Audio By Carbonatix
The three members of Proyecto Uno — Nelson Zapata, Juan Salgado, and José “Spagga” Medina — are calling Miami from their home in New York as the sounds of the city streets play in the background. It’s a fitting soundtrack to the conversation since the Big Apple has always had a big role in their lives.
You can hear it on their most recent album, 2002’s Pura Gozadera (Lideres): The merengue, tropicalia, and salsa that evoke their Dominican culture are blended with the urban grit of hip-hop, the driving dance beat of house music, and the pulse of R&B.
“We’re based here, and since we grew up here we listened to all these styles,” says Salgado. “Like a typical Latino in New York, we listened to salsa and merengue at birthday parties, and at the same time when you hang out with your friends you listen to hip-hop and R&B and all that stuff.”
“It’s basically from the different types of music we’ve been exposed to since we were kids, and the whole vibe on the streets here in New York,” adds Zapata. “I grew up listening to Seventies music — a lot of Chic, Barry White, the whole Philly sound, Motown. And then Juan Luis Guerra and a lot of merengue. It’s a whole mess and so we kind of make it work like that.”
Formed around 1990, Proyecto Uno was one of the first bands to play a style tagged as “meren-house,” a mix heard in songs like the hit “El Tiburon” from 1993’s In Da House. This style reappears on the new album in the form of “Dime Si Te Gusta,” which combines a house track with stuttering Latin horns.
Another characteristic of the group is the way it alternates among English, Spanish, and Spanglish lyrics. And while Spanglish is popular with other New York groups like Yerba Buena, Medina says the three of them just write their songs in the same way they talk with one another. “Many of our parents don’t speak English, but we grew up here,” he says. “So when we talk to our parents in Spanish, sometimes we don’t know how to say certain words, so we create that Spanglish dialect.”
That can be a little confusing for their large contingent of South American fans, as well as anyone else not schooled in the vagaries of street slang. Which is why the ever-considerate Proyecto Uno included a glossary of terms in the CD booklet for Pura Godazera. You can learn the meaning of salpica (bounce, get out of my sight), labia (the art of saying the right thing at the right moment), and bizcochito (a Colombian-derived word for an especially sweet or attractive person). “We get a lot of people in South America that don’t understand what we’re trying to say sometimes in English and they make up their own words,” says Zapata. “And if not, they ask us, ‘What is he saying in that line because I don’t get it.'”
The intention of the Miami Music Fest, born in 2001 in the wake of the Elian Gonzalez fiasco, is to bring together the sometimes fractious communities that make up Miami’s diverse puzzle. If that’s the case, Proyecto Uno will play its part well by bringing out a variety of fans from not only the local Dominican community, but recent arrivals from places like Colombia, Argentina, and Venezuela, and of course New York. But wherever they come from, they’ll be the ones with their arms in the air, moving their hips.
