The Salsa Machine

Cali, Colombia, has a complex heartbeat. The second-largest city in the South American country, it is the self proclaimed capital of salsa, a Latin dance music that mixes Afro-Caribbean song patterns, the Cuban son montuno tradition, Puerto Rican street beats and jazz. The genre’s distinctive pulse — driven by the “clave” rhythm — emanates from bars like the club La Muralla, named after a song by a salsa ensemble many consider among the music’s greatest: Bio Ritmo, which hails from the unlikely locale of Richmond, Virginia.

The cartoon likenesses of Bio Ritmo’s singer, Rei Alvarez, and timbales player Giustino Riccio adorn La Muralla’s logo; inside, a large poster of Alvarez is seen near a Tito Puente poster. Night after night, DJs in Cali bars blast out Bio Ritmo music on their sound systems — distinctive rhythmic concoctions like “La Verdad,” “Lola’s Dilemma” and “Tu No Sabes” — while fans make their own homemade Bio Ritmo T-shirts.

But while Cali, and parts of Puerto Rico, Italy and even the Republic of Georgia, spin and dance to the sensuous, playful and ever-changing studio recordings of this 10-piece ensemble, there is another scene happening one June night, 2,300 miles away in Richmond. At the Broadberry, on Broad Street near Boulevard, Bio Ritmo’s CD release show for its new album, Puerta Del Sur, is alive with rhythm, the smiling audience torn between hard dancing and appreciative listening of the group’s striking new material. But the club is half-filled. At times, the large ensemble, with bongos, drums, congas, horns and keyboards, augmented by four guest string players, seem to outnumber the crowd.

This band, self-nicknamed The Salsa Machine, was once the hottest thing in Richmond. “Audiences at Bio Ritmo shows rapidly become a sweaty mass dancing to a combination of polyrhythms and horns,” reported the Richmond Times-Dispatch’s Harriet McLeod in a long feature on the band from 1994.

And they’ve never been better-honed than right now — loose and groovy, with keyboardist Marlysse Rose Simmons summoning dramatic what-the-hell solos; frontman Alvarez singing his evocative Spanish lyrics, moving his feet and stroking a hand-held percussion instrument, the guiro; gold-toothed fashion plate Riccio providing strong support on timbales and “coros” — background vocals — along with trumpeter and second keyboardist Bob Miller. Bassist Eddie Prendergast hangs in the back, occasionally shuffling when space is allowed, and the cool sax and cornet players, John Lilley and Mark Ingraham, sway and bleat along with arranger and trombonist, Tobias Whitaker. The barrage of percussion is aided greatly by two newer members, the seasoned conga drummer Hector “Coco” Barez and percussionist Will Roman.

It’s a masterful set, but Bio Ritmo, hailed worldwide as a leader in progressive salsa music, seemingly can’t lure a brimming crowd in its own hometown anymore.

At the same time, critics rave. “Bio Ritmo have grown into one of the most intriguing and influential Latin dance bands of the last two decades,” urban music journal Wax Poetic noted recently. Music writer and DJ Pablo Yglesias says that there are many bands and artists in the progressive salsa mode these days — the likes of Orquesta El Macabeo, Melaza, Grupo Fantasma, 
 La Mecánica Popular, Ola Fresca and La 33. “But when Bio Ritmo started out, there were no bands really like them that pushed the envelope.

“ I always had the music intrigue in me,” Jorge Negrón says.

The original El Presidente of Bio Ritmo grew up in Puerto Rico — where he was a teenage DJ, playing disco — and came to Richmond to attend Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts in 1984. He got into the local band scene when a bass-playing roommate lent him money to buy a set of congas so that he could join his band, later called Mr. Sensitive.

“ Mr. Sensitive, one of the all-time great band names,” laughs drummer Jim Thomson, a key player in the Richmond music scene who showed up at VCU the same year as Negrón. He was a punk-rock devotee who grew up in Front Royal, and had played with a long list of local groups — GWAR, the Snakehandlers, Hotel X; his main gig was with the Alternatives.

