Salsa superstars Rubn Blades and Gilberto Santa Rosa crossed paths over the years - Blades sang last year on Santa Rosa's Grammy-nominated album "Irrepetible" - but they never shared a microphone on stage until the Chicago White Sox brought them together last year.
The combination clicked and the result can be seen Saturday at the Lehman Center for the Performing Arts in the Bronx, the first stop in their "Una Sola Salsa" tour.
"When we worked together last year for a benefit for the Chicago White Sox Charity, we had great fun, and we have always had a great deal of respect for each other at the professional and personal level," says Blades.
Speaking from Puerto Rico, Santa Rosa recalled that as a teen he called a radio station where Blades was a guest in one of his first appearances on the island in the early 1970s.
"His record wasn't even available for sale yet, but I was already a big fan," he says.
A couple of years later, Santa Rosa sang backup for Blades and other performers in a concert honoring Puerto Rican music legend Ismael Rivera.
"He doesn't remember it, I bet, but I have a picture of the two of us and I am bringing it to the concert for him to see," he says.
Santa Rosa says the concert will range over their extensive repertoires as well as some salsa standards.
Salsa aficionados recognize each headliner as the epitome of the genre's two modes — social and romantic — hence the concert title, "Una Sola Salsa," one single salsa.
"We both enjoy what we do very much," says Blades, 62. "He has emphasized the romantic aspect and I have focused on urban chronicles, but I think what we both do is more broadly urban music."
Blades says he uses "urban" not to mean the U.S. music industry label for hip hop and R&B, but to music that appeals to Latino city dwellers in the U.S. and Latin America.
Blades rose to prominence as part of the roster for Fania, the 1970s label that fostered salsa. His albums with Willie Coln, including the 1978 "Siembra," still the top-selling salsa album of all time, are considered classics of salsa's golden age.
Blades' songs have most often been narratives about rough-and-tumble Latin American lives.
"What I've always done is music with an argument, with information and facing up to our realities," he says.
Santa Rosa, 48, is of a generation that got its start when Blades was already established, but he, too, now is part of the old guard. He started out as a singer for such groups as Orquesta la Grande and Willie Rosario's orchestra, and is hailed as a master of "salsa romntica," focused on love songs.
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