Hot salsa-queen Celia cruises into A2 tonight

Hill Auditorium will be the venue tonight for salsa queen Celia Cruz and sonario Jose Alberto.

But when the salsa starts, Alberto said in an interview last week, the locale of the show becomes irrelevant.

"They always get up and dance," he said of the audience. "Oh yeah, even in theaters. Because the music is so danceable and so hot, you can't just sit down and listen to it."

Alberto, a native of the Dominican Republic, studied music in Puerto Rico before moving to New York City. He spent the best parts of his study, he said, at the record player.

"I believe that the best exercise that you have is to listen to music. Listen to a lot of records. That will educate your ear."

Celia Cruz strikes a pose. Cruz, along with Jose Alberto, will perform tonight at Hill Auditorium, bringing salsa's infectious, hot flavor to hungry ears. Catch Cruz' performance for a mere $10.

Now, he and his band delight audiences across the globe. The salsa beat, he said, is infective.

"They'll jump, they'll dance, they'll applaud ... music is an international language."

Cruz was one of the singers Alberto studied, and remains one of the biggest names in Latin music. She has appeared on countless stages, in the movies "Salsa" and "The Mambo Kings," and in concerts with Alberto for more than 10 years.

Performing with Cruz is easy, he said.

"The combination is so perfect. So click. It's there."

PREVIEW
	Celia Cruz Tonight at 8 p.m. Hill Auditorium $10 student rush tickets

Their styles mesh "because we are two very happy persons ... even that we are two different generations, we really match very well."

Salsa, Alberto explained, is changing. Even its name shows evidence of outside influence.

"It's a name to commercialize the different rhythms of Cuba," said Alberto, who said Cubans did not use the term for decades.

"Now they do. The name has gotten so popular all over the world."

The music itself has changed, too.

"It's not the same style that it used to be maybe 10 or 20 years ago," he said. "A new generation has come into our music, into our roots. ... They adopt new styles into it, new instruments and new sounds, new ways of arranging this music."

Far from critical, Alberto welcomes the evolution - and exposure that goes with it. Salsa, he said, receives more airplay than ever before.

"I haven't been through what Celia or what Tito Puente has been through," said Alberto, approaching his 40th birthday.

Younger singers like Jerry Rivera, he said, "they haven't been through what I've been through ... So (there's) always a new generation coming into the roots and coming into our music."

That, he said, means salsa's survival. Salsa can infect audiences the world over, but it must hit home, too.

"That's the important thing," he said, "to educate a new generation and our kids all about our roots, all about our music - so that they continue doing our music."

11-07-97