Ruckus: Mambo King

I heart food analogies: Eggs + frying pans = drug abuse, "You are what you eat" and, of course, "salsa music." The term "salsa" was developed by record executives in the 1970s to reduce a collection of Latino and Caribbean grooves to one savory word. Like hip-hop, salsa is a complex organism that owes much of its artistic development to the diversity of New York City. It's fitting that New York would be the place where the various sounds of danzon, charanga and the cha cha, which originated from places such as Cuba and Puerto Rico, gelled into the sound we now know as salsa.***image2***

A hip salsa party held after hours at a bakery in Santa Fe takes a little more time to explain. That's why I seek out Avi Khadir, a former New Yorker, DJ and the namesake of a bimonthly salsa party, "Avi's Mambo Room," held at the hottest nightclub in town, uh…the Cloud Cliff Bakery, Café, Artspace. It's been a year since "Avi's Mambo Room" debuted and the party has quickly become the place for salsa-dancing aficionados and novices alike to let loose among the spelt and yeasty mounds of resting dough.

SFR: Salsa is essentially high-energy party music. It doesn't exactly fit every mood. How did you first become interested in this music?

AK:

I grew up in New York, so when I was a little kid walking around in the Bronx and downtown, the music was there. Puerto Ricans would hang out in the street corners and bodegas and there would be a conga drum and somebody would be singing. So it was there that I first heard the music. It's very much a part of the New York experience.

Cloud Cliff is an unusual spot for a salsa party. How did that come into the picture?

In any bar situation where they bring in music, it's always, 'How many drinks can you sell?' And the truth about salsa dancers is that most of them don't like to drink. It messes them up, so that's not a formula for success in any of the local venues. Plus you need a bigger place. So if you go to a place and say, 'We're not going to bring in much business, but we need this really huge space,' that doesn't really go anywhere. So we are at Cloud Cliff because we have the ability to just rent the place and set it up the way we want.

Is throwing a salsa party a hard sell in this town?

Normally we have a 100 or more people. We haven't really advertised, so it's been word of mouth. What I was hearing for years was that nothing lasts in Santa Fe or the town isn't big enough. I think it's plenty big. How many people do you need to have a really great time?

You also offer salsa lessons and classes at the 'Mambo Room.' There's a class called 'New York style salsa.' Why is it important to make that distinction?

This style of dancing was developed in New York, so when the styles of salsa dance started proliferating throughout the years, the New York bands stayed the same…doing it their way. It's an original root sound and dance that came from the people. The basic motivation for this is to give dancers more choices in how they express themselves, particularly to give them a better feel for the rhythmic elements in the music. 'New York style' or mambo is not a function of how you count the music but how you feel it. So today we are seeing that the mambo feeling is spreading through the whole salsa scene and we are calling it salsa/mambo.

Salsa is a little more gritty and dangerous than, say, Argentinean tango. Do you think salsa dance classes mute the intuitive nature of the music?

The perennial tension in the endeavor is between getting it yourself directly or taking classes. We try to find a balance between teaching people the formal way and then showing people from that formal basis to put their own thing in it and then providing a place for people to go and watch other dancers. So the endeavor with the 'Mambo Room' is to provide access to whoever is interested.

Lou Bega made it big a few years ago with a bad cover of Perez Prado's 'Mambo No.5.' Salsa has never really made it into the contemporary mainstream without novelty or gimmick. Is it a misunderstood art?

There is something about the rhythms of this music. I think that people, whether they are consciously aware of it or not, when they really go deep into the dance and connect with the music, there is a spiritual experience for them. I agree with your term 'dangerous,' because that experience, from the music and the dance, is nothing to be trifled with.


Avi's Mambo Room

8:30 pm, class; 9:30 pm, DJ Mambo

Saturday, Dec. 8. $10.

Cloud Cliff Bakery, Café, Artspace

1805 Second St., 988-4011

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