WOMAD

Salsa Celtica

From United Kingdom

Some musical combinations are too weird even for the fevered imagination of the most desperate-for-that-next-hit record company A&R man. The KLF dragging Tammy Wynette out of retirement? William Shatner revisiting Pulp’s finest moment? Tito Puente cutting loose at a Highland ceilidh? OK, so the last one never actually happened, but that was almost certainly because a bunch of Edinburgh’s musos already had it taped when it came to the Nu Yorican salsa/Scottish folk crossover. Going by the exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin name of Salsa Celtica, ten years on these guys find their popularity doubling by the day. Their latest album, El Camino, has won rave reviews from Brechin to Bogota, while the sparkling spontaneity of their live shows has also gone far from unnoticed. This is no exercise in dull ethnomusicology, worthily tracing these two styles’ shared heritages. It’s all about the dancefloor, about celebrating this mixed-race musical baby, the product of what Billboard called “a shotgun marriage”. As they say in their part of Edinburgh – Mas! Mas!In A Few Words… Salsa meets folk for some Highland swing