photo by Peter Maiden

Wow - HdP packed Don Quixote's International Music Hall in Felton. It turns out to be a great venue - reasonably priced, great sound, great dance floor, great food. Patrick Hickey was on hand with his amazing video rig so you'll have some clips to look forward to, and Peter Maiden (above) and Tom Ehrlich were both clicking away with reckless abandon. The band was on fire - new tunes - two longs sets. Bay Area sonero extraordinaire Fito Reinoso sat in and brought the house down. Hopefully we'll be getting more Cuban shows at Quixote's in the near future.

Next tour stop: Saturday night at Yoshi's San Francisco - only one night this time - my advice is to buy advance tickets - I wouldn't be surprised to see people turned away at the door. The rest of the tour is here.

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Alexander Abreu & Havana D' Primera tore it up in LA - check out Kay Torres' report here. They play Don Quixote's off of Highway 17 in Santa Cruz - only $20 for the whole night and then Yoshi's SF on Saturday. Here's the rest of the tour. Bill's report is here.

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Here's a timba trivia quiz from my upcoming book for non-musicians. The idea is to demonstrate a key difference between salsa and timba - the "song-specific" accompaniment. So, this track starts by playing a typical vamp four times through with the generic conga, piano and bass parts - then it segues into a timba version with a unique part for each of those three instruments. The idea is that you should be able to know what song it is just from listening to these three accompaniment parts.

So listen to the track by clicking here and then see if you can identify the song in the COMMENTS section.

Here are some preview pages on the new book .

And for Bay Areans, tickets for HdP are on sale now !   [Kevin Moore]

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Eddie Palmieri and José Claussell on timbales - photo by Tom Ehrlich

Tom has a new gallery from the first night of the Monterey Jazz Fest featuring Eddie P., Grégoire Maret, Jack DeJohnette and others.

Rebeca Mauleón's Lecture Series got off to an amazing start with Danilo Lozano, Orestes Vilató, Jesús Díaz and Abe Gamroyan. Incredibly interesting stuff. It continues every Wed. in October.

Martin Cohen is really on a roll, releasing super-high quality videos of New York's growing community of world class Cuban musicians. Iván Llanes, who came with Maraca on drums, turns out to be a great singer as well.

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