MUSIC

Salsa band Calle Soul to sashay in for Juanita’s gig

— Calle Soul bills itself as a salsa band, but perhaps Pan-American fusion is a more accurate description. Half of the eight-piece ensemble hails from the United States, and the other half is from Central and South America. Friday the Fayetteville-based group will perform at Juanita’s, in conjunction with Little Rock Salsa’s bi-weekly dance party.

Calle Soul is Matthew Beach on bass trombone, Michael Olefsky on trombone, Jesse Austin on piano, Zessna Garcia on vocals, Fernando Valencia on timbales, Catalina Ortega on flute, Andrew Thompson on bass and Fernando Sanchez on congas. That breaks down as four University of Arkansas students (three of whomstudy music), two music professors, the post-graduate bassist and a self-taught percussionist, playing covers that audience members may never recognize as such. The band’s staples are originals from pioneering salsa artistsfrom the ’60s, such as Hector Lavoe, Joe Arroyo and the Fanya All Stars - uncommon fare in the roughly 300-mile radius where Calle Soul books gigs.

When the two Fernandos (Valencia is from Colombia, Sanchez is from Cuba) started Calle Soul in 2009, fans were sparse.

“Maybe 10 people would come,” Valencia says. Now they regularly pull crowds of 200 or more. The music isrooted in rural Latin America, but the arrangements are infused with borrowings from the States, namely rock, jazz and funk.

The songs run the gamut, from syncopated Cuban to more straightforward beats, such as Dominican merengue and Colombian cumbia. There are romantic, melancholic Dominican bachatas and, according to Valencia, lots of songs about food: “Rock music doesn’t reallytalk about food, but in Latin culture, if there’s going to be music, there’s going to be food. It’s an essential element of any gathering.”

Fans of progressive jams, New Orleans big band and Afrobeat will notice familiar elements in Calle Soul’s repertoire.

“Salsa is constantly changing. It has European and indigenous influences, even some Santeria [Cuban religious] influences,” Valencia says. “But the percussion is always the driving factor in this music. It’s the low sounds, under everything, and everyone plays on top of it,”

A jazz pianist pursuing his bachelor of music degree, Austin joined the band on his professor’s recommendation, even though he didn’t knowmuch about Latin music. “The vocabulary and harmonics, the chords, are the same [as in jazz], but the rhythms and interaction are different,” he says. “There’s improv in both, but with salsa, you really have to lock in with your band mates and almost read their minds.”

The musical genre of salsa, a catch-all for sounds of the Latin diaspora, was invented in New York about 50 years ago.

“It was a marketing thing, so record companies could make a profit,” Valencia says. But it would be decades before Latin music affected the U.S. mainstream in an overt way. In the late ’90s, guitarist Ry Cooder (a collaborator of Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton, among others) produced an album called Buena Vista Social Club, named after a legendary Havana dance hall. It featured musicians who had played thedance hall in the ’40s and ’50s and became the subject of an Academy Award-nominated documentary of the same name. The album alsosparked worldwide interest in Cuban music.

“There are people [at the shows] from many backgrounds,” Valencia says. “It’s a sauce, a melting pot, like the music itself.” In Fayetteville, Calle Soul’s fan base includes college students, retirees, Latin Americans and a healthy representation of southeast Asians: “The Indians are into it. They really seem to like jumping to the music.”

Calle Soul is part high art, part visceral party music. There is something inherently academic in the concept of appreciating world music, and the musicians are well-versed and classically trained, some with advanced degrees. But no one comes to their shows for the educational value.

“It’s just like going to an electronic music show. It’s all about the dancing, all about the physical,” Austin says.

Valencia concurs: “I love this music because I’ve listened to it my whole life. But people from here, they love the groove.”Calle Soul

9:30 p.m. Friday, Juanita’s,

614 President Clinton Ave.,

Little Rock

Admission: $10

(501) 372-1228

Weekend, Pages 34 on 02/14/2013

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