The great meeting between Celia Cruz, the reigning queen of salsa, and Albita, the talented upstart, never took place. But the San Francisco Jazz Festival, where the two played on the same stage on the same night, served as pretty convincing evidence of what works for each.
In the case of Albita, who was making her Bay-area debut, it’s energy and spectacle of a particularly complex and sassy fashion. Fronting her six-person group, the 35-year-old Cuban emigre commanded the stage with constant motion, dancing solo and with her band members in spite of a huge gash on her right foot suffered earlier in the week at Chicago’s House of Blues.
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Although Albita has tried to underscore that her music is Afro-Cuban in its many variants and not just salsa, the San Francisco concert included several songs from her new CD, “Una Mujer Como Yo”–a slam-bam dance record aimed at the crossroad between salsa and club music. And in San Francisco, she chose to emphasize the danceability of her music, stripping away some of her show’s more glitzy bits, including her usual, highly entertaining clog dance.
The focus then was on newer, more complicated rhythms brought from Cuba when Albita and her entire band arrived in the U.S. in 1993. If at times she sounded more like NG La Banda–with abrupt rhythmic changes that left unknowing dancers in the air–than Willy Chirino, it’s because Albita’s music has refused to yield to the U.S. salsa circuit’s commercial demands.
With her deep, resonant voice at full throttle, Albita also pulled out favorites like “Chico Chevere,” “Que Manera de Quererte” and “Que Culpa Tengo Yo”–
whose pro-Cuba chorus had a distinctly different resonance in progressive San Francisco.
Cruz didn’t have to work nearly as hard as Albita to get people going. For starters, by the time she hit the stage, the audience had been primed by both Albita and Jose Alberto, otherwise known as “El Canario,” whose recent flirtations with the music of swing-era giant Machito has brought a surprising sweetness to his own arrangements.
But the main reason Cruz can glide on stage and make everybody fall apart with a simple chorus of “Bemba Colora’ ” is because she plays comfort music. The rhythms are prosaic, the lyrics non-threatening, and her songbook is full of classics. What if every show’s basically the same? It’s plain fun, and in the salsa community, often that kind of familiarity is all that matters.