Bio Ritmo began at the Science Museum of Virginia, where Negrón worked part time and set up exhibitions — including one for the premiere of an IMAX film about volcanoes in August 1991. He assembled a drum group to connect to the music of the Pacific islands. Thomson was the first guy he contacted, and the second was Rei Alvarez, who was playing in a Richmond reggae band. “I needed somebody from Puerto Rico,” Negrón says. (Also participating that first night: drummer/artist Ed Trask and Burma Jam’s Malik Jones.)

The first practice happened at GWAR’s Slave Pit rehearsal space, then at Laurel and Broad streets. Negrón says that Alvarez just walked in, looked at the timbales, said, “One, two, three,” and they all started playing. “It was decided then that we would play salsa,” he says.

Thomson adds, “We got really positive reaction and had fun. Jorge then got us a gig at a party, and then a show at the Nile Café, later the Hole in the Wall.”

Next came Gabo Tomasini, a VCU freshman from Charlottesville by way of Hatillo, Puerto Rico, who saw a flyer for that show. “The kid” told Negrón that he played bongos and was invited to sit in. A gig with the popular Ululating Mummies then presented itself. Thomson, unfortunately, had a commitment to the Alternatives, but he told Negrón, “I can’t make it, Jorge, but take the kid. And don’t stop.”

Sitting in a booth at Kuba-Kuba, Rei Alvarez thinks back on those days. The Cuban restaurant in the Fan is owned by Manny Mendez — longtime benefactor and friend of Bio Ritmo. (Riccio works at Galley, Mendez’s South Side eatery.) Alvarez waits tables at Kuba-Kuba, and he’s just finishing a shift as he sits to talk with me. The singer reveals that he’s about to get a hernia operation. “I should have done it earlier,” he says.

The tall, bearded Alvarez was born in Ponce, like his friend Negrón, but his family left for the United States when he was 11. They moved around, from Texas to Florida and, finally, to Yorktown. His mother, Nelida, always had a radio on, he recalls.

Folk purists have sometimes challenged Bio Ritmo’s “authenticity,” but Alvarez’s great-great-uncle, Juan Morel Campos, is considered the father of Puerto Rican danza music, a genre of florid balladry dating back to the 1880s. There is a statue of Campos in the town square of Ponce, not far from where an outdoor stage is dedicated to Sergio Negrón, Jorge’s dad, a famous radio disc jockey.

Alvarez entered VCU in 1986 to learn art — his colorful work has adorned most of Bio Ritmo’s albums and singles through the years. The only founding member who still performs in the band, he remembers Bio Ritmo’s early days as “total freedom.”

“ I was hanging out with Jorge, listening to a lot of his salsa records. We were doing Afro-Cuban rhythms … but it was a hit,” he says. He still seems surprised. “We packed dance nights at 
 the Metro.”

Alvarez sported dreadlocks then, concurrently performing reggae in a group called Jive Farmer. For Bio Ritmo, he played timbales and occasionally sang. But in late 1991, he left Richmond. “I was chasing a girlfriend. It didn’t work out, and I came back. I knew Justin had replaced me on timbales.”

Giustino Riccio, aka Justin, was from New Jersey, the product of an Italian father and a Tennessee mom. The amateur boxer and Keith Moon fan, not yet 20, became Gabo Tomasini’s best friend when he moved to Charlottesville. They learned percussion together from playing along to Willie Colón records.

“ I remember talking to Jorge to see about playing again,” Alvarez says, “and he was like [imitating Negrón], ‘Hey, I don’t know, man. We’re a real salsa band now … If you want to sing, maybe.’ ” He smiles. “I never wanted to sing. I always wanted to hide behind the drums.” Alvarez took over vocals in the band’s lineup, but the band needed a bassist, too.

