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Meet Marlow Rosado, One of Salsa’s Underground Heroes
During the pandemic’s darkest days, when clubs were shuttered and his performances were canceled, Marlow Rosado retreated to his Miami Lakes recording studio. He had traditional salsa, a lifelong passion, and Zen, a longtime interest, on his mind.
Rosado, 52, a Grammy and Latin Grammy winner, has emerged with two new recordings and a sense of peace. The albums, he says, represent a new phase in his musical career and a cause for celebration.
Los Colores de la Salsa (The Colors of Salsa) is a modern take on traditional Latin dance rhythms that he recorded with his longtime friend, veteran vocalist Frankie Negron. The official video for the track, “Depende de Ti (It Depends on You)” has garnered more than one million views on YouTube since the album was released in early March.
Orun is a deeper, almost meditative recording and Rosado’s first Latin jazz album. (He interprets the Yoruba word as meaning a protective ancestral spirit.) The album also marks the first time the Puerto Rican musician has worked with Afro-Cuban jazz legend Chucho Valdés. The veteran musician is a guest artist on the track, “Marlow y Chucho,” which Rosado wrote.
“I was able to produce two amazing albums,” Rosado says. “They are very special because they came from a place of despair — of what’s going to happen, I’ve got nothing to do, no work, nowhere to go — to a place of hope for the future.”
Rosado is no stranger to beating the odds. His music isn’t played on Latin commercial radio even though he has won two of the music industry’s biggest awards: a 2012 “Best Tropical Latin Album” Grammy for Retro, which he recorded with his band, Marlow Rosado y La Riqueña, and a 2015 “Best Children’s Album” Latin Grammy for Los Animales.
He is one of salsa’s underground heroes.
“The overwhelming programming [on commercial Latin radio] is urban music,” says Rosado, a pianist, arranger, songwriter, and bandleader. “There are thousands of ‘salseros’ with records out there, but there’s no salsa on the radio.”
Zen has helped him deal with the ups and downs of the music industry, he says.
Rosado was first attracted to Eastern philosophies as a teenager when he picked up a copy of The Pocket Zen Reader. After visiting Nepal in 2007 to perform at a jazz festival, he was hooked. When the festival ended, Rosado spent seven days in the capital of Kathmandu, visiting a Buddhist temple.
He has returned to the Himalayan country twice: “Nepal was a life-changing experience.”
It’s among the poorest countries in the world, he says, “yet we have so much to learn from them.”
What Rosado learned was to try to see opportunities in life’s challenges, he says. His two new albums reflect this mindset.
Colores has Rosado’s trademark “salsa gruesa” (heavy) style — blaring horns, rapid-fire percussion, and lyrical piano solos — with shades of urban music. He recorded the album with Negron, a salsa and Latin pop singer of Puerto Rican heritage from New Jersey, who became popular in the late ’90s with hits such as “Con Amor Se Gana (You Win With Love).”
Rosado says he and Negron, who moved to South Florida a few years ago, went into the studio together, not knowing what to expect.
“It was a fun record to do because there was nothing else to do, we were in quarantine. So, we had a good time doing this,” Rosado recalls. “It’s probably the only record I’ve done that way. We were thinking, ‘If things ever get back to normal, we’re going to release this album,’ and we did.”
Rosado wrote most of the songs on the record, including the call-and-response “Depende de Ti.”
“It calls on younger Latin urban artists to ‘defend’ tropical Latin rhythms that first arrived in the Caribbean on slave ships,” he says. “We’re asking the younger musicians who are hot right now to respect this music, not to dismiss it as old people’s music.
“The original rappers were the ‘soneros’ (salsa vocalists), the rhymers — we invented that.”
The more melodic Orun with Valdés is a departure from Rosado’s “heavy metal” style of salsa.
In a recent video for the album, filmed at his Coral Springs home, Valdés had words of encouragement for Rosado.
“He has a great talent and a high level of composition and a tremendous swing on the piano — an incredible vibe,” says Valdés, smoking a cigar on his patio. “All I can say to Marlow is what [jazz composer] David Brubeck once said to me: ‘Marlow, never stop.’”
Valdés is one of Rosado’s idols.
Source: Deborah Ramirez, ArtburstMiami.com
