Live at the Belly Up: Sabrosas Latin Orchestra (Peaks and Valleys Productions, Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After that intriguing Death in Paradise episode, KPBS showed a Live at the Belly Up program, blessedly from 2024 instead of a rerun from previous years (they’ve been doing reruns so long we’ve got to see performers like local blues queen Candye Kane who have long since died) featuring the Sabrosas Latin Orchestra. They are the first all-woman salsa band in the San Diego area and they consist of 12 musicians, all of them excellent. The band’s designated spokeswoman for the interstitial interviews was Monica Saenz, who plays timbales (the two standing drums, which look like snare drums without the snares, that are basic to Latin music). She said the women had known each other for years but hadn’t played together until one day, when one of them said, “Let’s start a band” – and they all loved the idea and joined in. LIke a lot of bands that appear on Live at the Belly Up, Sabrosas Latin Orchestra are quite infectious, though as the show progressed I started to feel just a bit oppressed at the sameness of the material. It seemed every song had to get into a dance groove and stay there – even the last song, “Vivir mi Vida,” which began with some nice group singing, soon sped up and churned out the same basic salsa rhythms as everything else they played. I often measure a Live at the Belly Up episode by how many songs the band is able to perform in the show’s time slot (nominally an hour, usually 52 minutes, though I believe this one ran overtime and clocked in at 55 to 57 minutes). Sabrosas performed 11, on the small end and indicating that they spent a lot of time jamming and stretching out the songs into long dance grooves.

Monica Saenz said during one of the interviews that the band plays in the traditional clavé rhythm of Cuban music but also adds bits of the jazz influence that came when many Cuban musicians relocated to New York and started picking up on the jazz scene there. Their pianist, Tomo Osako (she was playing an electric keyboard but it was set to sound like a normal piano), threw in some tasteful but impactful bebop licks into their sound. I tried to pick out the sexiest members of the band and decided it was between their conga drummer, Monette Marino, who showed up in a beautiful red sequined gown; and one of their two trombonists, Rebecca McKinley, who had her hair cut short and wore a red sequined top similar to Monette’s whole dress but what appeared to be a tasseled short blue skirt below the waist. The band has three lead singers and they’re all sisters: Yadisley Vásquez Fuentes, Mariela Contreras and Iliana Ortiz. Iliana came out about two-thirds of the way through the show, and until then Vásquez Fuentes and Contreras had amazed me with their skill at dancing while wearing stiletto high heels. Ortiz also had on high heels, though at least hers were thicker than those of her sisters’, and she was wearing a stunning red wig that made me think of Lucille Ball. The 11 songs they played were “La Rebelión” (which threw the Belly Up’s usually reliable chyron writers; no title appeared on screen for it and I literally had to Google it to find out the song’s name), “Cali Pochanguera,” “Pira Pira,” “Amica es Safiurente,” “Moliendo Cufé,” “I Like It Like That” (a song they introduced as their concession to American soul music; they based theirs on Cardi B’s version, though there have been previous recordings by Latin stars like Tito Puente), “Toro Mata” (which they introduced with the drummers banging away on various African-derived percussion instruments to illustrate the song’s beginnings from Africa via Peru; it was one of the most exciting moments on the program), “Carnaval,” “Llordás,” and the closer, “Vivir mi Vida.”