Welcome to Kay Torres of Curuyé in LA! Curuyé in LA can be found under Reports above, or better yet, just look under New Stuff/Lo Nuevo, directly to the right. Whenever there's an update to any of our reports it will show up there. You can also simply type timba.com/reports/la into any browser for the latest Cuban events in SoCal.

The LA scene is really picking up, with Charanga Habanera, Van Van, Rumbanquete, and others scheduled in the next couple months.

Our goal is to eventually have a section like this for every city, so it's a great step forward to finally have Los Angeles covered.

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New to our Schools/Escuela section is Don Skoog's Contemporary Music Project. Don, a top Chicago percussionist, was a veteran of the Cuban music scene before timba.com came along. In fact, Don was one of the tour guides  on the fateful two-week Caribbean Music & Dance trip that led directly -- and immediately -- to the loss of my sanity and the founding of this website.

For some reason, a lot of books which having been being written for decades are all coming out at once this year and "Batá Drumming" is one of the absolute highlights. It's a gorgeous, glossy, hardcover coffee table book with color photos and a meticulous history of batá drumming ... and then the real fun begins with a beautiful and detailed transcription of the Oru Seco. It's easy to read, very methodical, and best of all, Don takes on the toughest aspect of the batá subject -- the extreme differences between the many styles of batá drumming in Cuba. Instead of beating his head against the wall in frustration, he embraces the differences and sets out to explain just how it turned out this way and how they all stem, ultimately, from a common source. As comprehensive as the 202 page masterpiece is, it's only the beginning of what Skoog has planned, and batá is only one aspect of his school's activities. They also take students on regular trips to Mexico to study with Havana masters such as Roberto Vizcaíno.

As with all of our sections, you can see when CMP has been updated by looking under "New Stuff/Lo Nuevo" to the right of the post, or you can access the site directly by typing timba.com/schools/cmp.

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With the usual caveats, here's the current prognosis for timba in California:

More Dates

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Continuing our survey of one of the great Cuban pianists, Beyond Salsa Piano Volume 8 moves on to Deja que Roberto te toque, Brindando con el alma, and La chica del sol.

The first two go deeper than ever into the  ways that Melón is able to create continuous variations on the same tumbao, while the section on La chica leads to an interesting discussion of salsa versus timba versus Latin jazz.

At this point, the first eight volumes are all available digitally and only Volumes 5 and 8 are straggling behind in hard-copy form. Volume 9 is in the works but before completing that I'm going to start working on Beyond Salsa Percussion.

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