The seasoned salsa band is entering its 23rd year with both a strong international presence and longstanding support from such local sources as Richmond restaurateur Manny Mendez.

“It’s a hard-drinking salsa band,” remarks Mendez. “It’s definitely adult swim.”

Mendez, of Kuba Kuba and C&M Galley Kitchen, has relished the band’s driving beats since they first took to a local stage. Recalling their early popularity, he shares that when his girlfriend at the time didn’t feel like going out dancing, he would leave her to go dancing solo, ever confident that there would be plenty of other girls to dance with at a Bio Ritmo show.

Setting itself apart from the mainstream pack of its genre, Bio Ritmo performs original tunes.

“There are salsa bands almost everywhere in the world at this point, but Bio Ritmo is a salsa band that writes their own music,” explains Marlysse Simmons, whose talents as pianist and songwriter have added a fresh dimension to the ensemble since she took leave of the Latin music scene in DC to join the group in 2000.

The ensemble is received enthusiastically in large US cities with thriving Latin American music communities and enjoys a significant following in Europe, where it has toured three times.

A salsa club in Colombia, where the band has never played, prominently displays a hulking photograph of front man Rei Alvarez—vocalist, guitarist, composer—within its gallery of salsa greats.

And thanks in no small part to Mendez, the band has performed in the Democratic Republic of Georgia.

But solid ties to local supporters such as Mendez, who has worked with several of the musicians over the years at his restaurants, exem- plify the band’s commitment to its hometown community and the love they get in return.

“Manny’s been a benefactor from the beginning,” shares Simmons. “Just to employ these guys, who sometimes have crazy schedules, has been enough. But he’s just family.”

In recent years, Bio Ritmo has joined forces with the Virginia Center for Latin American Arts (VACLAA), whose founders had long admired the band for its musical cultural significance.

“When we started VACLAA, our goal was to promote Latin American arts and culture,” explains cofounder Eva Rocha. “But first of all, we had to get to the heart of what that means. We felt that Bio Ritmo was the group to help us because they were loved, respected, well known, and they had accomplishments in promoting Latin music.”

Honoring tradition as a foundation for innovation is an approach that Alvarez takes as a composer, musician, and artist (a common theme in
the vibrant designs he creates for the band’s posters and album covers is masks of the vejigante, a creature of Puerto Rican folklore.)

And salsa itself, he says, owes its genesis to a generational impulse that transcends cultural boundaries and adapts customary forms of expression to contemporary contexts.

“Salsa is different because its very core is Afro-Cuban rhythm, but it was born of that time when youth was experimenting with love, with drugs, and with music. And society was changing. So the rock-n-roll of the young Latino kids in New York and the young kids in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and a lot of Latin countries, was salsa.”

As Alvarez tells it, the experiment that became Bio Ritmo was in fact a product of the same creative climate that spawned other local bands of that era, born of the amalgam of social, temporal, and ethnic influences that characterizes the world that most of us inhabit.

“At the time I didn’t know anything about Latin rhythms,” he recalls, saying that he played drums in a surf punk band and a reggae band when Bio Ritmo was first conceived. “I was all about reggae and rock- n-roll, even though I had grown up as a kid in Puerto Rico.”

After a one-time percussion performance by a collective of local musicians at the Science Museum of Virginia, Bio Ritmo was formed in 1991 by Alvarez, Jorge Negron, and Jim Thomson (also formerly of GWAR and Alter Natives).

Inspired by the edgy sounds of the 70s salsa collection that Negron had amassed, they moved forward with a stripped-down band that would capture the vibe of that particular musical style.

“I think if we had started as a full-on salsa band, maybe people wouldn’t have got it. But we started with just these super minimal,
basic, thunderous grooves.”

Bio Ritmo rapidly expanded into the ten-piece (give or take) production that it is today. But its masterful delivery of the basic beats that captivated its earliest audiences remains a hallmark of its appeal.

“I was blown away by the percussion section on a few occasions when they came to do some session work at the studio. I was like ‘Dang! I wish I understood rhythm that deeply,’” says Lance Koehler of Minimum Wage Recording, where Bio Ritmo has recorded its last four albums.

Koehler, who co-founded NO BS! Brass Band and has recorded some of the city’s most highly regarded artists, receives accolades for his work with the band. “Lance is great with those guys,” says Mendez. “He understands the groove.” But he credits the musicians with the success of the partnership.

“I always respect artists that keep pushing their sound out to sometimes uncomfortable places, especially artists that have a deep understanding of the fundamentals and traditions of their genre. Every single person in Bio Ritmo is like a library of Latin music and other music, as well. That’s what makes them so good and so solid, even when they go out on a limb.”

Bio Ritmo has weathered numerous changes in its members and stylistic direction—including a long period when Alvarez took leave of the project altogether. But in its current incarnation, and with the harmonious compositional collaboration between Alvarez and his band mates Simmons, Riccio, and Tobias Whitaker (trombone), the stage-shy performer is confident that the band is at the best point in its history.

“The fact is, we’ve got a great thing going, and it’s because we’re all just Richmond art and rock-n-roll freaks who got together and formed a salsa band. We’ve just been learning and are still learning. And here we are, 20-something years later.”

Richmond fans will be happy to know that as of October Bio Ritmo is now performing monthly at the Camel.