Oh, yeah.

I tried to.

Finally, when?

For decades, the San Francisco Bay area attracted people from all over the world.

Greater economic possibilities, an escape from political oppression propelled thousands to come to this area.

Waves of Asians, Latinos and African Americans came together to form a melting pot community.

They all brought their culture, art and music with them.

This diverse network of artists and audiences are the soul of the Afro-Latin music community.

You know, I mean.

Long before dancing With the Stars, these folks were passionate about salsa and Latin jazz.

And this music is so compelling, it makes me want to dance, but it also makes me want to listen.

Salsa is safe sex, and what life is about is that implosion explosion kind of thing.

You could go any day and dance salsa and dance with a brain surgeon.

One minute in a dishwasher, the next.

During the 1950s, the music inspired powerful social movements.

You have Cal Jader.

You have Cuban musicians.

They're playing jazz.

They're playing authentic folkloric Cuban rhythms.

That's integration.

All the confusion, all of the isms that we faced.

You came in, you danced, you had a good time, and you went home.

Tired of.

Titles.

But since the year 2000, the Afro Latin music scene has stumbled.

Gentrification has wiped out homes, clubs and culturally rich neighborhoods.

What will keep the music alive?

Music, education and grassroots support.

We need all hands on deck to grow the next generation of artists and audiences.

We have this commonality that brings us together and so becomes a powerful tool of of social unity.

And.

Of the Bay area Afro Latin music community draws together artists from across the globe.

I want you to.

So what is salsa?

Salsa is kind of a generic term that encompasses all the different styles of Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, Colombians.

From Colombia, there's a cumbia, you know, from from Dominican Republic, there's the middle finger.

You think of Afro Puerto Rican music.

It's usually bomba, but it can be plena.

If you think in terms of Cuban music under that umbrella to the soul Mambo dance song, cha cha cha.

To your music is a mixture of European and African music.

When you open a window, the amount of information in there, it's incredible.

Because in the in the island of Cuba, there are so many different African based traditions and very much alive today.

You know, the Bantu, you know, which is really big.

Talking about Paloma Gold, Demba BA Francis, he is, all the local traditions with the baton drumming.

It just goes on.

And on and on.

Such as American music.

The music is actually about Cuban music.

It's a North American music.

It's a blending of Cuban music with elements of jazz and some Puerto Rican music thrown in.

So that's that's something that didn't happen in Cuba.

That happened here.

The irresistible groove of congas, bass and horns compels you to move.

Some dancers learn the basic salsa steps in the kitchen.

Others at a ballroom or nightclub.

But everyone is touched by the African based rhythms and textures.

Afro-Cuban music is the heart and soul of what salsa is about.

You can feel kind of the progression of music from Africa to current times.

Oh, I got my soul.

I don't, that's all I know.

I ain't no.

My fire come from a neighborhood that I'm that you know the Cerrado reach a thing when it comes to folklore a room buying, you know or that African roots.

And so my family, my fire, his childhood, my five year old room bank Colombia, we come from there.

So I guess, you know, my talent, as a dancer come from God, I.

Go, go got, I got I won't go out, I won't.

Go got I'll go get.

Everybody to salsa.

Age wise, ethnic, racial background, whatever.

You know.

And I don't.

Go back.

You know, this this salsa with all of its sensuality, you know, with all of his passion, becomes something that feeds us in ways that very few, if anything else does.

And I love it.

And, you know, salsa music covers a broad emotional landscape.

The lyrics explore everything from love.

Betrayal to the most hard hitting stuff about racism, censorship, the being left out of the mainstream and everything in between.

And if you feel a sense of alienation, especially based on ethnicity.

But even if you don't, you can understand at least the feelings that are being portrayed.

As a part of the history of this country, it's a part of the history of, the immigration of Latinos from Latin America to this country.

And how we brought our culture with us.

Salsa did more than bring together American and Afro-Latino music styles.

Salsa in the Bay area forged a rock solid cultural and social alliance between Latin acts and the community around them.

And the whole party started in the 1930s.

The Bay area has been a Mecca for immigrants since the Gold Rush of the 1800s, but the turbulent 1940s opened a new era of cultural transformation.

World War Two generated thousands of jobs shipyards, refineries, and canneries needed workers.

