King of salsa Rolando Sanchez, the founder and leader of Rolando Sanchez & Salsa Hawaii, appreciates a good joke as much as anyone. From that perspective, he was amused rather than angry when he read recently that some uninformed person was claiming that salsa music had only arrived in Hawaii "a couple of years back."
By John Berger
jberger@starbulletin.com"Who could say something like that?" he asked rhetorically over dinner at Brew Moon earlier this week. It was Sanchez himself who launched Hawaii's salsa scene at Anna Bannana's over 13 years ago and has been the state's most tireless promoter of modern Latin music ever since.
"When the real Latin salsa music scene started in Hawaii, a lot of the people that are going out dancing now were probably just being born. That's a generation ago," he said. Sanchez is returning to the longtime South Beretania club for a one-nighter tomorrow, but he and his band make Brew Moon the place to be for salsa music every Wednesday.
Salsa and Latin rock were already hot on the mainland when Sanchez arrived here almost 20 years ago, but he soon discovered that, despite the national success of Santana and several other Latin rock acts, most local residents still thought of Latin music as either the mariachi music heard in Mexican restaurants or the folkloric jibaro music popular in the small but tight-knit local Puerto Rican community.
Neither reflected the music Sanchez had grown up with in Nicaragua or the music he'd played in California. He formed Malasada Electrica, a proto-salsa band, with Adela Chu. When that project dissolved, he formed the original Salsa Hawaii band that opened at Anna's back in 1989. By that time, he intended to take modern Latin music to the biggest and most culturally inclusive audience possible.
"Even when I was growing up in the Bay Area, my bands were formulated to go out and expose the music beyond the Latin community. That was one of the concepts that was fresh in my mind when I came to Hawaii, and that's what made me repeat the process. Obviously, it worked," he said.
Sanchez found a ready audience with Hispanic military personnel who had grown up in the hot East Coast salsa scene and considered jibaro the music of their grandparents' generation. He also reached out to the non-Hispanic population, many of whom were interested in Latin music but didn't know where to find it.
"Taking the music from Anna Bannana's to Waikiki was definitely a challenge ... but making Latin music accessible, especially in Waikiki ... and television and radio, was part of the same idea. Latin music has a magic about it. It's very conducive to socializing, and I saw all the ethnic groups in Hawaii coming in and appreciating it from day one."
Sanchez has taken salsa music to an assortment of venues over the years, recorded several albums with an ever-changing roster of musicians, and took the lead in organizing an annual Latin Music festival that would bring Hawaii's diverse Hispanic cultural and community groups together (the festival has since been a casualty of the 9/11 attacks). It was with that goal in mind that he included Hawaii's foremost Puerto Rican bands, along with his own and other salsa bands formed by Puerto Rican-born military personnel, when he produced the "Salsa From Hawaii" CD for international distribution by Quiet Storm Records earlier this year.
"You can't deny the fact that jibaro and 'katchi-katchi' has been here but they never really got exposed to the mainstream of the people, and now we're exposing those (local) styles, too. It puts more international eyes and ears on what we're doing here. I just hope people keep supporting it."
Where: Anna Bannana's, 2440 S. Beretania Rolando Sanchez's Salsa Night Celebration Party
When: 9 p.m. tomorrow
Admission: $5, 21 and over
Call: 946-5190
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