non-Hispanic radio stations - uses an archetypally Latin melody. But it doesn't trivialize its roots: the tough salsa rhythms were all there as well.
Mr. Nieves got his start 10 years ago with Conjunto Clasico, the band that headlined the show at the Club Broadway and that played at the Palladium two Thursdays ago and had the house rocking. The band - three trumpets, three singers, a handful of percussionists, a pianist, a bassist and a tres (a Cuban guitar) player -draw dense harmonies from their material. Silvery, modern chords jumped from the horns while the bass and percussionists sprinted through tightly coordinated rhythmic patterns.