Waves of African Americans and Latinos barreled into town.

They yearned for a better future and an escape from political oppression.

Both the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay bridge weren't built till 1936.

Yeah, yeah.

So the bulk of people that were coming here, the train stopped, you know.

So that's why you had more.

Yeah, yeah.

African Americans, a large African American community here.

Yeah.

And Latino community.

This is the last location for Sweets Ballroom, which during the 30s, after prohibition, was a spot for the big bands to come.

And sweets was really important because it was the meeting place for Mexican and Latino culture during the 30s.

It was really very, very important here in Oakland.

So it's a gathering spot.

It's now the Open School for the Arts.

And I have been here.

The ballroom is huge.

Yeah, it could have 600 people.

Yeah, it was enormous.

Oakland was a magnificent city.

The architecture, the way things were laid out for a long time.

Yeah, that changed in the late 80s and the early 90s.

A lot of great music played here.

Oh, yes.

Tremendous music in place to hear.

Oakland has its part in the legacy in the history of music in the Bay area.

It can't be disputed here.

Yeah.

Most said Gallegos, a Mexican bass player, was one of those newcomers.

He was one of the first to bring Afro-Latin music to the area.

Merced was really one of the first conservatory trained musicians that came from Mexico, from the conservatory, what I to here to the Bay area in the 1920s.

Mexico's civil war devastated the country's economic and social fabric between 1910.

In 1930, thousands crammed into trains and ships bound for the Bay area, Merced said.

Gallegos left Mexico's crippling poverty to join San Francisco's expanding music community.

We began to see the rise of Latin music, if you will.

First the tangos, the rumba, as you know, and all that, he, you know, picked up on that and began to see that there was an interest in these things.

So he began to actually try to formulate a band to play Latin music.

And one of the first places that he started doing this in was the Suites Ballroom in Oakland.

And.

In that era, nightclubs and ballrooms were segregated.

The entertainment catered primarily to the tastes of white patrons, but Merce said and his partner Guadalupe Carlos convinced the suites brothers to open their ballroom to Latinos.

They called their Sunday afternoon dance parties that, in the others.

So the deal is that, and they say having this band, they get to play the music that was popular at the time and for particularly these young Mexican Americans that on Sundays were very popular.

The boleros were very popular.

And then the mambo came in.

Bands would come with the, the big swing bands, or rather be the big Latin bands that would come from, you know, New York or Mexico or wherever in the afternoon on Sundays they would have the Latin music, and Fridays and Saturdays would be the American music.

So, you know, we we soaked all of that in like a big band.

Perez Prado, who was very famous at the time and, just listening to all the different styles of music.

People got to see Tito Puente, they got to see Machito, they got to see Mexican bands like Pancho's, you know, into the 40s and 50s.

Benny Maria, Chano Boss, who, you know, came with Dizzy Gillespie from.

Meanwhile, across the Bay, the influx of over 30,000 African American workers transformed San Francisco overnight, the Fillmore District evolved into a predominantly black neighborhood.

The area gave birth to a network of black owned hotels, shops and nightclubs.

The locals called it the Harlem of the West.

These newcomers brought their culture, traditions, and music with them.

After a hard day's work, they cut loose to jazz, blues and Latin music at hotspots like Jimbo's Bop City.

When Bop City closed in New York, the Jimbo Edwards opened one in San Francisco.

From 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., Jimbo's opened its doors to a fiercely loyal community of jazz fans and top notch musicians.

Everyone let their hair down and jammed to veterans like Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, to newcomers fresh from Cuba, Jimbo's showcased the beginnings of Afro-Cuban jazz, a potent mix of jazz harmonies, improvization and Afro-Cuban rhythms.

Jimbo's was an oasis, a safe space for folk shut out of jazz neighborhoods and clubs.

All of the black Latin people came there because they could play the downtown hotels.

What happened in Venice Street was the color line, where black musicians couldn't play east of Venice, so almost all the musicians who wanted to jam would come to the Fillmore after their gigs.

So that would include anybody of color, Latin musicians, etc..

So, you know, the welcoming part of it.

There would always be some Latin influenced music there.

Everybody's coming here.

And when they came there.

So all you need is a dollar in your pocket.

We'll take care of the rest.

It was a community.

That had suffered.

