¡Oviedo-manía!

As is the case with Transcribe!, AmazingSlowdowner and Emulator X, if you showed Tutti's new music education software to a musician from the Dark Ages (2005 or earlier), he or she would pass out in disbelief. In the case of Tutti, you see a whole band playing together in little video squares on your screen. If you click on a musician, you now see four different camera angles of just that musician and there are many other bells and whistles, like slowing the tempo and viewing sheet music as it scrolls along under the video.

The best news is that Vasík Greif and Michael Caba - the Czech Republic geniuses who brought you the video for the books on Alain Pérez and Melón Lewis - have filmed Calixto Oviedo playing all four parts (each with four camera angles) for a variety of Cuban rhythms. This will be a Tutti product soon!

Vasík, Calixto and Marek Caba (Calixto cooked the pasta - a man of many talents)

Calixto will also be playing in New York on July 9 as part of the New Dimensions Jazz series with Calixto's Way, featuring Gustavo Ramírez (ex-NG), Armando Gola (ex-Manolín), Mauricio Herrera (ex-PFG) and Carlos Averhoff, Jr. (ex-Issac). What a band!

Meanwhile, Calixto's son, Yulién, has rejoined Charanga Habanera - at least for their upcoming tour, replacing the departing Randy Martínez - Aned and Lachy Fortuna have apparently also left the group.

Here's Yulién with fellow ex-Charanguero Tirso Duarte, the subject of the soon-to-be-released Beyond Salsa Piano Vol. 14, which, in addition to being packed with piano tumbaos that will leave you speechless, tells the great Charanga Breakup story in greater detail than ever before, with lots of juicy new details from the world's leading Charangalogist, Majela Serrano van der Heuson.

Havana d'Primera: Next tour stops are today in Folsom California, May 30, at the historic Los Globos club in LA, and the two nights at Yoshi's SF, next Friday & Sat. 5-31 and 6-1 and then in Santa Cruz at Kuumbwa on Tues. June 4. These last two will sell out soon. You can take your HdP ticket stub to Cócomo afterwards on Saturday to hear Mayimbe for $5 - and their set starts after midnight, so you can do it without missing a note. Sorry for being Bay Area-centric here, but seriously, Miami, you've got nothing to be centric about. Miami is absolutely the least supportive Cuban music city in the world. Hang your heads in shame - and your basketball team is also choking. Okay, enough cross-coastal trash talk for one post - but this ain't over! [Kevin Moore]

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Miami and HdP

I have no position regarding Miami's sports teams (or anyone else's for that matter), and since I was nowhere near that city over the weekend, I'm not going to comment directly on the HdP concert except to say the following:
The fact that this was just another concert without major protests or some kind of media firestorm or organized boycott is actually a sign of progress in a city that might once have given a group like this an openly hostile reception. It may not be as much progress unfolding as rapidly as some of my West Coast friends would like to see, but it's progress, nevertheless. In my opinion, it is more important to recognize that than it is to fret about whether or not any attendance records were set.
That being said, we would encourage anyone who attended the La Covacha date for HdP to share their impressions of it here.

Posted by: Bill Tilford on Monday, 27 May 2013, 12:19 AM