To celebrate his four decades in music, Gilberto Santa Rosa didn’t hold back.
Known as El Caballero de la Salsa — the Gentleman of Salsa — the Puerto Rican singer marks his 40 years in the business with the HBO Latino concert special “Gilberto Santa Rosa: 40 y Contando,” set to debut Friday, Sept. 14.
Next week, Santa Rosa will be a special guest of the Mambo Legends Orchestra — comprised of former members of the Tito Puente Orchestra — to honor the music played at the famed Palladium Ballroom during the 1940s through the ‘60s as part of Lehman Center for the Performing Arts’ 38th anniversary season on Sept. 22.
For the concert film, the 56-year-old Santa Rosa went back to his birthplace, performing live at Coliseo Miguel Agrelot in San Juan before a stadium full of loyal, longtime fans.
“When you have an event like this where those so much emotion and the music that you’ve been performing for so many years, it really touches peoples’ hearts and the people make it their own.” Santa Rosa, 56, tells Viva. “It’s an incredible presentation.”
Among the special guest performers were Victor Manuelle, Willie Rosario, Tito Nieves, Luis Enrique, Vico C and Eddie Santiago, who joined in on such Santa Rosa classics such as “Dejate Querer,” “Que Alguien Me Diga” and “Conciencia.”
“I’m an interpreter,” Santa Rosa says. “The songs that I interpret — the majority of them — are creations of other people,” he adds. “On very rare occasions, I’ve collaborated with those people. But the satisfaction that you feel when you sing one of those songs and you feel everyone at the place singing along, salsa music has this peculiarity that makes something like that really hit me.”
Performing since he was a teen, Santa Rosa began his solo career in 1986 following stints with multiple orchestras, developing a reputation for mellifluously performing other artists’ songs, improvising lyrics and popularizing what came to be known as salsa romantica.
The salsa variant led to his “Caballero” moniker — and a dozen albums that stood atop Billboard’s Tropical Albums list beginning with 1992’s “Perspectiva.”
“They gave me that nickname (about) when I started as a solo artist,” the Santurce native says. “In Puerto Rico there’s a radio host named Rolando Sanchez of a show that was named ‘En Tiempo de Salsa,’ and he liked giving singers nicknames. A lot of my contemporaries were making erotic salsa, and I always made romantic salsa. One day, he said that I was the ‘Caballero de la Salsa,’ because ‘he treats women with a lot of respect and his songs are very chivalrous.’
“From that day, people started calling me that,” he says, adding that it was his 1988 album “De Amor y Salsa” that “opened the door for the style of music that people have come to know me for. That was the album that put me on this path.”