A struggle, but they had an inner peace because they were.

Some.

Place.

To go.

Pete Escovedo, West Oakland native and legendary percussionist, grew up surrounded by the Bay area's emerging Latin music scene.

There were sweeps born on the island by the sands.

Those bones were, in those days, thriving.

I mean, they were.

They were doing so well, that was the thing to go to the ballroom and dance and this sort of big bands, you know.

Smooth jazz.

Jazz.

Then I. I. Pete embraced the Latin sounds of the mambo.

The cha cha cha was from New York and Cuba, from.

All of us.

The father knew for us.

There's a train that used to go from, Oakland over the bridge Bay bridge into San Francisco.

This is the bottom of the bridge.

So I would jump on the train, go to San Francisco.

And I was young, you know, 16, 17, 18 around there.

And I was able to walk in and out of the clubs and, listen to other bands.

Actually met Tito Puente when I was 18 years old.

You came close to.

Mambo is a word that has a lot of different meanings.

The most common meaning is from voodoo, and it is the High Priestess.

So it is the the female who is responsible for communicating between the spirits and the practitioners and the people try and heal the old Cuban myth was it could mean dialog.

And and even though that's sort of been debunked, the I like that idea of there's something about a dialog, the drums call to the spirit world.

Mambo, either a dance style or it's a style of music.

The Lopez Brothers writes this guttural basically invented the mambo, was picked up by much throw in its afro Cubans and manifested itself in New York on the East Coast.

Eventually you had the big three of the big bands of material known as Afro Cuban Tito Rodriguez and of course, Tito Puente.

On the West Coast, Carlos Federico, pianist, composer and bandleader, fed the public's passion for spirited Latin dance music with his band The Panamanians.

The Panamanians This was a band that Carlos Federico had started with.

A lot of it also included people like Ricardo Louis, who was an African American musician in Oakland from New Orleans.

Carlos come from colon, Panama.

He came here, but he came here with a special spirit.

At the time because of segregation, you know, you begin to see scenes develop that were more exclusively catered to African-Americans, particularly here in Oakland, with what were known as the Mambo Sessions.

The mambo sessions, man, you know, they were phenomenal.

They happened over there at the California Hotel.

The Mambo sessions provided a safe haven for African Americans to enjoy Latin bands every week.

They could cut loose to the hot sounds of Carlos Federico and the Panamanians or the Escovedo brothers.

They came Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco.

When you walked in there and you felt that ambiance and you became clean, you left all that.

Crap outside.

All the confusion, all of the isms that we faced.

You came in, you danced, you had a good time and you went home.

Cao Jade, legendary vibraphonist and California native, was swept up in mambo mania.

It was in San Francisco where he fell in love with the bongo rhythms of Cuban born Armando Peraza.

You like, here you are playing with, you know, yelling, have a good time.

All right.

But when you went to New York and you're hearing these old bands like the playing day and my day, you know, I needed all these ideas.

And it was the first time they saw somebody playing vibes in a Latin setting.

So all of a sudden the idea just hit him.

That man, you know, I can go back and be able to do this in San Francisco with my own band.

When Jada returned to San Francisco, he wanted to knit together a new combo, and his pianist recommended percussionist Benny Velarde.

He called me the funny guy.

Who would do that?

What did you offer him for the you group?

I think, you know, I went to the the I go digging for him and I got the job.

The coordinator, Afro Cubans, debuted in San Francisco's Macumba Club in July 1954.

Within weeks, Latin music lovers mobbed the place.

Macumba was on Grant Avenue between Bush and Post, and the Macumba really was a jazz club, you know.

But the it was, it was on the edge of Chinatown.

And it's legendary.

It borders what was called the Barbary Coast, very similar to a Storyville in New Orleans.

It's a red light district.

Prostitution, gambling.

It's easy to get to because it's all you can get from Nob Hill here very, very easily.

Streetcars run off of both side to market streets down here.

So the streetcars at the time, it was easy to get it from any part of town, really.

They macumba became the place the flash points for integration because you're Jewish people, Hispanic folks, white folks, African American folks all coming there to dance just like the Savoy Ballroom.

So the music was the unifying cultural force to all of us.

All kinds of folks, you know, began to learn music and dance there.

You know, I really appreciated that the crowd actually knew what they were doing, that there were some really good dancers.

