Directory of North American nightclubs |
||
|
|
||
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
CALIFORNIA |
|
ILLINOIS |
MICHIGAN |
NEW JERSEY |
NEW YORK |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Search Results for: Son
Swedish dancer Molly Hagman made it in Europe and now in New York
Undoubtedly, Latin music continues to enslave hearts around the world and the protagonist of this story is a reliable proof of it. It has been such a great honor for us to have known the story of Swedish professional dancer Molly Hagman, who has shared with us the most important facts about her career and how she has reached the point she is at today.
How Molly became interested in dancing in her home country
Nice and jovial Molly was describing in detail everything she has done in her career, thus answering most questions we had for her. She began by telling us that her dance studies began when she was still very young. Being only 15 years old, her best friend at the time convinced her to enroll in the Malmoe Dance Academy in the Swedish city of Malmö, to learn from instructors who introduced her to genres such as jazz, hip hop, contemporary music and ballet.
Two years later, when she was sufficiently prepared, she began experimenting with salsa and auditioning for women’s dance teams, one of them being the group Bellasitas, Molly and Maddy being the first two original members. Once the team was complete, they began to perform in congresses throughout Europe such as the Berlin Salsa Festival, the Hamburg Salsa Festival, the Copenhagen Salsa Festival, the Stockholm Salsa Weekend at the Capitol Stockholm in Sweden, the Scandinavian Salsa Congress, the Love Dance Festival, among many others.
Activity outside Europe
By the year 2014, the young woman studied a year of commercial dance at the International Dance Academy in Copenhagen, Denmark. As part of her education, she was able to travel to Los Angeles to train at the Millenium Dance Complex studio, where she remained for about three months and shared with some of its choreographers such as Gustavo Vargas, Jojo Gomez, Yanis Marshall, Tricia Miranda and many more. That time was enough for her to know that her destiny was the United States and that eventually she would like to live there. And she did.
Some time later, more specifically in 2016, Molly moved to New York to study dance at Broadway Dance Center and the possibility to meet the best salsa instructors, many of whom were in that city. It is there where she made contact with Franklin Diaz, with whom she was dancing for a few months in a number of events, until joining the Yamulee Dance Company in the Bronx. She danced for that dance company for about six years, that is, until the year 2022.
During her time with Yamulee, she was able to participate in all kinds of events all over New York, Florida, Trinidad and Tobago and other places.
It is during this time that her passion for Latin music developed even more, since practically those whom she interacted with listened to salsa, merengue, bachata and reggaeton and the great majority of Yamulee’s members were Dominicans who gave much importance to their heritage. As mentioned before, Molly had already had contact with these genres, but this constant exposure only reinforced her decision to continue along this path.
Solo career
In 2022, Molly felt ready to start her career as an independent dancer thanks to all the training previously received. Since then, she has worked with her current dance partner ”Vittico La Magia” with whom she has performed in numerous festivals such as the New York International Salsa Festival in 2023 and 2024, the BIG Salsa Festival in the same years and the New York SBKZ Congress last year.
She also told us that she was starring in the official music video for the latest song my Thalia and Los Angeles Azules – “Yo Me Lo Busque” that already has over 1.2 million views after being out for only 5 days! What was an incredible experience and dancing for such big artists. Similarly, she has participated as a dancer for several concerts by Dominican artist Yiyo Sarante in New York and New Jersey before thousands of people who enjoyed her great talent. She also danced with Grupo Niche and La India in some of their shows.
Additionally, she has been interviewed by important shows such as The Art Of Fashion TV, which was broadcast through the Manhattan Neighborhood Network and exposed to millions of viewers, giving Molly the opportunity to make herself known to a much larger and diverse audience.
Her role as a dance teacher
Molly has been teaching dance since she was in Sweden on some occasions, but where she further gained experience was in New York, which is when she has developed all her skills through the private lessons she today offers. She says that this is an area of her work that she really enjoys very much because it gives her the opportunity to teach other young people what she herself learned at the time and this satisfies her enormously. The need to create a new choreography for each class invites her to be more creative and to keep the interest of her students with new dances in each session.
Ms. Hagman has also completed with Malmoe Dance Academy’s professional dance teams on the Swedish national talent competition “TALANG”, (“This is Talent”) where she and her team won First Place. Talang is the Swedish reiteration of the Got Talent series. Talang features singers, dancers, comedians, variety acts and other performers competing against each other for audience votes and prize money. It’s a nationally recognized dance competition which was broadcasted on Swedish national television and to viewers around the world.
Read also: Nicaraguan composer and pianist Donald Vega’s hard-luck story
Saxophonist and flutist Dave Victorino talks to International Salsa Magazine
Dave Victorino is a saxophonist and flutist who plays various Latin genres such as salsa, Latin jazz and swing in the city of Los Angeles, California. The American musician has been kind enough to talk exclusively with International Salsa Magazine about various topics, including his beginnings, current career and existing projects. We hope that our esteemed readers will like the details of this conversation.
