Wayne Gorbea & Salsa Picante

about

WAYNE GORBEA & Salsa Picante -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To fully appreciate Wayne Gorbea and Salsa Picante, a little history is in order. From the 1920s to the mid 1980s, Afro-Cuban music, later called Salsa, developed on the fertile Cuban, Puerto Rican, and multi-cultural soil of New York City. All kinds of diverse and local styles developed. The creative juices were flowing, things were happening. The Palladium era of the '60s and its aftermath through the late '70s overflowed into all the boroughs of New York. Seven nights a week, the dancer had the broadest choices. They could choose from the piano-brass of the Palmieris or the New York Puerto Rican, guitar- conjunto styles of La Playa Sextette. Then there was Tito Puente and La Lupe, and the Charanga of Johnny Pacheco and Orchestra Broadway. And then there was the clearly identifiable style of bands from Puerto Rico like Raphy Leavitt y La Selecta. There was diversity. Then something happened. The music seemed to die. In New York, if you can control the radio airwaves you can gain great power, and in New York it was easy to control the non-English speaking ethnic markets if you had the money. Thus began the era of Salsa and the control of mainstream radio airplay by a few record companies. Aside from keeping musicians like Wayne Gorbea from the public's ears, one of the end results of this monopoly was the Salsa Romantica takeover. New York in the 1990s fell

top songs

albums

similar artists