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.
 

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