Young Dave’s beginnings in music
Dave recalls that his taste in music led one of his cousins to give him a flute so that he could start playing an instrument and see what happened. However, over time, the young man preferred the saxophone, which he found he liked much more at the time. He reckons that his interest in music began when he was just a 12 or 13-yeard-old.
His interest in the saxophone began with a friend of his mother’s who was a teacher of that instrument, so he was the first to teach him how to play it properly and, even after so many years gone by, he continues to remember everything he learned with him.
Education
Dave graduated with a degree in music education from Cal State Los Angeles and assured us that one of his greatest mentors there was saxophonist Barney Martinez, a very important figure in Latin jazz at the time. This was a time of great learning for what was to come professionally, and that knowledge continues to help him a lot.
He also studied with other important music teachers and professors who complemented his musical training almost perfectly.
What has Dave learned from his greatest collaborations?
Throughout his career, Dave has collaborated with groups such as The Henry Mora Big Band, Temptations, Al Viola, Fred Ramirez, Little Anthony and The Imperials and many others. Obviously, all these personalities have had something important to teach the musician when sharing the stage with him.
Dave refers to Henry Mora as one of his greatest mentors in this whole process, as he had much more experience than the artist, so he had a lot to learn and imitate from him.
Each professional experience is one more step on the road to excellence that Dave and any artist looks for in his work, which is achieved through practice and spending time with more experienced teachers.
Great inspirations
When we wanted to know Dave’s greatest inspirations, he could not help but first mention the group El Chicano, with which he played in the early 1980s. One of its founding members and singer Bobby Espinosa, who showed him some recordings of the Fania All Stars and Johnny Pacheco while playing one of the best solos Dave had ever seen. In fact, the artist considers Pacheco his favorite flutist from the very moment he first heard him.
He also commented that he really likes the way Stan Getz, a Californian saxophonist whose main genres were jazz and pop, played.
How his love for Latin music was born
Dave’s first contact with Latin music was with the group El Chicano, but then came other groups that playing genres that caught his attention.
For several years in the 1980’s and 1990’s, he played in a park three times a week and, on those same days, a DJ would play music by Johnny Pacheco himself, El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico and other salsa groups. He became so fascinated with everything he heard that, little by little, he began to transform his repertoire into one that also included salsa and Latin jazz.
Initially, he only cared about playing this music without understanding the lyrics, but then he began studying and learning a little Spanish to get a better performance in his work. However, he assures that this detail has never posed a problem or a limitation to get good performances in Latin music.
Music Classes
Another interesting thing about Dave is teaching. He currently teaches saxophone, flute, clarinet and piano to a good number of students, who have taught him the virtue of patience and determination to always learn something new.
His students are of different ages and he teaches various levels.
También lee: Eddie Muñíz continues to head Swing Sabroso
Damian Ballester and the transformations of Cuban Folk Dance
Latin America / Cuba
The relationship of Africa within the musical and dance culture in Latin America is notorious when we see the cultural expressions of the peoples of this continent, it is easy to see how similar they are, the use of percussion is one of the most relevant topics, in itself a mixture of cultural customs, religion, musicality, dance, in itself all the elements of the black race.
America, one of the main destinations of the ships with black slaves from many areas of Africa, caused our culture to be armed with a bit of each custom, therefore, we can say that in America there is a bit of each African people, this relationship of variety of slaves focused on dividing the forces of the race so as not to make it powerful, divided languages, customs, words and religions only left the marginalized population to communicate through percussion, an element that made the system improve at times of understanding within the fences where they lived.
Due to the above, African religions and customs are born in Cuba but, adopted by those already existing on the island, this combination gives us a rich variant of movements from three continents, Europe through Spain and Africa in all its splendor.
To clarify some topics of the folklore of the Caribbean island and its current dance transformations, we had to contact a great teacher, Damian Ballester, director of Iya Aye, one of the best folklore groups on the island of Cuba, to speak with this professional of the dance is necessary if we want to obtain real information about Cuban traditions, a great teacher who has left his teachings in many Spanish-speaking countries, among which Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and now in the United States stand out…
we begin by greeting him and opening a pleasant conversation, to which we got an original response “Greetings acere, what was it”, calling him opens up a range of questions on the subject in question, here is an extract of the most common doubts generated around the relationship with salsa, its festivals and diffusion in the world.
Greetings Prof. Damian, grateful for your receptivity, we want to give information to our readers about the relationship of Cuban folklore within our world, Salsa, to begin with, what is defined as Cuban Folkloric dances?