In the era of segregation, it became very important to have clubs that you knew you were welcome.

And at least one night.

Much like New York, the Bay Area Mambo community pushed open the doors for social change.

If you look at the pictures of those bands, you have African American, you have Cal Jader, you have Cuban musicians, they're playing jazz, they're playing authentic folkloric Cuban rhythms.

That's integration.

The Mambo makers brought a wide array of musical influences to the table.

This multi-ethnic community cultivated its own identity.

The 50s and 60s West Coast sound.

What we were defining was the anti New York Anti-Big band kind of thing.

You know, it was the cool jazz vibe with quintets and, you know, the vibraphone with particular that sound that became so indicative of our West Coast, so.

Cal found that that wonderful crossing, that merging of Afro-Cuban rhythm with jazz, and then the textural element that was so distinct.

Benny Velarde recorded six albums with Cao Jader and went on to form his own group.

Benny Velarde is a super combo pack dancefloors all over the Bay area for over 40 years.

I played with Benny a number of times.

Then you want to get out and dance band, you know.

That's because you've been able to get the super combo.

You know, that was like you did.

Those bands really of Benny Velarde and Pete Escovedo and this Camino buddies were the ones that would really usher in salsa to the Bay area.

You know, they would tweak those arrangements to make them a little jazzier.

So as a result, we actually got hipper to hearing people improvise, to hear people taking solos, to extend the tunes so that people could enjoy a longer dance segment called Jader.

Carlos Federico, Benny Velarde and Pete Escovedo.

Their music brought solidarity and joy to generations of artists and audiences alike.

I was up and down in.

It was the 60s, and San Francisco was a hotbed of love, movement and music.

The hippies were smoking weed, dropping acid and vibing to rock superstars.

I was a teenager in the 60s.

The rock scene was incredible here, you know, we were so much into everybody was always going to rock, rock and roll, and we had the best right here.

Living in San Francisco, we had Janis Joplin and we had Jimi Hendrix also, who lived here as well, and Santana, of course, the whole Latin rock scene that was born here right at that same time and comes out of the body of work where I was born, in the neighborhood where I grew up, one block away.

Santana used to.

Rehearse.

The.

In 1967, Cesar's Latin Club opened its doors in North Beach.

Jazzy horns and throbbing congas fired up the faithful.

This is the original.

Caesars grew up on Green Street, and this was the crossroads.

One Green street just a block up is where Vallejo Street is, and Vallejo is where Keystone Corner was the time bar?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And we're just a stone's throw away from all the other jazz clubs.

Matador, basin Street West.

Mr. D's also the Broadway scene.

Caesar's was a club that had the stairs.

I went from the street down.

It was under the street, actually, the level and Caesar's.

So you had to come up at the top of the stairs.

You know, because Caesar, when he began his club over on Green Street and North Beach, you know, it was something new to people.

We used to go down there as 15 year old and just hang out as we got older in high school, you know, 16, 17, we could actually get into a club.

In 1976, Caesar moved his operation across town to 3170 Mission Street.

The new Caesars put in an elevated stage and sprawling hardwood floors.

You know, I was in high school, man, when I first went to Caesar's Latin Palace.

And I think that really that's where the modern salsa era really began, was with Caesar.

And his brother and did a bunch.

So this is where the second Caesar's got settled.

Yeah.

I worked in Caesar's band, I think from 1980 to about 1981.

This gig didn't start till 10:00, and it didn't until four in the morning.

I think it was six.

Six.

Yeah.

So say you got success.

You had you had to kind of risk a, like, this gig.

It was the type of thing where you could go do whatever you wanted to do til 2:00 and still have two hours of dancing.

Yeah, yeah.

You know.

Grammy nominated Sheila E and her living legend dad, Pete Escovedo played their world.

Tito Puente, they play.

I don't know how many times.

Family.

I don't know how many times.

The whole orchestras, which is in New York and Puerto Rico, they play and Caesar's.

There was a place for these bands from New York to come and play, to get paid decently and to be able to turn us all on, man.

East coast headliners vaulted the club into the national spotlight, while Caesar's Latin all stars kept the dancefloor packed from Thursday to Sunday.

Of course, Caesar was playing piano.

There were various other people.

Francisco Agora Bell was playing congas for many years.

