Soñando:
American Dream Band
by
Peter Aaronby
Peter Aaron
“The music is really complex and interesting, but there’s
still a lot of room to stretch out and try different stuff every
night. And most people just really can’t help but dance to
it.”
“We
get people from all walks of life dancing like crazy at the gigs,”
says Quintero, who was born in the U.S. but immigrated to his family’s
native Colombia when he was a young boy, only to return to the States
as a teenager. “Little kids, teenagers, people my age who
remember the Fania All-Stars and the great salsa scene in New York
during the 70s, they love it. Sometimes we even get elderly people
dancing who tell us we take them back to when they went to the Palladium
in the 1950s to hear Machito, Tito Rodriguez, or Tito Puente. That’s
just unbelievable to hear.”
Recently
the band has cut back on club gigs, concentrating more on better-paying
private functions—without sacrificing its tradition of playing
worthy benefits whenever possible. So while the audience is busy
working up a sweat, it’s often doing so with a warm conscience.
“We’ve done shows for AIDS and breast cancer awareness,
political fundraisers, schools, multi-cultural and heritage festivals;
we’ve done a dance benefit and art and craft sale event for
Haitian children for the last nine years,” says Quintero,
who works as a crisis intervention counselor at the Ulster Board
of Cooperative Education Services (BOCES) by day. “We have
to put a cap on those types of shows because we also have to make
some money ourselves, but we do feel it’s very important to
do something to help the community whenever we can. It makes us
feel really good to do that.”
With
a live repertoire of standards and originals, Soñando has
so far released one CD of band compositions, 2002’s dynamic
Sueño del Valle (Dream of the Valley) on the group’s
own Soñando Records... CONTINUE...
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