Aníbal “Sensación” Velásquez is one of Colombia’s most innovative and prolific Costeño musicians, known as “El Mago del Acordeón” and “El Rey de La Guaracha”. Velásquez grew up hearing Cuban music as well as the local rhythms of his region, and this led him to tinker with and transform the beats and melodies of the regional music encountered in his home city of Barranquilla during the 1950s and 60s.

By 1960, after being a sideman in several groups, Velásquez formed his own conjunto with his elder brother Juan, a talented musician in his own right, and his younger sibling José.

“Aníbal Velásquez en tremenda salsa” is a perfect example of the musician’s wanderlust and restless creative spirit. A pioneer of the adventuresome mixing of rhythms, genres and styles that was happening at the time in Barranquilla and the rest of coastal Colombia, in retrospect one can say that Velásquez was quite daring in combining the music and instrumentation of his native country with other Caribbean forms. In 1968, when he made this album, very few Colombians were attempting to record an accordion-led session of descarga, guaracha, boogaloo, guajira, guaguancó and mambo, and for that we should recognize Velásquez as a forerunner of various other records by Lisandro Meza y su Combo, Los Corraleros de Majagual, Los Caporales del Magdalena and Chico Cervantes y su Conjunto Internacional.

The album kicks off with an intense and mesmerizing descarga featuring the guaguancó bass line, hot Cuban style piano and a heavy timbales solo, reminding one of the Tico-Alegre or Fania All-Stars jam session records. And yet, the accordion and caja are there throughout the tune, giving it plenty of “sabor colombiano” and distancing it from the New York or Havana sound. It bears repeating that for this album Velásquez and Fuentes added a crucial ingredient in salsa, the piano.

Overall, the feeling on the album is of the loose, improvised jam session implied in the genre term descarga - a word written all over the back cover and a very apt description of Velásquez’s preferred manner of playing and inventing songs on the spot. Although “En tremenda salsa” is just one of many such records that Velásquez cut with his Cuban and Puerto Rican influences writ large on his sleeve, it is perhaps his most consistent and well-recorded, certainly only one of a few of his featuring prominent piano played in a salsa style, and this is why it is a highly sought after record by collectors in the know.

Thankfully now it has been remastered from the original tapes, with its artwork intact, and two bonus tracks in the same style of “salsa con acordeón” have been added to flesh out what was originally a far too brief album.