We had many jazz musicians playing at Caesars.

I mean, it was, it was basically a dance, a dance venue, but it had these tremendous musicians.

So all the New Yorkers, the jazz heavyweights, would come by and sit in with the band, and it became the real place where you.

Could go for left.

Caesar's became a home base for the Bay area's growing community of Latinx music performers and fans, emerging artists.

And veteran musicians share the same stage.

We live in this very tight community of musicians.

We all know each other.

We're all friends.

We're all close to each other.

Everyone is held to one another.

You know, that's the good part.

There are other cities with musicians flavor you.

You might work with somebody.

You never see them again.

For ten years.

Caesar set the stage for generations of Bay area musicians, dancers and Afro-Latin music lovers from all walks of life.

The people come to play that music and to dance and have a good time and love and to forget about all the other stuff.

It's powerful on a lot of levels.

And do.

In the 1980s and 1990s, hard core New York salsa was under attack.

Salsa romantica, merengue, and hip hop lured away the youth.

Yet the San Francisco scene was still going full blast.

Bay Area musicians produce a rainbow of Latin music, tones and textures.

John Santos and the Machete Ensemble for decades have been on the cutting edge of Latin jazz.

One door was audible.

Was.

La la la la la la la la la la la.

Ha ha ha!

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha no way!

A once led by Grammy winner Carl Peraza brings together hard driving Afro-Cuban percussion with R&B tinged melodies and soaring vocals.

And.

Mesa, led by New York transplant Luis Romero, pours out hardcore dance music, salsa and.

Orquesta moderne a la Tradition and Anthony Blaze vibrant ensemble plays a distinctive style of Cuban music featuring violins and flutes called Chattanooga.

Orestes Villatoro, Grammy winning percussionist, came on the Bay area scene in 1980.

In his over 50 year career, he has played with icons like Ray Barretto, Carlos Santana and Israel Cacho.

Lopez.

He has been a dedicated teacher and mentor to hundreds of musicians in general.

Not just anything his piano, saxophone, trumpet and that the students are very interested in technique, speed.

That's fine, but you have to balance the speed with the heart, with the feeling.

Going with Corazon and they.

Bobby Cesspit is Havana native and renowned vocalist, grew up hearing Cuban music, but she also loves jazz and American folk.

So I used to.

I loved it and I used to sing, but now I understand why I loved it because it was storytelling, which is what I was used to.

That's the thing that moves me most about my music.

When it would rain.

And so for my granddaughter, the whole day.

In 1981, Bobby, her brother Luis, and nephew Guillermo formed a band, Conjunto Spirits.

The trio played the melodies they had heard as kids.

Conjunto says it is quickly grew from a trio to an ensemble of a dozen musicians.

Their three albums and live shows earned international acclaim.

Conjunto Cespedes helped launched many performers in the Bay area Afro-Latin music community.

For decades, San Francisco native Rebecca malian has been a vibrant musical force.

In her teens, she leapt into the spotlight as a gifted pianist and composer.

Since then, she has excelled as an educator, author, and Grammy nominated producer of Afro-Cuban jazz.

She has performed and recorded with such icons as Carlos Santana, John Santos, and Tito Puente.

In 2011, Rebecca took over the reins as Director of Education at the San Francisco Jazz Center.

She remembers how the mambo king Tito Puente became her mentor.

Growing up in the mission and listening to salsa and Latin rock.

Jazz was on in the background, and I never assumed to know anything about jazz until Tito Puente came up to me and he said, Rebecca, I really like your chords, and I want to make my chords.

I see how you're playing jazz chords.

That's what I do, I do.

So he became not only one of my strongest allies and advocates, he became kind of the door opener.

Didn't you know you could do this?

This is who you are.

Now, when I of your.

The salsa explosion also inspired Bay area music lovers to visit Cuba.

Since the 1990s, Oakland based Plaza Cuba has hosted cultural tours to Cuba.

They bring together Americans with Cuban dance and music instructors.

Magic unfolds at Latina, the National School for the Arts in Havana.

Where they learn how to dance.

Salsa just brought it all together.

It helped me feel where the beat laid inside the music.

You know, and I think it made me a better singer at the school.

I see no peanut butter sandwich.

And don't call me mister.

No black.

