Los Muñequitos Begin 16-City Tour with a Bang

Monday's sold out show (over 1,000 people) was greeted with - and closed by -- the most thunderous, sincere and heartfelt ovation that I can recall hearing ... ever.

photo by Tom Ehrlich - click here to view more

The music, the dancing and the crowd were all amazing. Tonight was the formal show with one set of Afro-Cuban music and one of rumba. Tonight, Tuesday, will be a much more informal setting, at the Mission Language and Vocation Center with Los MdM's crack dancing troupe squaring off against the "the locals", who of course, in this town, include plenty of transplanted Cuban masters like Sandy Pérez, José Francisco Barroso and Rosita Villamil who played with major folkloric groups in Havana and Matanzas. Next stop is Savannah, Georgia, then Atlanta, then Florida and the buzz is that the three New York shows are already almost sold out. CLICK HERE FOR THE FULL TOUR.

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Friday, 18 March 2011, 05:49 AM

In the future we'll be reserving this space for global news, so please get into the habit of checking our new BAY AREA REPORT for local NoCal news. You can always see when it's been recently updated by looking under NEW STUFF-LO NUEVO to your right. We've been adding a lot of local sections lately. Bill Tilford's REPORT FROM CHICAGO has been especially active and contains information of interest to those outside of the Windy City as well.

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Friday, 11 March 2011, 06:45 PM

UPDATE: eBook and audio now available

Sorry for the delay but the first Pupy Pedroso book is finally done! Getting the research and photos for Pupy's amazing musical childhood turned into a bit of a ... errr ... "labor of love", but it was worth the extra time and I'm very happy with Volume 10 of Beyond Salsa Piano. It's the first of four books on Pupy. I'm organizing them by the order in which the songs were originally composed, so while Vol. 10 covers the Los Van Van albums from 1979-1983, some of the songs were re-recorded by Van Van or Los Que Son Son later - for example, Seis semanas is part of LQSS's live show and the version transcribed (which includes the cuerpo) is the current version. Another example is Con el bate de aluminio, where we compare the changes in Pupy's style from 1979 to 1998.

Finally, this is the first volume to include a fully transcribed solo - in this case La rumba no está completa. You can get the hard-copy book here, and the audio files and eBooks will be available soon and will be announced here, in Pa' ponerte en talla. NOTE: The eBook is only for PC - not for Mac.

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Tuesday, 08 March 2011, 03:34 AM

Things are heating up again in Northern California.

Paulito FG returns for the first time since 2001, sporting a new album which can be auditioned here. The tracks sound quite good to me and Paulito live is always incredible. He'll be at Yoshi's Oakland on March 18, 19 and 20 .

Los Muñequitos de Matanzas will return to Mission High School Auditorium on April 4 for the first time since the 1990s.

Juan de Marcos and The Afro-Cuban All-Stars, with Calixto Oviedo on timbales, will return to Zellerbach on April 19th . The rest of the tour, including, New York, Nashville and Oregon, among others, can be found here .