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Salsaddiction >> Fatal Mambo's J.F. "Oscar" Hammell gets a little rumbagitated by RUPERT BOTTENBERG
"One day, I travelled with a friend to Paris. We went to a concert, more or less at random. We didn't really know who was playing or what we were going to hear." Once inside the concert hall, the pair were bombarded by totally unfamiliar sights and sounds--bright colours, feverish dancing, bizarre rhythms. "I was totally overcome by this strange music, so different from anything I'd heard before. When we left, we looked at the poster outside. It said Tito Puente." The clinical name for Hammell's affliction is "rumbagitation." "The one type of music--and I have no reasonable explanation for this--that I never get bored of is Latin music," he says. For non-Latinos, symptoms of rumbagitation include mortifying attempts at salsa dancing, or the perpetration of ridiculous mustaches such as the one Hammell sports in the photo above. This medical anomaly gets its due in the song "Rumbagitation," the title track of the new album by his band Fatal Mambo. When Hammell began putting Fatal Mambo together in 1982, he had a hard time finding musicians who shared his condition. "It was a kind of music that was almost impossible to hear in our part of France, apart from maybe Carlos Santana, who at least had the percussion." Latin records had virtually no distribution in France, and local salsa orchestras were nonexistent. Fate was on Hammell's side though, because the players he did find gave Fatal Mambo a completely new twist. "We started by trying to do classic salsa," he says, "imitating what we heard on records." As each new member joined the band, though, they brought in something different. "I wanted to hear, in the compositions themselves, gypsy influences and Arab and African. There are many North Africans in our region. I hear their music whenever I go to market." Hammell would come to christen the Fatal Mambo sound as "salsaioli," a blend of Latin hot sauce and Gallic garlic paste. Sexy tropical rhythms cut with the greasy French goofiness familiar to fans of Les Négresses Vertes. Timbales and accordions, Arabic exotica, a little old world flamenco... oh, hell, toss in some funk and ska too, while you're at it. Now, a gaggle of self-taught salsa neophytes might knock 'em dead in Montpellier, but the real question is how Fatal Mambo flies with Latinos, particularly on their home turf in the Americas. Experience shows that while Latinos will argue 'til dawn over who speaks Spanish properly--Cubanos, Salvadorenos or Bolivianos--they all agree unequivocally that people from Spain haven't a clue. So how is a French salsa band going to fare? "At first, they're always skeptical," says Hammell. "They have their doubts, which is normal. But as soon as the concert gets going, by the second song and sometimes the first, people get up and start dancing. That's what happened in Paris, in Chicago, everywhere. "There's always a little competitiveness between Latinos. On the other hand, we're neutral, in the middle, allied with no side." In the end, that neutrality seems to work to Fatal Mambo's advantage. "The Colombians say we're better than the Cubans... and the Cubans say we're better than the Colombians." At Lion D'Or, Friday March 27, 8:30pm, $12.50 + taxes
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Jean François Hammell--"Oscar" to his friends--suffers from an overwhelming addiction. Like any other addict, he was a helpless innocent when it snagged him, with no idea what he was getting into. "It started when I was about 17 years old. I was a student, a lover of music, a drummer but not really a musician," says the native of Montpellier, a town in the south of France.