Salsa Con Monte

Vampisoul is thrilled to present the latest facsimile LP in their Discos Fuentes reissue series, an instant tropical Latin dance party from Blas "Michi" Sarmiento. Honestly, it was hard to choose which Michi y Sus Bravos album to reissue, they're all so good. But we took a poll with fans and DJs, and his sixth LP Salsa Con Monte (1973) came up with the most votes, though it was a close race and any one of them could have easily been substituted. El Michi is the son of the famous reedman Clímaco Sarmiento, a bandleader and session ace in his own right who recorded with Fuentes for decades. Michi was a musically gifted child prodigy who grew up in the historic Colombian coastal port city of Cartagena. Proficient in percussion and singing from an early age, he is most well known for following in his father's footsteps with clarinet, saxophone, composition and musical arranging as his signature skills. At 17 Michi had his own band and by 1967 his Bravos were competing with local sound systems and radio stations that were playing the new generation of Latin records from New York, Caracas and San Juan, namely salsa, descarga, charanga and boogaloo. This album contains a number of excellent cover tunes (including Gilberto Gil's 1967 hit Viramundo) as well as originals, and there are a dizzyingly diverse gaggle of genres, namely cumbelé, calypso, pasebol, cumbión and rumba. The title tune is a pumping jam session descarga with a rousing riff (tumbao) that ably competes with any hot Nuyorican number of the time from Willie Colón or Ray Barretto. Salsa con monte refers to Michi's motorbike "mount" (seen on the cover), and is enough to put a tiger in your tank, pizazz in your poncho, light your cigar and make you jump for joy, which is exactly what's happening by happening by the look of the front and back jackets of this classic Discos Fuentes LP.