Salsa de la Bahia Vol. 3: Renegade Queens explores the largely untold story of the San Francisco Bay Area’s pioneering women of Latin jazz
With the first two volumes of Salsa de la Bahia, arranger and trombone maestro Wayne Wallace and filmmaker Rita Hargrave provided a detailed history of the San Francisco Bay Area’s vibrant and oft-overlooked Latin jazz scene. Track by track the albums make a powerful case that the region has nurtured a treasure trove of artists drawing on a singular blend of influences from across the Caribbean and Latin America.
Scheduled for release on Wallace’s Patois label on March 21, 2025, the double album Salsa de la Bahia Vol. 3: Renegade Queens shines a bright and necessary spotlight on the women who muscled their way into this scene with a combination of talent, commitment, imagination and moxie. From Venezuela, Cuba, Chile and Colombia to the thrumming creative hub of San Francisco’s Mission District, the album brings together a dazzling cast of artists changing the face of Latin jazz and related idioms.
Hargrave credits Bay Area DJ and journalist Jesse “Chuy” Varela, who contributed cogent Renegade Queens liner notes, with pressing her to pursue the project after she’d finished her documentary The Last Mambo (which led to original Salsa de la Bahia albums). “He said he’d done a show on women in Latin jazz for Women’s History Month and got such a big response,” she recalls. “He felt there was a real hunger for that. He said, ‘When are you going to do Salsa de la Bahia Vol. 3?’ I had done the background work, but it turned into a much more difficult dive.”
With documentation on the pioneering women of salsa and Latin jazz thin or nonexistent, Hargrave found few recordings with women as leaders recorded before the turn of the century. Renegade Queens captures the accelerating impact of female players on the Bay Area scene with a series of thrilling performances. But more than a deep dive into the archives, Renegade Queens is a present-tense celebration. Both discs open with new music showcasing a brilliant cross-section of women players.
Arranged by Wallace, “We Were Born to Drum” is a surging big band mambo featuring vocals by powerhouse Christelle Durandy singing lyrics by poet supreme Avotcja. Many of the players on the performance are featured throughout the anthology, like saxophonist/flutist Mary Fettig, percussionist Michaelle Goerlitz, and the mother and daughter tandem of vocalist Sandy and vocalist/trombonist Natalie Cressman. Similarly, the second disc opens with “La Mensajera,” a new Wallace salsa number that showcases the instrumental prowess of veteran improvisers such as violinist Sandi Poindexter, tenor saxophonist Jean Fineberg, and trumpeter Marina Garza, who led the talent-packed 1990s all-woman band Orquesta D’Soul.
The two new tracks also highlight the central role that Wallace has played in producing and championing women artists. Hargrave describes the recording sessions as “a love fest.” So many people wanted to work with Wallace, who mentored generations of musicians. It’s no coincidence that several of the artists featured on Renegade Queens released albums on Wallace’s Patois label. Multi-instrumentalist and Latin jazz expert Roger Glenn, percussionist John Santos and flutist/arranger John Calloway’s names also came up a lot, she says. The Latin jazz Youth Ensemble of San Francisco, La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, and Jazz Camp West were also cited as invaluable relationship proving grounds.
Each piece on Renegade Queens opens a window to a extraordinary musical realm. Here are some of the highlights. Vivacious Afro-Colombian vocalist Xiomara Torres is featured on “Me Quedo Contigo” (“I Will Stay With You”), the opening track from her 2022 debut album under her own name, La Voz Del Mar. The richly orchestrated salsa dura arrangement by vibraphonist Dan Neville effectively supports an artist who has drawn international attention to the unique folkloric culture of Colombia’s Pacific coast.
“La Lagrima” (The Tear) is a traditional song from Venezuela’s Caribbean island of Margarita delivered by the singular, Caracas-born vocalist Maria Marquez. Her throaty cello tone caresses the sensuous ballad, which she recorded for her acclaimed 2004 Adventure Music release Princesa De La Naturaleza (Nature’s Princess). The lapidary arrangement features rhythms and percussion instruments from the coast of coast of Venezuela by Venezuelan percussion master Gustavo Ovalles and the cuatro of Jackeline Rago, who’s played a key role introducing Venezuelan rhythms to the Bay Area scene.
The projects earliest piece is “Cosmo” by The Blazing Redheads, an all-female septet that coalesced at the end of the 1980s with a dance-inducing combination of jazz, funk and Latin beats. Composed and arranged by the dynamic percussionist and trap drummer Michealle Goerlitz, the samba-tinged “Cosmo” came out on 1991’s Crazed Women and features a particularly charged flute solo by Donna Viscuso (who’s performed and recorded widely with Jackeline Rago’s Venezuelan jazz projects).
Some three decades later, the femmeton of La Doña (aka Cecilia Cassandra Peña-Góvea) has earned national attention, including Barack Obama listing her song “Penas con Pan” on his 2023 summer playlist. Many of her recent fans don’t know that she grew up playing rancheras, cumbia, and boleros in her Mexican-American family band La Familia Peña-Govea. In something of a programmatic coup, Renegade Queens features the title track of her much-anticipated 2023 release on her Text Me Records, Can’t Eat Clout. An anthem about overcoming doubters and haters, it’s a piece that resounds far beyond the dance floor. In many ways, La Doña speaks to the challenges faced by all the renegade queens.
“Women in Latin jazz, they’re a community within a community, a genre within a genre,” Wallace says. “These are national artists who’ve stayed true to the craft and art of making music. We included a variety of styles, because that’s the truth of the Bay Area.”