“ One day, Shade Wilson showed up at a practice,” Negrón recalls. He says the ThroTTle magazine cartoonist was drunk, barefoot and wearing a rope for a belt, but Wilson played bass with persuasive timing. He had learned by jamming to a Latin music tape.

They also picked up pianist Charlie Kilpatrick, a Richmond native who was a few years older. He had performed with numerous bands across the region, including Ban Caribe, a Richmond ensemble that played Latin music covers.

Some members – Gabo, Jim, Justin – also took lessons from a “master drummer” named Miguel Valdez, who schooled them on the foundation of salsa. “At first, he would come to the gigs and kind of laugh at us,” Riccio says. “But it pushed us to get it right.” The highly respected Valdez died from hepatitis in 1993, just as Bio Ritmo was becoming the most popular group in town.

Different saxophonists would sit in at shows. The ones who stayed, Michael “Sid” James and Zip Ervin — and later Gary Jones — solidified things. The early Ritmo recorded a 45 for a local, barely remembered label called Tenderizer, and played the Metro, Twisters, Hole in the Wall, Floodzone, Rock Bottom Café, the Memphis and the Moondance — when Manny Mendez owned it. Bigger gigs followed. “Any time there was a Latin or world music band coming through, we’d open for them,” Thomson recalls. “We had to tighten up, start wearing suits.”

They branched out to D.C., Charlottesville, Blacksburg and Norfolk, and began barnstorming the South. “We went to North Carolina quite a bit,” Thomson says. “Nags Head to Raleigh and Chapel Hill … then South Carolina, Georgia, Florida. I just remember getting in that van and heading south a lot.”

One of their most popular stops was the Local 506 club in Chapel Hill. That’s where Laura Ballance and Mac McCaughan had started a label called Merge – home today to chart-topping acts like Arcade Fire — and released Bio Ritmo’s first national 45.

The band’s early live repertoire consisted largely of covers from favored (obscure) salsa artists, such as Marvin Santiago and groups on the vaunted Fania record label. “That’s because of my father,” Negrón says. “He used to send me old [salsa] records every month. When he learned about Bio Ritmo, he said, ‘Oh, you are making a salsa band? Here’s what you gotta learn.’ ”

The group, especially Alvarez, had been writing original songs. “It’s that moment in a band when you know that it’s time to record,” Thomson says of ¡Que Siga La Música!, a set of seven originals and two covers captured at Richmond’s now-defunct Montana Studios in 1995. Right before the sessions, a new member arrived.

“ I brought in René Herrera,” Negrón says. Herrera was a trombonist and trained musician who had fled Cuba with his family in a boat, and was brought to Richmond as a refugee. Manny Mendez was involved in a Catholic charity that helped displaced Latinos find jobs, Negrón says. “They brought him to me and said to René, ‘This is the guy who is going to put you to work. He’s got the biggest band in town.’ ”

He arrived in time to tighten the horn arrangements for the band’s debut CD. But Herrera would soon be doing more than that.

“ The stuff we did back then was very simple,” Bob Miller says. The bearded Maryland trumpeter arrived from Baltimore just as Ritmo’s debut CD was being released in 1996. “There’s a lot of old salsa from the ’70s, which the band loved — Puerto Rican and ‘Nuyorican’ — it was kind of simple. What makes it is work is the groove, the simplicity of it, the repetition.”

That style, and playing sweaty rock clubs, was not what René Herrera was about. (Herrera, described by most as “a Cuban gentleman,” declined to be interviewed for this article.) “I remember feeling sorry for him,” Thomson says, adding, “[We] hadn’t gone to music school, we didn’t read music. It was culture shock to him.”

And Bio Ritmo’s culture was, by all accounts, volatile. In the most famous of the many fights that have marked the band’s career, Alvarez and Negrón got into it during the intermission of a Hilton Head, South Carolina, show in 1996. “I tried to break the fight up and was knocked over an amplifier,” Kilpatrick says.

