Anibal Velasquez - En Tremenda Salsa

Super heavy mix of descarga, salsa and boogaloo by accordion virtuoso An�bal Vel�squez, done in the salsa con acorde�n style, featuring hot piano and timbales, yet played with a uniquely Colombian flavor. Recorded with fantastic production quality, this replica LP contains 8 hard-hitting dance floor bangers plus 2 bonus cuts including the 1972 version of 'Mambo loco', making this an essential addition to your Discos Fuentes collection. First time reissue. 180g LP. An�bal Sensaci�n Vel�squez is one of Colombia's most innovative and prolific Coste�o musicians, known as El Mago del Acorde�n and El Rey de La Guaracha. Vel�squez grew up hearing Cuban music as well as the local rhythms of his region, and this led him to tinker with and transform the beats and melodies of the regional music encountered in his home city of Barranquilla during the 1950s and 60s. By 1960, after being a sideman in several groups, Vel�squez formed his own conjunto with his elder brother Juan, a talented musician in his own right, and his younger sibling Jos�. An�bal Vel�squez en tremenda salsa is a perfect example of the musician's wanderlust and restless creative spirit. A pioneer of the adventuresome mixing of rhythms, genres and styles that was happening at the time in Barranquilla and the rest of coastal Colombia, in retrospect one can say that Vel�squez was quite daring in combining the music and instrumentation of his native country with other Caribbean forms. In 1968, when he made this album, very few Colombians were attempting to record an accordion-led session of descarga, guaracha, boogaloo, guajira, guaguanc� and mambo, and for that we should recognize Vel�squez as a forerunner of various other records by Lisandro Meza y su Combo, Los Corraleros de Majagual, Los Caporales del Magdalena and Chico Cervantes y su Conjunto Internacional. Overall, the feeling on the album is of the loose, improvised jam session implied in the genre term descarga - a word written all over the back cover and a very apt description of Vel�squez's preferred manner of playing and inventing songs on the spot. Although En tremenda salsa is just one of many such records that Vel�squez cut with his Cuban and Puerto Rican influences writ large on his sleeve, it is perhaps his most consistent and well-recorded, certainly only one of a few of his featuring prominent piano played in a salsa style, and this is why it is a highly sought after record by collectors in the know. Thankfully now it has been remastered from the original tapes, with its artwork intact, and two bonus tracks in the same style of salsa con acorde�n have been added to flesh out what was originally a far too brief album.