Photo via Summerfest
Gilberto Santa Rosa has the good fortune to have gone from being a baby to a gentleman and thusly, a giant in his field. That is to say, his public debut as a salsa singer as a teenager in the mid-1970'\s, in Mario Ortiz's band and La Grande Orchestra, garnered him the nickname El Bebe' de la Salsa.
As he became one of the most respected names in the music that originated in the '60s among New York City’s Caribbean Hispanic population, Puerto Rican Santa Rosa was given by his public and the press a more mature sobriquet: El Caballero de la Salsa. The shift in identity was not only a function of age, but style as well.
Santa Rosa became one of the pioneers of salsa romantica. The subgenre categorization noted a textual shift. Whereas the dance music’s primary lyrical concerns were the partying that seemingly naturally comes with such spirited and rhythmically invigorating sounds, and pan-Latin ethnic identity and unity, Satan Rosa was among the salseros to more directly and consistently address matters of the heart. Perhaps not coincidentally, the rise Santa Rosa and the love-minded salsa occurred as the music became widely embraced by much of the Spanish-speaking world beyond Gotham residents of Puerto Rican and Cuban heritage.
To his credit however, Santa Rosa wasn’t about to be pigeonholed as his genre’s epitome of a lover man. Releases in the ‘90s an ‘00s found him successfully incorporating elements of hip-hop, funk and electronic production without trendiness nor desperation. Santa Rosa easily fills arenas and stadiums elsewhere, but Summerfest attendees get the opportunity to see him in a relatively intimate setting.
