Salsa – Scottish style

As the band embark on a Highland tour, trumpeter and bandleader TOBY SHIPPEY traces the rise and rise of SALSA CELTICA for the Arts Journal.

ARTS JOURNAL: Before we get into the band, how did your own interest in salsa begin?

TOBY SHIPPEY: I used to go down to Club Latino in Edinburgh, where the DJ, Simon Hodge, used to play really good stuff. There is a lot of rubbish out there as well, but Simon played the top stuff, guys like Eddie Palmieri and Tito Puente and so on, and I just got into it that way. A lot of that was jazz-based, but I then got into the song and folk side of salsa music as well.

AJ: Salsa Celtica brought together Latin American and Scottish music in a unique way – how did that concept of evolve?

TS: It wasn’t a massive concept, really – it is more a product of the musical climate of Scotland than any big concept. We started as a salsa band playing in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and the people in the band had been playing all kinds of music – jazz, hip-hop, funk, lots of things. We had a residence in a bar in Broughton Street in Edinburgh, and a lot of people came down there who hadn’t really heard salsa before, and the Hispanic community in Edinburgh got into it as well. Then other musicians from the traditional side of things started coming down and sitting in, and from that we started to expand.

There is a lot of cross-fertilisation between music forms going on in Edinburgh and Glasgow, and I have always found that really exciting. We started mucking around with those ideas, and found that it worked. It could have been terrible, really – I think you could definitely do a band like Salsa Celtica and get it completely wrong, but it became really exciting moments in the gigs when we started putting the two things together, and because of the people we had in the band, we were able to pull it off – we had musicians who could switch from salsa and suddenly be into a reel or a jig. As time went on we pushed further down that road.

AJ: The band formed in 1996 – do you see the music has having changed or developed much since then?

TS: I think so, yes, and it is really moving on all the time, which is one of the fun things about it. There are a lot of different ideas feeding into the music, which is great. We have the salsa side of it, the Scottish traditional side of it, and we can always blend them in different ways, and on top of that there are a lot of other influences feeding in from jazz and hip hop and so on. Salsa actually has a huge amount of folk influence in it anyway. I’m sure some people don’t think it is a good thing, and that’s fine, but in terms of doing gigs, people really get off on it, and so do we.

AJ: The band has grown a bit in size as well, including some very big versions.

TS: We started off as an eight piece, and we thought that was a really big band, but it has sneaked up from there! Salsa bands tend to be quite big anyway, because of the expanded rhythm section and so on, so it’s always going to be quite a big group. The really big versions of the band were put together for one-off festival occasions and so forth, like the Edinburgh Jazz Festival or the Highland Festival or Celtic Connections.

AJ: What will the line-up be for the tour?

TS: Well, we’ll have the three traditional musicians, Chris Stout on fiddle, Fraser Fifield on pipes and whistles, and Eammon Coyne on banjo, who joined us quite recently – we discovered that the banjo was great fun and worked well in the band, so we added him. We have a singer from Cuba, Lino Rocha, myself and Ryan Quigley on trumpets, Steve Kettley on saxes and flutes, Phil Alexander on keyboard and accordion, Demus Donnelly on bass, and the three percussionists – Dougie Hudson on congas, Chimp [David Robertson] on bongos, and Eric, a new timbale player from Cuba who moved to Edinburgh recently. It’s quite a lot of people to take round the Highlands on a bus.

AJ: You are touring with funds from the Scottish Arts Council’s Tune Up programme – what difference has that made?

TS: A big difference. The money has made it possible for us to take a bigger band round smaller venues [see below for tour dates], which is great. We had hoped originally to do Mallaig as well, but that one didn’t work out this time. It’s been great to have this funding – we have wanted to take Salsa Celtica to Shetland as long as the band has been going, but there was no way we could do it without this funding. One thing I really like about the Tune Up fund is that it gives money to established bands to get out there and do their thing, rather than always having to manufacture a new project or whatever to attract funding.

AJ: The band has built a big following at home, but you have also ventured into the salsa heartlands – how did you go down in Cuba and the USA?

TS: The Cuba trip was more research than anything – we just did wee sessions there, we were really just hanging out and soaking it all up. The main place we played was New York – I got a call one day from the Lincoln Center offering us a gig, and stupidly said, yes, don’t bother paying us, we’ll be there, then spent the next three months trying to get the fee out of them! It was great, though. There are lots of bands round the world who are playing identikit learned-from-the-books salsa, and we had something that was a bit different. It wasn’t just the  Scottish stuff – when we play salsa we are probably a little bit looser and more punk-like in our approach.

Even in places like Toronto there is a big Hispanic community, and we were sharing bills with big names, but they loved us. We followed a fantastic salsa band in a big outdoor gig in New York, and we were absolutely terrified, to be honest, but people loved it, and we did several club dates on the back of it. We met lots of amazing people. They really took to the Celtica part of it – I remember coming back on a bus from a festival with one of the big Cuban bands, and the guys started playing a few tunes, and the Cubans loved it. We did Los Angeles as well, and they were doing their salsa dances to the Scottish tunes!

We’re really looking forward to the Highland tour now. We have just done a number of dates in England, and that went really well – we played a few arts centre to sell out crowds. I think the band has really improved over the last couple of years – we’ve been a bit tougher on ourselves in terms of rehearsing and preparing and so on, and that is paying off.

 
Salsa Celtica play at the following Highlands and Islands venues:

Corran Halls, Oban, Tuesday 27 March 2004
Nevis Centre, Fort William, Friday 2 April 2004
Universal Hall, Findhorn, Wednesday 7 April 2004
Cullivoe Hall, Yell, Shetland, Friday 9 April 2004
Tingwall Village Hall, Shetland, Saturday 10 April 2004
Fusion, Kirkwall, Orkney, Sunday 11 April 2004
Eden Court Theatre, Inverness, Thursday 15 April 2004