| Format: | LP |
| Availability: | Out of stock |
VAMPI280
24/03/2023
Super heavy mix of descarga, salsa and boogaloo by accordion virtuoso Aníbal Velásquez, done in the “salsa con acordeón” style, featuring hot piano and timbales, yet played with a uniquely Colombian flavour. 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.
Aníbal “Sensación” Velásquez is one of Colombia’s most innovative and prolific Costeño musicians, known as “El Mago del Acordeón” and “El Rey de La Guaracha”. Velásquez 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, Velásquez formed his own conjunto with his elder brother Juan, a talented musician in his own right, and his younger sibling José. Aníbal Velásquez 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 Velásquez 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, guaguancó and mambo.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 Velásquez’s preferred manner of playing and inventing songs on the spot.
