Orquesta De La Luz -- Gracias Salseros

Always nice when I learn something new. Doing some research for this latest Orquesta De La Luz（オルケスタ・デ・ラ・ルス）concoction, I discovered that the dance music genre of salsa was actually as American as baseball, apple pie and jazz. All these decades, I had assumed that salsa was straight out of Cuba and had been around since the early 20th century, when in fact, the genre has only been around since the 1960s and made its rise in New York City as the synthesis of a number of other genres including Cuban son montuno, mambo and jazz, according to Wikipedia.

The other thing that I discovered was that Orquesta De La Luz, the Japanese salsa band that wowed crowds right in the birthplace of their bread-and-butter music in the late 1980s, was still very much alive. I'd thought that NORA and the band broke up for good in the 1990s but according to their J-Wiki entry, they've been back at it since 2002. As such, this year, Orquesta De La Luz is celebrating their 35th anniversary in the music business so they just released a new album in July called "Gracias Salseros" which I think means "Thank You, Salsa Performers".

The above is the title track, and I'm happy to say that the band hasn't lost their step. NORA is in fine fettle, the horns are still smoking and the percussion is still popping. May they continue to have listeners dancing in the aisles and on the floor. Orquesta De La Luz was actually one of the first bands that I covered in the blog's history, so you can take a look at their first article all the way back in March 2012.