Four great Bay Area shows Tom and I will cover in the next week:

Tonight - Thursday: Rumbankete at Yoshi's Oakland

Saturday - Sandy Pérez, Michael Spiro, Lázaro Galarraga at Dance Mission Theater

Friday the 19th: Issac Delgado at Bimbo's 365 Club

Friday, Feb. 26 -- Premiere of Rebeca Mauleón's symphonic debut: Suite Afro-Cubano.

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Volume 4 is now available in hard-copy on CreateSpace.

Audio files and eBook at LPM.

Click here for more details -- Vol. 5 coming next week!

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Jan "Yanesito" Bogdan is off to Havana for a quick trip and while in Havana you might as well record something, right? Yanesito will be bringing us a new version of a Cristina Azcuy song, "Limpia mi son", with the talented young sonero El Nene on lead vocals. Coros will be sung by Sinsonte of Orquesta Revé and Enrique from Bamboleo. The plan is to have Alexander Abreu record the trumpet parts, assuming they can fit it in with his tour schedule. Yanesito himself plays bass and tres on the song and Oldrich Gonzáles is on piano.

El Sinsonte, Yanesito & Cristina Azcuy in Havana
The recording will take place at ICRT (International Cuban Radio & Television) in Vedado. When the mixing and mastering are done, the single will be released at iTunes. The exact release date is in the hands of iTunes, but it should be out sometime in the spring of 2010.  We will keep you posted of course.

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The audio files and eBook for Beyond Salsa Piano, Volume 4 are now available on LatinPulseMusic.com. For those who prefer hard-copy, those will go live in about a week, but remember that the audio files can only be bought at LPM.

This finally completes the "roots of timba" phase of the piano project. Volume 4 is all about the 1980s: Rumbavana, Adalberto, Son 14, Los Maravillas (with the early work of Manolito Simonet), Aliamén, and of course Elio Revé y su Charangón. There's even a section on Los Karachi for true 1980s connoisseurs. The 80s were a wild time and it's very interesting to study the transition from the songo era and the birth pangs of the timba revolution. It's also cool to see what timba favorites like El Indio, El Tosco, Tony Calá, Manolito, and Calixto Oviedo were up in their formative years. The coro ya yo tenía mi tumbao pega'o has taken on much greater meaning for me!

It's been an extremely interesting process, but I'm definitely ready to return to Volume 5: Introduction to Timba, which is 90% done and will hopefully go live in a week or two.

Click here for some previews of Volume 4.

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