click HERE for all official tour dates (so far) -- oprima aquí para ver las fechas

Ok IT'S ON and it's OFFICIAL. ALL VISAS APPROVED. No "pasaporte" required to get down with Alexander Abreu and Havana D' Primera. The tour opens with a performance at the Cuban Cultural Fest in Tampa on May 18 and runs through Miami, Folsom, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, New York, Virginia, Atlanta and Kentucky.   We'll be seeing you on the road people !!

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La Timba y  Los Estados Unidos, Parte II: La Recepción Inicial de la Timba en los E.E.U.U
(Para leer este artículo en español oprima aquí)

          If musical merit was the only ingredient necessary for mass popularity  in the United States, Timba would have quickly  taken the country by storm the same way that the Mambo did years earlier.  However, that  is not enough, as many Jazz musicians have also learned the hard way over the years.   An infrastructure to support the music is  also required for any genre to reach large numbers of listeners, and that was not in place for Timba when its sounds first reached the United States. In order to fully understand the reasons for this, we first need to briefly revisit the three decades prior to Timba’s emergence as a distinct style.           

          In the 1960s, there was no significant ongoing cultural exchange between the United States and  Cuba.  This does not mean that there was no exchange of ideas of any sort -  musicians both here and there were listening to each other by various means, and radio enthusiasts such as this writer were keeping up with what was happening in Cuban music via shortwave stations such as Radio Habana Cuba, Radio Rebelde etc.  However, most of the general American public remained....click "continue reading" below for the full article

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(photo by Kent Richmond courtesy Chicago Jazz Philharmonic)

Orbert Davis of the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic and Frank Chaves of River North Dance Chicago had already performed diligent work managing expectations about what to expect and what not to expect from Havana Blue  during interviews in the press and a roundtable discussion at the Instituto Cervantes leading up to the performance, so this writer went into the Auditorium Theatre understanding that this was to be an original interpretive work rather than a series of covers of Cuban music and dance, and he was prepared to receive the work on its own terms.  Nevertheless, it is difficult for anyone who works with Cuban music to watch and listen to "Cuban-inspired" works without also considering the relationships that have unfolded for more than a century between Cuban performers and their American counterparts as well as Cuban and North American music, so this review will speak to both this performance and the bigger picture as well. 

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HOW TO MAMBO with the new Tutti Music Player
The new interactive, state-of-the-art multimedia standard for music instruction. 
versión en español = oprima aquí
para leer sobre este nuevo tocador y los ritmos afro-cubanos gratis

Last November I attended the Billboard FutureSound Conference in San Francisco and there was one product that totally blew me away... the TUTTI MUSIC PLAYER. A company called Tutti Dynamics has developed an interactive music player for Mac, PC (Windows) and iPad that enables students to practice playing their instruments with master artists. If you are a serious student of Afro-Cuban music this will blow you away! 

In a special partnership with TIMBA.com, Tutti is offering Timba.com readers a complimentary introductory offer to access two free Latin grooves (mambo & afro-cuban) from the Tutti Essential Grooves collection. CLICK HERE to take advantage of this FREE OFFER. 

We wiil keep you updated as more rhythms become available. Just click on the Tutti link on the top right of every page (next to the language flags) to the latest news from Tutti.

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