Students also worked with top notch Cuban musicians.

People are wonderful.

The place is absolutely gorgeous and there's no better environment to soak in the the origins of the music.

A lot of the people that went there because it was legally sanctioned were artists, dancers, musicians, and we studied while we were down there.

We brought back that information and put it into our music and.

I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm.

I think of everything we do here has been so hybrid.

So we have so many we don't have one set Puerto Rican community, one Dominican community, one Cuban community.

The possibility of so many different things and styles happen come, coming out of this area because no one has to stay in one camp the whole time.

Jelly's on pier 50, in San Francisco was a Mecca for hardcore salsa dancers.

This downhome spot brought together the community of musicians, deejays and dancers.

Jellies was just a place to go on a Sunday where you could be outside, where you could see all your friends, where you could have live music, and it didn't cost a lot of money.

And the most beautiful thing about it is you hear stories of backing back in the day in the Palladium, where you had all ethnicities would come to the Palladium to dance.

Cuz Italians, everybody would come, African Americans, you know?

And that vibe was created off jellies.

You can look around and there are 25 different styles of salsa going on, and everybody is in their own kind of salsa dream, and they're just loving it.

But the atmosphere that, jellies, created, it was that it was an open, almost an open jam session and musicians knew.

They said they could come in, drop by and sing a song or two with the band.

So people love that.

People love the spontaneity of that.

Oh yeah.

I'm not.

Giving up when I come by.

And unfortunately, nothing lasts forever.

And the new millennium marked big changes to the Afro-Latin music community and.

I was up and down in.

For decades.

Seven time Grammy nominee John Santos has been the Bay area's musical powerhouse.

John's artistic and education activities highlight the heart of Afro-Latin music, the cultural and spiritual roots of the artform.

Yet as a teenager, John's pulsating congas collided with the turbulent socio political environment of the Vietnam era.

John's neighbors were so upset about his drumming too loud in the park that they called the police, and he was arrested.

We got the mission legal defense to take the case, and we got we went to all the dances and collected thousands of thousands of signatures in support of the drumming in the last part.

And we got about 40 community organizations from the Mission District to sign on to say this drumming is a tradition.

In our.

Community, in our neighborhood.

It's a positive thing.

I've got all this weight.

I went into court and they.

Had to drop all the charges.

This incident energized John to use his music for cultural preservation, social justice, and political action.

We're fighting for something that is our identity and our our salvation in terms of the unity, but the level of awareness of what this music is and what it means and its history has so, ever so gradually grown, does not waver.

The Bay Area Latinx music audience has grown steadily for decades.

However, since 2000, nearly two dozen clubs have been forced to shut their doors.

It's hard to get people to come out and hear live music.

A lot of people have become complacent.

There's Spotify, there's Pandora, there's the web.

You know, and and so people have to really think twice about, do I really want to go spend $20 on a concert?

Music venues have been eliminated by high end condos, restaurants and office buildings.

In 2010, San Francisco's beloved salsa club, Jelly's, shut its doors.

Where will the next generation of dancers, musicians and DJs come from?

Can outreach and education infuse the Latin music lovers community?

The good news is that this music is primarily based on oral tradition.

If we just have the opportunity to reach them and connect with them in a very direct way, they're going to get turned on.

The Bay area.

Latin music education is really at a great forefront.

Part of it has to do with the fact that we have done a lot of great independent music schools that have gotten started here.

We have the jazz school where you can go and study with people like David Belove and John Santos and play salsa and be part of the group.

Dedicated teachers transform passive audiences into active participants.

The ensemble class is a student band of folks who play different instruments and are learning about the music.

So we would bring charts in and run the group practice.

I see myself in.

That same role that Mark Levine and Carlos Federico played for me.

That got me excited about the music, got me interested, and gave me knowledge about what the nuts and bolts of it were.

The Latin Trans Youth Ensemble is a performing arts organization, and our mission is to teach Latin just youth and to provide useful role models for other musicians.

They learn how to play their instruments relative to the concepts and musical foundations that that are part of Latin jazz.

Afro-Latin jazz Cuban music.

I've had children as young as nine.

If they're very talented and they just have that spark and they're able to hang with, performing group.

One of the issues that we have to find is, you know, particularly and not just in urban setting, but it's finding, you know, children of color to actually play this music.