Actually, there were two fights that night — another was after the gig. “This one was somewhat comical,” Riccio recalls. He remembers the small, wiry Negrón climbing on the back of the tall, burly Alvarez, both flailing away. “That’s when we left Rei in the back of a nightclub, just standing there,” he says, describing Alvarez’s abrupt disconnection from Bio Ritmo.

The vocalist’s departure upset the group just as its star was rising. The band blamed Negrón, but Alvarez says that the fight in Hilton Head wasn’t why he left. “I got very frustrated creatively with the band and where it was going. Jorge was the leader and he was into having new material from René that was professionally arranged… which I can understand. But for me, as an artist, I was not happy. I wanted to stay on the punk rock circuit.”

“ Rei left right in the middle of a big tour,” Miller recalls. “And we were like, ‘How are we going to get through [it]?’ René stepped up and said, ‘I’ll do it.’ ”

Negrón, too, says he was burned out. “People counted on me to book the band,” he says. He was working full-time as band manager, leader and performer while holding down his Science Museum job. “I said, ‘Man, I need a break.’ ”

Then, after a Cape Cod show, Negrón lost the night’s earnings — $800 or so — when he drove off with the cash on top of the van. Tempers flared. Things came to a head after another tour down South. Dragging back at 4 a.m., the frazzled band loaded out their gear and staged, as Thomson calls it, “the F-you moment that changed Bio Ritmo forever.”

A just-hired horn player, Matt Paddock, challenged Negrón about getting paid for the gigs as the bandleader counted the cash in hand.

“ Tensions were high,” Riccio says. “The thinking was, you obviously can’t be trusted with it because you lost it before. Why do you get to hang on to the money?”

“ The way I remember it,” Miller recalls, “Jorge threw the money on the ground and said, ‘You want your money? Take your money. I quit. I can’t do this anymore.’ ”

The band had gigs the following weekend, one of them a big Florida show. “We were still on the rise, playing to more and more people,” Miller recalls. “We had to scramble, the same way we had to when Rei left.” After returning home, they found a repentant Negrón. “ ‘Guys, I’ve made a big mistake,’ Miller remembers him saying. ‘This band means everything to me. I apologize. Please let me back in.’ ”

It came down to a vote. And memories of how it played out, and who voted which way, are reminiscent of the movie Rashomon — no definitive account is agreed upon by anyone. But Jorge Negrón was forced to leave his own band.

“ I could tell before this happened that some members wanted Jorge out,” Kilpatrick says. “They were doing everything they could to needle him.”

Riccio admits that he was one of those members. “I love Jorge, but he could be very in-your-face, very demanding.” A few months earlier, the timbales player and the bandleader had gotten into a fistfight outside of the Moondance. Negrón wanted to fire Riccio — who had already been warned by the band to cool down his hot temper — and it was only when Tomasini threatened to leave, too, that things calmed down.

“ I can appreciate that it was a difficult place for Jorge to be in,” Riccio says today. “And I feel bad about it. … But remember that we weren’t firing Jorge. We were voting on whether to let him back in. He’d quit.”

“ It was very hard for me to stay in the band,” says Thomson, who was then the only original member left. Friends in the scene, fans, even his own mother, told him it was wrong. “In hindsight, I see it that way now, and I regret that I let it happen. It was hard to walk around Richmond and hear people say, ‘You can’t fire Jorge.’ ” Although the band never talked to the press about it, people seemed to know. Riccio recalls a party he attended (“Jorge was there too”) where a drunken guy berated him about the firing. Of course, a fistfight ensued.

Sergio Negrón — the band’s faraway enabler — died of a heart attack in 1997, and his son left Richmond for Puerto Rico, where he lives today. In an article published in this magazine that year, Jorge Negrón bid farewell to the region, but gave no hint of his previous contentious exit from the band, even though lawyers became involved. “Bio Ritmo is a machine that can’t be stopped,” he stated, posing with a stack of suitcases.

