Here in Europe Maykel Blanco y Salsa Mayor are in full swing with their Spring 2011 tour . Pedrito Calvo Jr. is also touring Europe now with concerts in Italy, France, Austria, Macedonia and Denmark.

In the US Paulo FG has just completed a series of concerts in San Francisco that have Kevin waxing lyrical. Hopefully he will post a full report later, but I will say that Paulo and his band were in top form and made quite an impression on the fans in California.

Calixto Oviedo also stopped by to see Paulo the other night. They played together in Adalberto's band lo those many years ago. Calixto is in the US now with Afro-Cuban All Stars for the North American leg of their spring tour . Calixto will also be holding some percussion clinics : April 6 and 7th in Seattle at Pacific Seattle University and Washington University, respectively and April 26 in LA, and April 28 at Cal State U in LA. If you can\t make those clinics, check out his books in the Beyond Salsa Percussion series.

And get ready for the summer tour season! It will be here before you know it.

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In the future we'll be reserving this space for global news, so please get into the habit of checking our new BAY AREA REPORT for local NoCal news. You can always see when it's been recently updated by looking under NEW STUFF-LO NUEVO to your right. We've been adding a lot of local sections lately. Bill Tilford's REPORT FROM CHICAGO has been especially active and contains information of interest to those outside of the Windy City as well.

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¿Buscas una transcripción completa del piano y bajo para el cuerpo y coro del tema clásico "Seis Semanas"? ¿O como aprender a tocar como el creador de tus montunos favoritos de Los Van Van? O la mejor biografía de César "Pupy" Pedroso con su discografía completa? Te puede tomar más de seis semanas pero el Sincronizador Central de la Timba te lo pone en bandeja de plata con Volumen 10 de MÁS ALLÁ DEL PIANO SALSERO. Descraga una muestra gratis aquí. 

César Pupy Pedroso - Photo by Tom Ehrlich

The tenth volume in the Beyond Salsa Piano series focuses on César "Pupy" Pedroso, the founding pianist and one of the principal composers of Cuba's most popular band, Los Van Van, and now the leader of Los Que Son Son, the most successful new Cuban group of the 2000s. Doubling as a history and music appreciation course, the book contains extensive music notation examples of Pedroso's piano tumbaos, or "montunos", as well as transcriptions of solo and head arrangements. 

Illustrated in detail is Pupy Pedroso's trademark "contrary motion" montuno style, which, while very easy to execute produce much richer sounding harmonies than the standard salsa approach. The book also includes "sidebar" sections on the importance of rumba in salsa, rhythm section "gears", controlled improvisation and the evolution of bass tumbaos in Cuban music.

Bass tumbaos are included for each of the 54 piano transcriptions and some also include string section guajeos and second keyboard parts. Volume 10 also includes a detailed biography with rare photos from Pupy's private collection and information about his extensive musical family. The discgraphy section lists Pupy's work in two ways: by album, and by song, as many of his compositions were recorded by various artists.

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UPDATE: eBook and audio now available

Sorry for the delay but the first Pupy Pedroso book is finally done! Getting the research and photos for Pupy's amazing musical childhood turned into a bit of a  ... errr ... "labor of love", but it was worth the extra time and I'm very happy with Volume 10 of Beyond Salsa Piano.  It's the first of four books on Pupy. I'm organizing them by the order in which the songs were originally composed, so while Vol. 10 covers the Los Van Van albums from 1979-1983, some of the songs were re-recorded by Van Van or Los Que Son Son later - for example, Seis semanas  is part of LQSS's live show and the version transcribed (which includes the cuerpo) is the current version. Another example is Con el bate de aluminio, where we compare the changes in Pupy's style from 1979 to 1998.

Finally, this is the first volume to include a fully transcribed solo - in this case La rumba no está completa. You can get the hard-copy book here, and the audio files and eBooks will be available soon and will be announced here, in Pa' ponerte en talla. NOTE: The eBook is only for PC - not for Mac.

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