HOT & SPICY SALSA AT GATWICK WITH OSBANIS TEJEDA & FRIENDS

London Salsa in Gatwick
Wednesday 1st August
Words: Ed, all photos by Alex Segre

It was Afro Cuban’s first salsa weekender and organisers Caren and Ibrahim must have bitten their fingernails up to the elbows.
It was a severe case of bad timing for their launch event, with five major salsa dance events all vying for business over the same weekend.
They were competing with La Bomba at the Ministry of Sound, London's Rise Festival, Salsa Republic’s popular weekender at the Colosseum in Vauxhall and Mambo City’s Ealing party night. They must have wondered whether picking Friday 13th July for their first big gig at the Arora Hotel - minutes from Gatwick Airport - was such a good idea.

       The decisive ingredient was a hot and spicy line up of some of the world’s top Cuban salsa talents, including World Rueda (2003) and British Salsa Champion (2002) Osbanis Tejeda; Salsa Champion Iris de Brito; Cuban School of Arts Damarys Farres Toyo (left, front), Kerry Ribchester, one of the UK's leading experts on Cuban salsa plus the lyrical Rafael del Busto and many more.         

          The event showed off Cuban style salsa at its best; people were there to socialise, enjoy themselves, relax and have fun. Parties were friendly and laid back, with a sense of an intimate, family gathering, making it easy to get a dance in the evening. As usual, there were more women than men, so girls had to wait to get a dance, but the guys were more than happy to oblige.
(right: Rafael del Busto & friends

 Music and dance come naturally to Osbanis, whether it’s Cuban salsa, rumba, cha cha cha or hip hop. He dances and plays percussion the way a bird sings, absolutely naturally, every muscle moving to every beat of the music, bringing the rhythms of individual salsa instruments to life with a perfectly timed snap of the shoulders, a tilt of the head or tasty footwork. To use a Cuban expression, Osbanis has “sabor” or flavour. 

           “In Cuba, you only have three choices, sportsman, artist or doctor. I couldn’t be a doctor – I can’t see blood. I was serious about sport and trained to be a baseball player in Havana. But my feeling changed, I was more interested in music. There was music in my family so this was natural for me,” he explains.
           Osbanis was born and grew up in Cero – Havana’s artists’ quarter; his mother is an artist and his father a percussionist. He grew up surrounded by artists and intellectuals. But his passion as a kid was hanging out on the streets in the poor quarter of Havana, listening to music, making music and dancing.
           Later, Osbanis studied percussion in Havana, qualifying as a percussion teacher and performed at Havana’s prestigious Casa de la Musica. You get the impression he didn’t break a sweat over any of it.           “Music was in my family, I’ve always played percussion since I was small,”  he says. 
         Osbanis came to the UK five years ago, on tour with Cuban band Megason Sexteto. But he was quickly talent spotted and picked up work as a salsa teacher.

 Salsa may have come to the fore in New York but Africa is the mother who made the recipe. In Cuba one of the popular rhythms now is timba – a kind of hot and spicy salsa – and Cubans dance rumba with casino style to this, not salsa.”
         Afro Cuban’s launch weekender may not have brought in big numbers. However, the quality of the instructors and the carefully thought out workshop programme gave dancers a real insight into the individual ingredients that make up the sauce that is salsa and its complex and multi-faceted rhythms and dance genres. Watch out for this one next year. Ed.

         Despite having no formal training in dance, Osbanis won two major salsa championship titles in quick succession (2002 and 2003). Osbanis has just shown off his virtuosity again, releasing the UK’s first instructional DVD on traditional Cuban rumba with Iris de Brito.
         Our conversation lights up when Osbanis talks about Latin music and dance. “Salsa isn’t a rhythm,” he explains in Spanish. “It’s a commercial name, made up in the 1970’s by Fania Records to sell a whole range of Latin music. Salsa is a sauce, but it’s made up of a lot of different and separate ingredients, like son, the family of rumba – guaguanco, jambú and Colombian – cha cha cha and mambo.