MikePadgett.com

I first heard of Scottish band Salsa Celtica back in 2004, courtesy of WFMU radio’s Doug Schulkind.

I was just starting to get interested in latin and world music at the time and I hoovered up Schulkind’s Culture Shock collection. The Give The Drummer Some DJ had put together twenty soundclashes in which Latin would rub up against Blues, African musicians did turns on Hawaiian guitar and Brazilians paid homage to the funk of James Brown.

Salsa Celtica’s Fuerte opened the collection. It appears on the band’s second album The Great Scottish Latin Adventure and represents a perfect summary of what the band is about: salsa and bagpipes, Latin and Celtic.

Somehow, against first impressions, the combination works perfectly.

Catching up with them isn’t easy. Their fairly infrequent tours take them to some pretty obscure places. However, only a couple of weeks ago I learned that they were doing a gig in Saltaire, West Yorkshire.

Accordingly, Saltaire became the unlikely destination of our third visit to a UNESCO World Heritage Site in two months.

Salsa Celtica formed in 1995 and has gained considerable popularity since then, receiving acclaim in the UK and further afield. The Saltaire date was their eleventh in a long list that continues until mid August 2008.

There were times during the gig, which was split over two sets, when the wooden floors of the Victoria Hall felt and actually looked like they would cave in. Stacks of sound equipment by the stage wobbled precariously.

The large crowd consisted of those more used to the Celtic-only fare usually heard at the venue, a significant number of salsa dancers and the rest of us there specifically for the band, or just out of curiosity.

Of course, the salsa dancers were by no means the only ones dancing and we all had a bit of a shuffle ourselves. I’d been watching YouTube videos all last week to pick up the basic steps!

The atmosphere was terrific once the crowd had warmed up, with Venezuelan singer Lino Rocha expertly working the crowd. By the second set, the overwhelming majority were on their feet.

With a unusual, totally unique mix of sounds, the eleven members of Salsa Celtica have found a niche but more importantly, an audience.

Harrogate, that most venerable of stuffy old Yorkshire towns, pulled off a real coup this week by having the wonderful Lila Downs over to do a concert for its International Festival. This weekend, it was the turn of Cuba’s Sierra Maestra, followed by timba band Manolito Y Su Trabuco.

Grupo Sierra Maestra has been around since the late 1970s.It was founded by Juan de Marcos González, the man responsible for bringing together a diverse group of musicians later known as the Buena Vista Social Club.

Sierra Maestra’s members had been students at the University of Havana. In forming the band, it was their intention to revive the old son tradition that had defined the golden era of Cuban music and formed the bedrock for most modern styles. De Marcos left in 1996 to work on the Buena Vista project and his new outfit Afro-Cuban All Stars.

The group probably weren’t at their best. It didn’t help that the sound at the International Centre was decidedly poor and the lighting system appeared to have baffled their technician judging by the rather messy display. But the crowd was easy enough to please, with a number of couples getting up to dance salsa from the front rows.

Timba is a tough style to pin down - it’s the Cuban adaptation of salsa, but aficionados will tell you that timba is significantly different and certainly not a subset of salsa. In any event, the sound of Manolito Y Su Trabuco was rather cloying, delivered by a tight band and three rather daft looking singers. I guess it’s a case of you win some, you lose some.