Rubén Blades, a Salsa Legend, Swings in a Different Direction: Jazz – The New York Times
The album also includes elegantly arranged swing standards like “Paula C.,” a post-breakup chronicle about one of Blades’s first mature romances. He wrote it soon after he arrived in New York in the mid-70s, when he was working in the mailroom for Fania Records — known as the Motown of salsa — and subletting an apartment from Leon Gast, who directed the classic salsa documentary “Our Latin Thing.”
“It was a very inspiring time, in terms of creativity,” Blades recalled, citing the city’s thriving jazz and salsa scenes. “Everybody was at their best at that time, downtown punk rock was exploding, and you could still go to Tad’s Steaks and get for $1.99 a steak with a potato and corn on the cob.”
While the material on “Salswing!” is very much a retrospective, Blades is still quite engaged with the present and busily pursuing projects with singers he admires. He just finished a track with the revered Cuban vocalist Omara Portuondo, the effervescent Mexican singer Natalia Lafourcade and the Argentine folk-rocker León Gieco. And following a prepandemic concert in Puerto Rico, he even had a chance to elevator pitch one of the biggest stars of global pop: Bad Bunny.
“We played three and a half hours and he showed up with his mother and his father,” Blades said. “He was so super respectful, not only to me, but his parents. And then I asked him, in front of his dad, ‘Listen, I have a mortgage to pay, why don’t we do something?’ And everybody laughed.”
“He thought I was kidding,” he added, “but I wasn’t.”