Grateful for the opportunity and sure, that if we report on the case, folk dances are nothing more than the set of cultural goods or phenomena that constitute a cultural complex with manifestations of all aspects of popular life. It is the sum of the manifestations acquired by experience, by inheritance, by tradition, by the satisfaction of biological or sociological needs, among other things. This lasts through several generations and almost always undergoes transformations.
They will get compound terms in the word folklore, which speaks of people or people, popular knowledge, together with the popular knowledge of the people. It is a very long topic, because I should talk about so many things about my culture, better let’s leave the definition until here and thus add flavor to the interview.
Much better, we continue then, do African dances have any impact on Cuban folk dances?
Yes, of course, it is the root, the exercise of dance has always characterized my land and has suffered the same processes of contagion and transculturation between the ways of dancing of the colonizer and the styles introduced by African ethnic groups since the 16th century, in fact, the colonizers brought romance, active in the Cuban countryside for several centuries, with its couplets and their ways of singing and founding alegrías, while the black slaves included their ancestral rites, their drums, and their particular sense of rhythm and movement. bodily.
Given this brief explanation, we can say that not only dances of African origin contributed or influenced Cuban folklore, we can say that there is also an incidence from Spain, France and the Caribbean, but its main axis was born from the Spanish and the African.
We know the extent of Cuban folklore, for how long should a person prepare to be called a professor in this branch?
First of all, to carry the name, whether it is a teacher or instructor of Cuban folklore genres, there are two factors that are very important, the first is study, since Cuban folklore is made up of a very wide range of genres divided into different styles, I could mention some examples: Peasant, popular, Afro-Cuban and Franco-Haitian folklore.
Within the styles of peasant folklore, examples could be given of the Cuban zapateo, the ripiado parakeet, the chidonga, the hawk, the caringa, the son montuno, among others.
Within the styles of popular folklore, the Complex of the rumba, the mambo, the chachachá, the danzón, the dance, the pilón, the congas and the comparsas, the casino can be mentioned, within the Afro-Cuban folklore the Bantú cycle can be mentioned, the Yorubas, the Arara, the Abakua, within Franco-Haitian folklore we can mention the French tomb, the Haitian merengue, the gaga, the vodu among others, if I continue we will not finish today. (laughs to close)
Of the folkloric dances, which are the most outstanding or spread worldwide?
It could be said that there are several, examples are the popular folkloric ones, one could say the casino, the mambo, the chachachá, the son, the rumba complex, that the latter people tend to say are African or Afro-Cuban dances, that have African influence does not mean that they are classified within Afro-Cuban dances because this genre emerged in Cuba, was used as an object of protest against the government of that time and was eradicated in the essence of Cuban. In the same way, the one that has had the most impact and remained in the whole world are the Yoruba dances or dances of the orishas.
Should we open another interview to just talk about the many genres that the island embraces, what institutions correctly form the folkloric traditions in Cuba?
There are many institutions in Cuba, from the community point of view what is named in Cuba as amateur dancer are the community projects and actions that are nothing more than groups created in the communities, all of these supervised technically and methodologically by specialists from the houses of culture of each area by provincial and national methodologists governed by the Ministry of Culture.
From a professional point of view, there are art schools such as the ENA (NATIONAL SCHOOL OF ART) and the ISA (SUPERIOR INSTITUTE OF ART) all governed by a logical curriculum organized by specialists and connoisseurs of the genres.
Other institutions that could be mentioned, is the little school of the national folkloric group of Cuba with 56 years of creation in charge of rescuing and safeguarding the traditional Cuban musical and dance traditions.
Wao, Enough, Do you know if there is any similar institution in the world?
In the world there are countless schools that are training dancers with the Cuban style and technique, whether they are Cuban or foreign teachers, but nothing like the preparation of art schools in Cuba that work with a logical and well-prepared program, in some schools around the world it could be said that they do not work under a logical methodological program for the teaching of these genres due to the commercial and monetary part, unfortunately there are many dedicated to commerce, to money and not to the necessary dedication.
This dissemination has been achieved while respecting the roots and traditions of the farmers? The root? The original essence?
Unfortunately, it could be said that a good diffusion of Cuban genres worldwide has not been respected or achieved, of 100% of the performers, it could be said that only 10% are protecting Cuban traditions, it is sad to say, but trade and populism it is destroying the folklore of an entire country.
Have these changes in traditions positively or negatively impacted Cuban culture?
First of all, traditions do not change if they are not passed down from generation to generation. In terms of their impact, I see it negatively because the dissemination that is taking place is incorrect and worst of all, there is no organization, which was of Cuba, can follow up on the program that is being given to Cuban genres, in itself, many see the commercial and hence they do not care about the poor distribution of what is taught.
What is the reason that so many dancers seek to perform Cuban dances? It is notorious to see it at festivals and congresses.
