September Playlist Highlights

Where did you get that song from?

A question dj’s get asked all the time is “where do you get your music?”. I too have asked other dj’s the same question and the answer I get and the answer I give is “wherever I can find it”. As much as that answer is true it’s not very useful to whoever was asking the question. The fact of the matter is that dj’s can be secretive about where they get their music because on some level the value of a dj is his or her ability to find really good music that others don’t know about. If everyone went to the same places for their music the whole ‘crate digging’ aspect of dj’ing would be lost. However, on the flip side dj’s can often be quite willing to share the source of their music with you. To them it’s important that you are familiar with the music and thus more likely to dance to it. Also, besides playing music dj’s also act as music promoters especially for lesser known artists whose great music gets little media attention. As that is one of the main purposes of this blog I am going to share with you one of my favourite sources for great music by relatively unknown artists.

Up until recently, it was really hard for small independent groups to expand their fan base by getting their music to markets outside of their hometown. However, the recent explosion of social media and crowd funding has enabled small bands to raise awareness about and money to support their music and musical projects. One of the most popular places to do this is a website called Kickstarter.com. This website and those that are similar to it are a god-send for small, independent artists who want to breakaway from being funded and controlled by record labels.

Not only do relatively unknown bands turn to crowd funding to raise money but so do well established artists.  One of the amazing projects I found on Kickstarter was called Los Viejos de la Salsa created by the timbales player from Ruben Blades’ band Seis de Solar, Ralph Irizarry.  It should come as no surprise that the music on the Viejos del La Salsa album is top notch (there are a couple of their songs in this months playlist).  Another really cool music project I found was set up by Brooklyn based George Vélez Jr.   According to the promo video associated with the project he and his father really enjoyed making salsa music for fun and decided to take that hobby and passion and turn their music into an album.  The result is a killer disk called Desde El Otro Lado Del East River.   And yet another group that caught my attention was a project by the self-proclaimed premier Latin big-band in the San Francisco Bay area called Pacific Mambo Orchestra.  This is one of those cases where an amazing band has a huge following locally but just hasn’t been able to raise the money or awareness to prompt and distribute their music outside of their hometown.  Apparently, the band is a local favourite packing dance halls with their unique blend of salsa, cha cha cha, mambo and latin jazz.  Like the other two projects we just mentioned, the Pacific Mambo Orchestra’s project managed to raise the money it needed via Kickstart to enable them to release their first album.

Those are just a small sample of the great music projects you can find on Kickstart and there are a bunch more  (like the Motown tribute to Nickleback) but I will let you discover those on your own.

That’s it for this month. Questions, comments, requests?Send me an email

Hasta la próxima