The New York Times
April 4, 1984

THE POP LIFE;
RUBEN BLADES'S SALSA

By Robert Palmer

WHENEVER a pop musician who appeals to a limited
audience gets to the top in his field, the chimera of
''crossover'' begins to beckon. The field may be salsa
or reggae, blues or gospel music or rap. Each music
has its core of artists and supporters who have had
similar upbringings and share an identity that is
separate and distinct from the cultural mainstream.

How does such an artist ''cross over'' - win a share
of the mainstream audience - without losing the
loyalty of his original fans? The history of such
attempts is usually a history of failure, especially
in the salsa field, which present the mainstream
pop-music fan with two barriers to understanding, one
of language, the other of culture. Salsa stars who
want to cross over tend to dilute their music, either
by singing in English or by dabbling in rock and other
mainstream styles. Neither of these approaches has
been successful for most performers.

Nonetheless, the singer Ruben Blades, who recently
left the Fania label and made his first album for a
mainstream record company, Elektra, has his own ideas
about crossing over. ''The basic elements in any
successful crossover would have to be honesty and
quality,'' he said the other day. ''I would never want
to lose my audience by trying to present a salad of an
album, with one or two songs in English, to appeal to
whom exactly? I'll always keep the basics of the
music, the Afro-Cuban structure, the language. But
I'll give the music little twists; I've never
subscribed to the idea that the music will disappear
if you change it a bit. When I signed with Elektra, my
ambition wasn't to make a crossover album. I wanted to
make an urban American album that can be appreciated
by any American city dweller and may bring people who
haven't identified with salsa a bit closer to us.''

Mr. Blades's Elektra album, ''Buscando America''
(''Searching for America'') lives up to expectations,
and then some. It may not be the first salsa album
capable of winning a wider audience. Mr. Blades
himself made two albums with Willie Colon, ''Siembra''
and ''Canciones del Solar de los Aburridos,'' that set
his literate and often political lyrics in musical
arrangements that grafted Brazilian, Jamaican and
other influences onto basic salsa structures. On his
own, he made ''Maestra Vida,'' Parts 1 and 2, albums
that traced a Latin American family saga through three
generations, in a manner reminiscent of one of Mr.
Blades's favorite authors, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

.

Properly promoted, and with English translations of
the lyrics enclosed, any of these albums might have
done the trick. But ''Buscando America'' is the equal
of any of them, a rich, moving tapestry of life - and
death. One of the most powerful songs is
''Desapariciones,'' which tells the story of the
''vanished ones,'' political prisoners of Latin
American dictatorships, through the eyes of various
ordinary people. Other songs are panoramas of urban
life, portraying a priest and his altar boy, murdered
by masked gunmen; a pregnant, unwed teen-ager; a drunk
driver whose machismo is his downfall; and other
characters, sketched artfully in a few well chosen
words. These lyrics work equally well sung in Spanish
or read in the English translations that Mr. Blades
has provided with the album.

The music, played by Mr. Blades's all-star sextet Seis
del Solar, is also eloquent. The musicians, most of
whom have labored for years on the salsa circuit,
respond to Mr. Blades's creativity and risk-taking
with some of the freshest, most impressive playing
heard on a pop album this year.

Saturday, Mr. Blades will make one of his infrequent
club appearances at the Corso, 205 East 86th Street.
It may be his last local appearance for some time. He
will be touring in Europe and Latin America until
September, when he leaves New York to study for a
master's degree in law at Harvard.

''I'm certainly not giving up my career in music,'' he
said. ''While I am at Harvard, I will be working on an
album of songs based on eight of Gabriel Garcia
Marquez's early short stories. But I'm looking forward
to my studies as a change of pace. You can become a
little complacent in your own field, just from being
too close to it. Besides, I want to be known as
something besides a performer when I finally return to
Panama, where I was born and grew up. I took a law
degree there before leaving to come to New York more
than 10 years ago. But these additional studies will
help me to specialize in international law.''

An ordinary pop singer would never dream of packing
himself off to Harvard just when wider popularity
seemed within his grasp. But Mr. Blades is not an
ordinary pop singer. He is also a writer of journalism
and fiction, and a politically concerned Latin
American. Although he has more than a decade as a
popular singer behind him, one gets the impression
that when it comes to leaving his mark on the world at
large, Mr. Blades has just begun.