There are two very important factors: 1 Cuban music, which has been evolving in an incredible way, fusing Cuban rhythms within its repertoire, and the other factor is not because I am from Cuba, Cuban folklore could be said to be the most complete genre available. world level from the point of view of dance, is that it has a history, virtuosity is varied, it could be said that it is well complemented, due to its complexity and interpretive difficulty, it is what attracts attention, additionally, salsa comes from us, from these roots is born what now wants to be denied.
Teacher and the Cubans? Have Cubans spread their dance correctly?
It could be said that the vast majority of Cubans have disseminated the genres well, why do I say that the vast majority?
Because there is another small group that deforms it, money changes everything, foreigners think that all Cubans They dance, it has happened that they say Cuban and quickly you think he is a dancer, he knows everything, he is good, and no, that is not reality, one thing must be clear about being an opportunist, not a dancer, being a dancer by hobby and another is being one by profession or for being a teacher.
There are Cuban teachers who are hurt by the deformation that is happening with what has been studied so much, but there are others who only care about getting paid and do not care if their students do it well or badly.
How has the interpretation of Cuban roots impacted the so-called Salsa Casino in the world? Has the original and real spread of traditions been respected?
Look, since Cuban music began to evolve inside the casino, it began to undergo a series of transformations from movements to choreography due to the musical style that Cuban orchestras began to spread, known as TIMBA, which was well accepted by the public, If we talk about the impact from the traditional point of view, it could be said that there is no original interpretation of the Cuban roots because they are not executing a specific traditional genre, but rather what they are using different styles of the traditional folk dances that all this could be called Variety.
Have Cuban music and dance festivals or congresses devoted time and effort to improving these transformations? Have they worried about minimizing the damage?
In most cases, very few, first of all, if it is a competitive event, the organizers make the mistake of hiring unqualified personnel to evaluate genres of Cuban origin, and that is where the serious faults come from. There have been cases where there are groups , couples or soloists who perform a good technique within normal limits and the jury evaluates for a taste problem if they see it as beautiful and give it less points, or disqualify it, it is not about beauty, it is about correctness, the organizers should be more careful about these things.
What recommendations would you give to our dancer readers on this controversial topic?
The dancer must be clear about four aspects that are fundamental to his artistic life and entire career: dedication, love of dance and, most importantly, study.
Do only what you love and you will be happy, the one who does what he loves is blessedly condemned to success, which will come when it should come, because everything that should be, will be, and will come naturally.
Let’s spend time respecting the roots and cultures of peoples, and above all, let’s take a good look at who we entrust our desire to learn, there are thousands of ways to learn correctly, everything is in the research, knowing who we contact and why There are hundreds of excellent instructors in the world, not to mention the many means of learning today.
I invite you to learn a little about this and other topics, I have a virtual classroom where I teach a lot of the theoretical and practical content online, I do it through the son rumbero academy and its virtual classroom format, follow the @sonrumbero accounts on Instagram and Facebook.
Salsa, territory of joy.
Latin America / Venezuela / Caracas
Salsa, territory of joy, language of celebration, enjoyment of the towns and their people, was born from a confluence of facts, geniuses and rhythms. Confluence that happened in the faith of the same religion: Afro-Cuban music.
And that mixture, which Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz cleverly described as “similar to the tomato sauce that is put on hamburgers to give them flavor”, was summed up in the insightful sentence of the occasional witness, the journalist Phidias Escalona: “the music that you make is salsa. From now on we will call it sauce”.
The year was 1968 and although the new rhythm already existed, there had been no consensus on the name. And that consensus began to emerge -perhaps for the first time- on the album “Los Durisimos The Strong Ones, Salsa y Control”, by Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz. Later, Richie himself would add: “The word was born around us, (however,) if it weren’t for (Jerry) Masucci there would be no salsa, because he brought it to the world.”
In 1960s New York Harlem, black Americans had begun to like Latin music, despite not speaking Spanish.
The guajira dazzled them until they made them dance. Believing that the mixture of boogaloo, blues, mambo, guaguancó or son montuno, was a variant of the boogaloo invented by Chubby Checker, the new rhythm was founded, incorporating the concepts of the Latin spirit in their interpretations and that -technically- they would add to the baggage : percussion, piano, violins, trumpets, trombones and whatever instrument would serve to give it flavor and richness.
Musically, for example, the so-called “blue notes” would be added (that is how the overtones of the acoustically weak E and B notes, last to be added to the scale, where they would be relocated between Lam and Lam) would be added to the new fusions. Then came the downloads and phrases that we know until now as characteristics of salsa.
Thus the sauce was born. And so it has been transformed, always within the circle that encloses joy, passion and enjoyment, history, experiences, fortune or misfortune, seen from different perspectives: urban, social, sensual or everyday.