Latin jazz, which was for the most part created in the United States by musicians of color, primarily Latin, African American.

And I don't want to, you know, simplify everything by thinking that it's just about race.

But that's a big part of why I do this.

Just to help preserve it and pass it on to groups that, you know, were historically part of this music.

We give them that experience of what it's like to work as an ensemble or as a team, and how important each and every person is.

To songs.

When I see that, maybe that the sense of responsibility and accomplishment transferred over in some small way or large way in to making them better adults is when they when they leave the group, then I think that's probably for me the most important benefit, and that they learn to appreciate the music.

Since the 1970s, the La Pena Cultural Center in Berkeley and the San Francisco Mission Cultural Center have promoted and preserved Latin music and graphic arts.

Of.

The country.

The most important for me is working as a team, you know, working together and really caring about each other.

And our purpose, you know, to being on stage and making people smile, making people dance, making people feel, you know, good about life.

Wayne Wallace, John Santos, Rebecca mulligan, Maryland Dave Matthews, Corporal Russell, everybody.

I know you look, you look at most of the music in the Bay area at one time.

One of the most to play with my band.

At some point.

It's a great feeling to know the.

I'm.

I see these guys, you know, and I see where they are now, you know, and how they played, how they have progressed musically and as human beings.

And I love man, this is so cool.

It's the greatest thing that Pete's always done for me is he's allowed everybody to be who they are and to find their voice within his band.

And I would say as a writer, Pete gave me so much freedom and really helped me develop and to explore my ideas.

Deejays are the influential music ambassadors, opening the public's ears to classic and new Latino melodies.

Public radio has been one of the great forums for people to learn about Latin music.

Part of it has to do with the expertise that we have of deejays here.

Do you want to play this music?

If you want to learn music understands music.

You know it's history.

Todo lo soi very swinging album.

And that was a nice instrumental in the radio.

I like it because there's more patience for people to listen to music and to share a lot of the stuff that I'm interested in.

Like I said, connecting different styles of music.

You have, Regina Carter and this you have Wynton Marsalis on this.

I'm basically exposed to new musics, but also complementing it with the classic music of our music, which encompasses, both all styles of Latin music was for the Rican, whether it's Colombian, Venezuelan, Cuban, or when I hear, of gypsy singers recording with Cuban musicians, you know, it's it's it's exciting for me or Cuban with an Arabic or a Jamaican with an Arabic.

And there's just so much.

And keep trying to make the all better and bring a context to the program in the context of the music, so the listeners know what to listen to.

And why it came to be.

What does this music sound like before I send you Rodriguez?

What did this music sound like before the weather?

Now, what does music sound like before any problem?

You had your Tito printing?

I believe that as I'm growing and appreciating more music from around the world, I feel like I love to share.

When I see that we can connect the dots from.

There's a common ground with music because the wind takes it everywhere, you know?

It's a universal language.

You know, I started doing radio the years ago, you know, at KPFA music, jazz.

And for me, it was always, you know, just wanted to learn more and wanted to pass it on.

Many musicians have evolved into charismatic teachers and mentors.

They are cultivating the next generation of performers and audiences.

Teach organically and teach history, and teach the connection of art and politics, and teach resistance, and teach through the instruments and through the dancers, and through the rhythms into the compositions about how to be creative and how to be in the world the way that it's been done for centuries.

There's a lot of young people and people of different, you know, ages that have taken an interest in the history of the music and what it means to our community, how it relates to other musics and other communities.

And that is a is a real foundation.

And move that can be built on.

And I think that's the reason that has supported the soon to be as rich as it is in terms of artistic, availability and artistic creativity.

That we have here.

The.

For over 70 years, the Bay Area's Latin music has fought to survive and thrive.

The harmonies and rhythms have touched people in many different ways.

For some, it has been an inspiration to create.

For others, it's been the voice of social change.

But for everyone, the melodies have nourished their souls.

We're all participating everywhere we come, but we find the song and it touches our hearts in harmony.

We make it out.

So the you know, way.

Or you swap out some.

Talent.

Way.

It's almost like.

I mean, I.

Know it's iconic.

It's almost like somebody's song for.

It's almost like a.

It's almost like a. I mean, I.

Know it's the most iconic.