Word: salsa
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...that the food at the First Street Cafe is bad. Judging by this week's reception, it will probably be quite good. Green tomato salsa was pleasantly tongue-tingling, the ripe tomato salsa delicately flavored with cumin. A ginger and sesame spiced chicken salad crunched with bean sprouts. The squid in the calamari risotto salad was tender, though the rice itself was overcooked. But while crab quesadillas might be an innovative idea, they turned to be both greasy and cold...
Visual signals are everything: hard-pounding loudspeakers woof and tweet to the strains of Tito Puente, Hansel y Raul and Willie Colon. The songs are mostly rhythmically irresistible salsa songs that combine the heady call-and- response of African music with the electronic surge of rock 'n' roll and the glitzy brass of a Big Band. The dancers move to the beat like a snake to the charmer's call: the hotter the tune, the cooler the step as the men expertly guide the women through the twists and curves of the mambo, the cha- cha-cha, the merengue...
...this evening, though, the crowd has come for something special. Like middle-class Italian kids flocking to see Sinatra at Carnegie Hall, the young Cuban Americans have gathered to see the reigning Reina de la Salsa, Celia Cruz, who was entertaining their parents and their parents' parents in the smoky dens and fancy nightclubs of pre-Castro Cuba long before they were born...
...Miami Sound Machine and its spitfire lead singer, Gloria Estefan, sold 1.25 million albums containing their saucy 1985 hit, Conga, which combined American pop with salsa rhythms and established the hybrid "Miami Sound." ("C'mon-shake-your-body-baby-do-the-co nga, I-know-you- can't-control-yourself-any-longer.") The song hit the Latin, black, pop and dance charts and made a crossover star of the Cuban-born, Miami-raised Estefan, 30. "Salsa is not so ingrained in me that I can't do a legitimate pop tune or vice versa," says Estefan, who numbers both Cruz...
...worried that every step toward Anglo society is a step away from their culture's roots; one player's progressivism is another's sellout. "The Latin market is our bread and butter, and we can't ignore them," says Raul Alfonso of Hansel y Raul, a straight-ahead salsa band that is trying to broaden its appeal with an upcoming record in English. But pop music has always been an indiscriminate buccaneer, hijacking European, American and African treasure alike, mutating it and selling it around the world. Now it may be the Hispanics' turn. In the global village called...