Customer Reviews

Rough Guide to Salsa De Puerto Rico

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This is more of a soft guide to salsa de New York! How on earth can you have Yomo Toro and Plena Libre representing Puerto Rican salsa? And aren't Tito Puente, Jimmy Bosch and Eddie Palmieri New Yorker's? Let's not forget that Jose "El Canario" Alberto is DOMINICAN! You cannot make any rough guide to salsa de Puerto Rico compilation without the maestro's themselves! Namely "La Sonora Poncena", "Cheo Feliciano", "Ismael Rivera", "Pete (el conde) Rodriguez", "Andy Montanez", "Hector Lavoe", "Ray Barretto", "Ismael Miranda", "Willie Rosario", and "El Gran Combo". All of which are MISSING from this weak compilation (with the exception of Hector Lavoe)!

Another reviewer seems to miss the whole point of the Rough Guide collections. As the subtitles says, "pure latino: classic salsa to roots plena." The Rough Guide series in known for stretching their listeners' common notions of what a particular country sounds like musically. For example, the Rough Guide to Japan isn't just koto and shakuhachi; it includes Japanese music generally unknown in the West. In this case, I suspect that the "New Yorkers" represented here consider themselves Puerto Rican, especially when it comes to their art form. I was quite happy to see Nava represented. I love his music, but it's quite difficult to find more than one of his CDs in the U.S. The selection by Cico Mangual is a terrific representation of the African roots in Puerto Rican music. No collection will make everyone happy, but there are plenty of other collections out there that will satisfy salsa "purists."