It all started when we received a phone call from Alison Webb of Portfolio Creations and Zafer Associates, a well established corporate events and film company. They had been asked by NABS - a charity which looks after the well being of people in the advertising and media industries - to stage a fundraising annual dinner at Battersea Evolution - the huge events venue in Battersea Park. The evening had a Cuban theme. Comedy music group The Cuban Brothers, and Madness were already booked as the main entertainment, and Rob Brydon was booked as compere. Alison wanted to know if we could mount a 5-min music and dance spectacular to start the evening off, and provide Cuban themed live music for the guests as they arrived for the cocktails. She wasn’t sure exactly what form it would take, but we went to her offices in Marylebone to discuss the project.

The working idea to get started was to present a “history of Cuban dance” in just 5 minutes. We contacted Esther Alvero of the Cuban and Brasilian dance company Oi Brasil Shows, who we had worked with in the past and whom we knew to be totally professional and reliable. Esther suggested that we start with the folk dances of the Santeria religion, moving onto salsa, cha-cha-cha and carnival in full Tropicana outfits. After some discussion between all parties we put together a project involving 14 musicians, musical arrangers from our side - 16 dancers, a choreographer, dressers and make-up artists from the side of Oi Brasil.

Our side of the work consisted of choosing the music with Esther and the choreographer - no easy task because we had to ensure that every piece chosen would segue seamlessly into the next. We sifted through dozens and dozens of recordings until we found just the right songs. Then our timballero Nat Steele edited the songs into a 5-min medley. We sent this off to Alison for confirmation, and set to work painstakingly transcribing the music and arranging/scoring it for our extended band.

Once the score and parts were ready we organised rehearsals. Cuban music is very percussion based, so we had a special rehearsal for our four percussionists, followed by a full band rehearsal with the four brass instruments and three saxophones. The dancers and choreographer worked separately from us using our edited medley.

The music for the live entrance music had to be arranged separately. Most of this was transcribed from old Cuban records for our band Cafecito by its musical director - pianist Janet Sherbourne. You can get a flavour of what the guests saw and heard by checking out the photos below, and by listening to the demo audio tracks of the band either on this site or at Cafecito’s own site.

The final rehearsal of the dancers and musicians didn’t happen till the day of the performance. Fortunately everything fitted together perfectly, and you can see the result above!

The whole event was a great success, and you can get some more of a flavour of it by looking at the photos below.

And here’s what the client said about it!

“Nabs Bash was a huge success. The opening number was fabulous - great energy, colour and passion. It was so exciting for us after months of planning to have an injection of musical adrenalin! Thank you for all your organisation, creativity and professionalism. You totally delivered everything you undertook. Well done to you and your team.”

After the NABS Bash event illustrated above, we decided to develop our 50’s Cuban band Cafecito a bit more. We recorded some demos and designed a website and started out playing a lot of background music events where the clients wanted something more than the ubiquitous jazz quartet, but not as energetic as a full salsa band. Through the site we were approached by the production music company LIFT Music to compose and record original music in that style for use by media, TV, adverts, training films etc. We composed some 20 odd songs, prepared the demos on our computers, scored the tunes for 15 musicians, booked the musicians, prepared all the parts recorded them all. This was a huge undertaking but it paid off, almost immediately several of the tunes were licensed to be used in a series of TV ads that Paul Whitehouse starred in for the Aviva insurance company. These songs continue to be used for all sorts of media all over the world. You can listen to the main tracks and some remixes from this album here, and you can see the two main adverts below.