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AWARD WINNING Latin jazz/salsa pianist and bandleader Alex Wilson and leading dancer instructor and journalist Lee Knights have just published Find the Rhythm! The Dancer's Guide to Understanding Salsa Music.
A dancer-friendly manual, with over 80 audio examples and a wealth of practical workbook exercises, Find the Rhythm! helps dancers get closer to the music and take their dancing to the next level.
Already, Find the Rhythm! has struck a nerve among the UK's scene top promoters, instructors and educators. There is praise Robert Charlemagne who has dubbed Find the Rhythm!
"The Dancer's Bible", the IDO's Ansell Chezan, Salsateca's Elder Sanchez, Club Cubana's Cressida Childs and more. Meanwhile, there is official recognition from the UK Alliance of Professional Teachers of Dancing - one of the UK's leading awarding bodies - which has included the title on its essential reading list for dancers.
There is only one person who could have led this project and it was Derbyshire-born Alex Wilson. Alex is the UK's No1 Latin jazz/salsa pianist, band-leader, composer and educator. He is a prodigious talent, with a mastery the myriad Latin rhythms practically unparalleled by a non-latino musician. If you want to go deeper into salsa music, this is your man.
Together, we've built a bridge between the musician and the dancer, creating a unique, practical, accessible learning model to pass on the secrets of understanding salsa music music for the dancer.
Over the coming months, Alex and I are planning a Find the Rhythm! UK Tour. If you are a salsa addict and want us to hold a workshop at your event - please get in touch with Lee at The London Salsa Scene. We want to get the word out there - if you want to get closer to the music, we'll travel to bring it to you!
Find the Rhythm! has been a long time coming. Up til now, there has been no authoritative guide to help instructors passionate about salsa music transmit this to their students.
Instead of waiting around for someone else to do it, Alex Wilson and I decided to take on the challenge and do it ourselves. Believe me, after months manacled to a computer, we realised why nobody else had done it before!
Working together with Alex Wilson on Find the Rhythm! has offered me a pathway back to the heart of salsa as a dance, offering new creative challenge and freedom for me as an instructor and as a dancer. This is the journey you will go on when you buy and experience Find the Rhythm!
Salsa music isn't an easy genre – it is incredibly beautiful but also incredibly complex. This makes it difficult to understand - even for experienced musicians and top dancers. Find the Rhythm! gives you the recipe, explains the myriad ingredients and spices that make up the spicy sauce that is salsa - so you can make it your own!
To allow dancers to embrace the challenge, Alex and I have produced a dancer-friendly manual, with a wealth of audio examples and practical workbook exercises. One of my roles was as human guinea pig, making sure audio examples and exercises were tailored to dancers' needs.
As we wrote about the range of Latin rhythms and styles, the make up of a salsa song, or the rhythms of salsa instruments, I tried out every exercise and listened to every audio clip. Some I tried out at home, some with a friend, others in a club. This process opened my eyes, ears and feet and took me on an overdue journey, deeper into salsa dance and music.
During the course of this process, my dancing and approach to teaching have evolved. While I've always been passionate about salsa music, there was something missing, something niggling away at me.
Find the Rhythm! offers a way to take your dancing to the next level, moving beyond the count. There is a new way forward for your dancing, in which dancing to 1 - 2- 3 - pause - 5 - 6- 7 - pause - becomes only one of the techniques you use to master the dance. While the count can be a helpful signpost for a dancer's feet but it does not help a dancer move with rhythm, authenticity and freedom of self expression.
Find the Rhythm! offers a way to develop a natural and instinctual sense of the ebb and flow of the music and where the 1 – or any other beat of the music - rather than relying on a count. These are the gifts I want to express in my own dancing and pass on to my students.
It's a bit like trying to listen to your favourite radio station, only you live too far away to get good reception, the sound is fuzzy and you get a lot of interference. Now, I'm getting station salsa loud and clear. Having found my wavelength, I feel I can tune in more fully to other Latin stations - mambo and cha cha cha; the folkloric rhythms of the orishas, the Afro-Cuban gods; son; cumbia; mozambique; bomba and plena and more. Radio Salsa has never sounded more inviting.
More on Find the Rhythm! The Dancer's Guide to Connecting to the Music
by Alex Wilson and Lee Knights at: www.findtherhythm.com
Price: £19.99 and www.londonsalsascene.co.uk and www.alexwilson.net
For information on holding a Find the Rhythm! workshop at your club or event: lee@londonsalsascene.co.uk
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