René Herrera either killed Bio Ritmo or saved it.

“ René’s music was Cuban, whereas before [our style] was Puerto Rican-influenced,” says Kilpatrick. “The Cuban music is faster, the tempos quicker. 
 To play it, you have to be good on your instrument.”

“ In my opinion, it was a cheesy style of salsa,” says Alvarez, who derisively refers to Bio Ritmo, in its 1997 to 2001 iteration, as “René Ritmo.” He wasn’t in the band at the time, but fellow founder and bongoist Jim Thomson was. “I was definitely not crazy about the music,” Thomson says, “but this guy’s arrangements — I mean, you really had to be on your toes.” Kilpatrick says that Herrera’s songwriting took the group to another level. “He made me a better musician.”

Riccio, the self-taught hothead, and Herrera, the conservatory-trained aesthete, found common ground. Rene wrote a song about the timbalist and gave him a nickname — “El Timbarero Loco.”

“ We have our own opinions on that period,” Riccio says. “We all looked up to René musically. He was the first guy who played with us who had a full-fledged salsa and Latin music background. I didn’t like his singing and some of his ideas, but his stuff was a challenge, and it made me a better percussionist.”

“ Rene didn’t have any problem with taking over,” Thomson recalls. “He just said this is my band now. I’m going to make it sound good.” He, and other members, thought Rene’s songs were “cheesy.” It was a word regularly bandied about. One day, Herrera asked Kilpatrick a serious question: “Charlie, what is cheez-ee?”

In 1997, the band recorded (quickly) a second CD, written mostly by Herrera, called Salsa Galactica. But whether it was the grind of the road, the complexity of the new material or fans at every venue asking about what had happened to Jorge, the atmosphere was different. “Bio Ritmo essentially broke up,” Miller recalls. “People were having trouble getting along with each other … It was kind of like, ‘Who was in charge?’”

The plan was to disband The Salsa Machine after a Knitting Factory show in New York City. They were unaware that it was a music industry showcase. Kilpatrick: “Shade Wilson, unfortunately, showed up so drunk that he couldn’t tune his bass.” It was not a good gig. But the Mercury Records executives in the crowd loved it. They wanted the band to take a morning meeting, talk a deal. “It still amazes me,” Riccio says.

Their bassist didn’t show up for the meeting; he might not have known about it. (Wilson declined an interview). He walked out just as Bio Ritmo was signing to Mercury’s subsidiary label, Triloka, for a healthy advance reported to be around $50,000 — and a deal with Madonna’s publishing company.

They needed a bass player. Riccio knew a young bassist studying in the VCU Jazz Department, schooled mostly in blues and alternative music. A risky choice, but the laconic Eddie Prendergast turned out to be a real find — one that still yields benefits today — even though he’d never played salsa, or any real Latin music in his life.

“ It was brutal, man,” Pendergast recalls of his sudden immersion into the band for the recording sessions. “I had to redo the bass parts with René in the room pointing to the notes. It was embarrassing. I really didn’t have my groove together.” Kilpatrick disagrees, and still marvels over Eddie’s quick assimilation of salsa. “To me, it almost seems like an impossible feat. … This was his introduction to the band, and to this kind of music.”

Recorded at Richmond’s Sound of Music, the group’s major label debut, Rumba Baby Rumba, remains a sore subject for the band (only Riccio and Kilpatrick defend it, and they have their doubts). “I’m full of regret,” says Thomson. “I had fun, I got paid well, but it was just all wrong.” He sums it up in one word: “Tequila.”

The band’s version of the Champs’ oft-covered “Tequila” was definitely an artistic low point. “Nobody wanted to do that,” Kilpatrick says, “but the record label, and producer Jeffrey Lasser, insisted.”

