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SALSA CELTICA
Queen's Hall. Edinburgh, Sat 15 Mar; ABC. Glasgow, Sat 29 Mar
For ten years now Salsa Celtica have moved from strength to strength and with their latest, self-released album seem to have really stepped up a gear. Currently sitting pretty at the top of iTunes' World Music download chart, the band’s largely sold-out UK tour has generated broadsheet buzz, taken in a Radio 3 session with Andy Kershaw and culminates with a string of Scottish dates before the band hot foot it to Iceland and then Germany ahead of much anticipated return trips to Venezuela and the US. Mind you, this could be seen as business as usual for a band that cut its teeth in two and a half years of four gruelling weekly residencies around the clubs and cellars of Edinburgh. So how does one stumble upon a seemingly effortless blend of Latin American and Scottish folk music?
‘We started as just a straight-ahead salsa band really but we soon began to incorporate all these other things that were going on’ explains co-founding member, spokesman and trumpeter Toby Shippey. ‘It probably has become a more natural sound; when we started it
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was just fun but I suppose the idea with this album is to try not to signpost our influences, to really make original music out of those two elements.‘ And this they have certainly achieved on El Camino with a sound that would surely lead the uninitiated to assume a long cultural partnership between the two distant cultures.
‘lt‘s just something that comes out in the mix. We‘re really a touring band, working together and jamming together between gigs. The people in the band have their influences being there so you end up writing music that accommodates that. In Salsa Celtica particularly we find that side of it really interesting, you don’t want to make it a straight-up salsa band and that is a bit of a challenge.‘ It is this organic approach that Shippey highlights as central to the band‘s success and longevity, though it is not without its potential pitfalls. ‘lt’s a strange idea, but a nice ambition to try and make the mix work musically. And it really works, though there is no master plan.’
It is admittedly not an obvious amalgam but by presenting a wholly unique angle on a huge worldwide phenomenon this ‘Iocal' band continues to find captive. rapturous audiences across the map.
(Mark Edmundson)
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From summer wine to spring time vino, via Tetley's bitter. ls Roddy Woomble ever sober? I I'm ashamed to admit that I missed lily last Iliupatlh column deadline I'm not proud. my only (Excuse wa‘: that l watt lost somewhere in tho: YU'kHllllt‘ llalet; unable to find an li'll‘Wllt‘! connection through letley's bitter misted nodules Actually it‘s; not too far tiom the truth lwau in Yorkshire. live lllllCS west of where last of the Summer Wine was filmed. big news; for fans of light comedy I've been f(?(i.’)l(llll{) a receid wrth lolk lllllfiltLlJlllfl. Vllllt‘ll has been an education lll a number of ways), not least in attitude. l‘lecor'dinu mum, in a Studio With a rock hand often being characterised by days spent With amplifier sounds. gurtar pedals. take after take etc Not $0 With fiddler; and cinema, most folk l'lltlSKZlélllf; learn their trade doing sessions in puba and its a working method they take into the studio. hence my new appetite for flat creamy ale. I like the Yorkshire people; they're like a Scottish vorSion of l: riglir‘h people My mother recently informed me that I've got seine Yr)rl<s;hire blood that I never knew before. so now rt all makes sense
Juxtapose this; with a weekend away in Barcelona, not sunny per se. but interesting alway'; to See the Spanish wander around in therr scarves and IRCROlS while the Scots opt for t-shirts anrl Sunglasses. A couple of unruly hen l'llghlS 85MB. it was a relatively Cultured couple of days. I went to an exhibition of conceptual art that was thought provoking. not lUSi because I mistook a heater in the (tallen/ to be a cuttingedge new installation. but then maybe that's the whole pomt of conceptual art. to get the Viewer to start noticing the art in everything.
On a more factual note. I learnt that ‘tapas' was originally leftovers given to farm workers on little plates. 80 there you go.
I Roddy Woomb/e's debut solo album is out on Pure Records In July.
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