Anbal Velsquez – En Tremenda Salsa LP

Description

First time reissue.Anbal “Sensacin” Velsquezis one of Colombia’s most innovative and prolific Costeo musicians, known as “El Mago del Acorden” and “El Rey de La Guaracha”. Velsquez grew up hearing Cuban music as well as the local rhythms of his region, and this led him to tinker with and transform the beats and melodies of the regional music encountered in his home city of Barranquilla during the 1950s and ’60s. By 1960, after being a sideman in several groups, Velsquez formed his own conjunto with his elder brotherJuan, a talented musician in his own right, and his younger siblingJos.Anbal Velsquez En Tremenda Salsais a perfect example of the musician’s wanderlust and restless creative spirit. A pioneer of the adventuresome mixing of rhythms, genres, and styles that was happening at the time in Barranquilla and the rest of coastal Colombia, in retrospect one can say that Velsquez was quite daring in combining the music and instrumentation of his native country with other Caribbean forms. In 1968, when he made this album, very few Colombians were attempting to record an accordion-led session of descarga, guaracha, boogaloo, guajira, guaguanc, and mambo, and for that Velsquez should be recognized as a forerunner of various other records byLisandro Meza y su Combo,Los Corraleros de Majagual,Los Caporales del Magdalena, andChico Cervantes y su Conjunto Internacional. The album kicks off with an intense and mesmerizing descarga featuring the guaguanc bass line, hot Cuban style piano and a heavy timbales solo, reminding one of theTico-AlegreorFania All-Starsjam session records. And yet, the accordion and caja are there throughout the tune, giving it plenty of “sabor colombiano” and distancing it from the New York or Havana sound. It bears repeating that for this album Velsquez and Fuentes added a crucial ingredient in salsa, the piano. Overall, the feeling on the album is of the loose, improvised jam session implied in the genre term descarga. AlthoughEn Tremenda Salsais just one of many such records that Velsquez cut with his Cuban and Puerto Rican influences writ large on his sleeve, it is perhaps his most consistent and well-recorded, certainly only one of a few of his featuring prominent piano played in a salsa style, and this is why it is a highly sought after record by collectors in the know. Remastered from the original tapes, with original artwork intact. Includes two bonus tracks. 180 gram vinyl.