“ It’s a period of our history that we sort of skip over because none of us look back on it that fondly,” Miller says. “Unfortunately, that was when we were our busiest as a band. We had a real booking agent and were traveling the country, playing most of the time.”

The band’s commercial peak was in 1999, with U.S. and Canadian dates, a tour of Spain, successful concerts with the Squirrel Nut Zippers, and a music video shot in Los Angeles.

A follow-up disc was in the works when word came that the gravy train had been derailed. Mercury Records had been sold to Seagram, and many specialty labels and their artists, including Bio Ritmo, were let go in the corporate shuffle. Fixed Sale Info

The group recorded that CD anyway, on their own, at Sound of Music. It’s the final word from “René Ritmo.” “The band broke up again in the midst of recording that, and it was never released” Miller says. “Listening to the tunes, it was the most stunningly impressive music we ever played. We had a chip on our shoulder.”

Things fell apart when Herrera brought in a female vocalist, Llilian Valdes, whose operatic style didn’t fit. “Justin, Gabo, myself, we never bought in to that and thought it was a weird idea,” Miller says.

Bassist Prendergast left (he’d be back), but there would be other players floating around, providing connective tissue for the lineups during a transition period or two: percussionists Ernesto Laboy, Arnaldo Marrero and Mike Montañez, saxophonists J.C. Kuhl and Chris Moody, trumpeter Tim Lett, pianists Juan Carlos and Stefan Demetriadis, bassists Jon Sullivan and Cameron Ralston and trombonists Bryan Hooten and Tobias Whitaker. The latter remains today.

One night, in 2000, Jim Thomson found himself looking at his watch during a show. He knew it was time to exit the group he’d started with Jorge Negrón nine years before. “Besides having this crackpot composer and some good musicians in the band, we were rudderless,” he says.

No one can agree on exactly why Herrera quit. “Those knuckleheads got rid of one bandleader, and then they alienated another,” says Kilpatrick, who left around the same time. “I’d had it.”

Bio Ritmo limped along, a machine in need of oil and parts. One day, they got a lawyer letter. Herrera wanted the Bio Ritmo name. “Even though it had become René’s thing the last three or four years,” Miller says, “we couldn’t see him having the name. So we basically took on the band debt — Justin, Gabo and myself were the holdovers.”

“ Even though we weren’t playing at the moment,” Riccio remembers, “we were going to make sure we continued this tradition.”

That tradition was celebrated at a special 10th anniversary concert in 2001 at Shockoe Bottom’s Alley Katz, which closed in 2011. It was where, by all accounts, many people buried the hatchet, and not in each other this time. Manny Mendez bought a plane ticket for Negrón so he could join the celebration. Onstage that night, three days after Sept. 11, all of the founding members, plus Tomasini and Riccio, and even Herrera, surrounded by a million horn players, rejoiced. It was a special time that unified and healed — if just for a night — all of the different Bio Ritmos.

“ Then after that,” Negrón says, “Rei got back in the band. And then Marlysse came.”

Marlysse Rose Simmons is sitting outside Lamplighter, talking about how Bio Ritmo found her.

It was at the Latin American Folk Institute in Maryland, where she was the on-staff pianist. “A guy named Juan Carlos called and told me he played in a salsa group from Richmond and needed a substitute piano player. So I met him in a parking lot and he gave me a tape of Bio Ritmo live. No charts, just a tape. The gig was in a few days.” She laughs, sips her coffee. “I had no idea what I was in for.”

The petite, curly-haired Simmons loved them. Today, as the longest-running El Presidente of Bio Ritmo, she does everything for the band — books, promotes, wrangles schedules, road-manages, handles the money. On top of her sound-changing role as the band’s keyboardist since 2002, what can’t she do?

“ I remember, back then, I had an attitude,” she says. “What kind of salsa band comes out of Virginia? Now that’s the attitude that I try to fight against.”

