Everything you need to book Nolosé

Nolosé, an urban salsa picante that sends a shiver down your spine

Casked in Lausanne in 2004: amber music distilled in jazz cellars, with devilishly fine legs. Nolosé did not grow up, like the heroes of salsa, in Havana or the Bronx: the Bronx grew up in Nolosé. Havana has since opened its studios to the band all the same.

The band has found a style, a sound, handbooks of bewitchment; it has its rhythms, its harmonies, its warmth. Everything in all the right places: a rhythm section, voices and horns. Sixteen musicians, sixteen arsonists. After a well-behaved childhood, the band fell, ever so gently, into bad company, dropping the nice little tune to armour-plate itscorazón. Jazz had made itself at home there, bringing its retinue of freedoms and a hell of a groove: everyone gives, nobody takes, and the salsa takes fire. Spiced with soul, hip-hop or R&B, this music in mutation, this mutazic, sends a shiver down your spine. You may lose your Latin, but you’ll gain your Latino.

Its homeland lays on its finest stages: the Montreux Jazz Festival from 2007 to 2018, JazzAscona, Caliente! in Zurich. And it did take flight: eight vintages, one of them laid down at the Radio Progreso studios in Havana and crowned with the Premio Internacional at Cubadisco 2014; eight concerts in seven days in Bogotá; the clubs of Athens. Nolosé (No lo sé, literally ‘I don’t know’) is, in no particular order: a Puerto Rican night, a sonic orchid, a colossal wedding party, a pirate algorithm, analgoblues. A hypersonic freighter, now boarding. Further even than Cuba, it takes you to the land of Frenzy.