Bio Ritmo will play a free 30-year Reunion Show at Hardywood Park Craft Brewery on Sunday, Oct. 23, at 2 p.m. (Photo by Chris Smith)
For Bio Ritmo, it started 31 years ago, when a ragtag group of musicians assembled to perform after the screening of a documentary at the Science Museum of Virginia.
“The film was called ‘Ring of Fire,’ and it was all about volcanic rings around the world,” says Jim Thomson, a founding member of the band, now recognized worldwide as one of salsa’s most creative forces. “The museum wanted to feature music from a culture affected by volcanic formations.” The percussionist admits that this first gig was “not really salsa — it was raw, experimental Latin-influenced music,” but it was successful enough to start the band on its hot and fiery journey.
Postponed for a year due to the pandemic, Bio Ritmo’s 30th-anniversary concert comes to Hardywood Park Craft Brewery on Oct. 23, a free daytime show that will feature more than a dozen former members of the band also known as “The Salsa Machine.”
“We are still in the planning stages as far as who is going to be onstage,” says co-founder and lead singer Rei Alvarez, “but what happens onstage will come together — as it always does.”
Opening the show will be the Richmond-based bomba ensemble Kadencia and a set by juggler Jonathan Austin, who performed routines to Bio Ritmo’s music in its earliest days. The event will also include an art show featuring Alvarez’s distinctive album and flyer designs, with a portion of proceeds from merchandise sales benefiting Gallery5.
The concert will mark one of the few times that Jorge Negrón, Bio Ritmo’s first bandleader (“El Presidente”), has joined the group onstage since he left in 1996. He‘s traveling from Puerto Rico to participate. “We’ll definitely feature Jorge on a couple of his old tunes,” says Marlysse Simmons, who serves as El Presidente for today’s Bio Ritmo, “even though I don’t think he’s sung for a long time.”
The event will also serve as an album release party for “Salsa System,” an EP recorded in 2005 that band members call a turning point in the group’s history. “I always look back on it as going to salsa school,” Alvarez says of the sessions, which were helmed by producer John Fausty, who also produced for the legendary Fania label.
“Salsa System” is being released on 10-inch vinyl by Electric Cowbell, a record label founded by Thomson, who has remained a key collaborator, booking agent and benefactor for Bio Ritmo since leaving the band in 1999. “We’re presenting it as if it’s something new,“ he says. “It’s in a frequency range that is completely copacetic with salsa radio.”
Over the years, Ritmo’s members have become elder statesmen and -women for a new generation of salsa musicians. “One article called us the old folks of salsa,” Simmons says, laughing.
The Salsa Machine’s persistent popularity and staying power still surprises some band members. “Who would have thought that the band would be around this long?” Thomson says. But far from being an anomaly, he says, Bio Ritmo’s history represents the diversity and vitality of the Richmond music scene. “I mean, we practiced in the back of the GWAR space, the Slave Pit, for many years, and that says so much about Richmond, right there.”