Her mom, Victoria Argandoña, started her on piano lessons when she was five, and introduced her to Spanish Classical music — she loves the sounds of Brazil and has a side band, Os Magrelos, that explores this passion. Simmons’ introduction to salsa came when she started playing with an established Washington, D.C., group called Orquesta LaRomana. “For a year, all I did was study salsa,” she says.

One day, she presented them an original song. They were not amused. Most salsa bands don’t write songs, she was told; they do covers of familiar salsa arrangements (Bio Ritmo found this out through the formal salsa dancers.)

Alvarez admits that he had a sexist attitude before Simmons joined. “I’m all about girl bands and I’m all about guy bands, but for a mixture, it has to be a special relationship.” This one turned out to be very special — after a rough start butting heads, Rei and Marlysse became good friends and, finally, a couple. “From that first weekend and couple of gigs, I was impressed with her playing but also at ease with her vibe,” Rei says. “She was so cool and nonchalant.” The two perform together in another side band, Miramar, which plays romantic boleros.

“ I swear, man, the first gig Marlysse played with us, we were all going: We have to fire Juan Carlos,” Miller says. “Then Rei started writing music like a madman, and Marlysse was there to translate that. And immediately we wrote the [eponymous] green album in no time overnight.”

Since then, the self-trained Alvarez and Riccio have hummed song ideas to Simmons, who transcribes them. “She’ll do different chords and I’ll say, ‘No, no,’ until it’s the one I’m hearing,” Alvarez says. Whether it’s a result of her influence or the emergence of arranger/writer Tobias Whitaker (he has penned memorable songs, including “La Muralla”) , Bio Ritmo has issued five compact discs of shape-shifting, passionate and playful salsa music since 2002: Bio Ritmo, Salsa System (an EP produced by Grammy winner Jon Fausty), Bionico, La Verdad and the new Puerta Del Sur (the last two recorded at Richmond’s Minimum Wage studios).

“ Without Marlysse, if she were to lose faith, and from time to time it looks like she’s about to, that would be the end of it,” Miller says. “No one else is going to pick up all of the little things that she does.”

Simmons also keeps the band connected to its roots. Jim Thomson, whose Electric Cowbell record label issued La Verdad, says “I talk to her more than any of those guys.” And when Simmons visited Puerto Rico recently, she stayed with Jorge Negrón, soaking up Ponce. “She sends me early Bio Ritmo mixes so I can give my opinion,” Negrón says. “She doesn’t have to do that, but I’m very grateful that she takes me into consideration.”

“ She’s the mama,” says Barez, one of Bio Ritmo’s new guard, who has played with everyone from Rubén Blades to Femi Kuti. When Negrón made a triumphant return to Richmond in 2009 to perform at the Richmond Folk Festival with a Puerto Rican band he’d formed, the Master Bomba Ensemble, one of his percussionists was Barez. Negrón recommended him to Simmons and, when Gabo Tomasini finally stepped aside, she called him up.

“ I’m not replacing Gabo,” Barez is quick to say, getting into the spirit of being a member of Bio Ritmo. “I’m just sitting in for him indefinitely.”

The next time I see the Salsa Machine live, months after the Broadberry CD release party, they are playing a free evening show at William and Mary’s Sandler Center. Simmons, Alvarez and Riccio have been here on campus all day, educating music students in the ways of Latin music. Tonight, the front of the Sandler auditorium is packed with students in full-freakout dance mode, as Bio Ritmo treats them to some of this lineup’s earlier songs (such as “Hermano”), along with new creations (like “Perdido,” which features a danza). It’s quite a scene.

The band looks relaxed and happy. And why not — it’s a good gig, Rei Alvarez’s operation has gone smoothly, their new CD has hit the CMJ World Music Top 10, and there are talks about going to Colombia next year, if the money is right. Meanwhile, the college kids are really into the groove. They couldn’t care less about where Bio Ritmo came from, or how long it’s been around.