Que Flavor

The eight-piece Madison-area band, with members from a half-dozen Latin American countries and the United States, formed in early 2002. Since then Qué Flavor has undergone continuous lineup changes, but its leadership of Roberto “Bobby” Alemán and Ruben Marquez has remained constant.
Earlier this year the band was named winners of the 2003 Madison Area Music Awards’ Best Latin Album category for their first recording, “De Nuevo En La Escena.”
Marquez, a guitarist and lead vocalist, says the band performs music in the Afro-Cuban and Afro-Caribbean traditions, but its also willing to mix styles and experiment on the fringes of jazz.
- Janesville Gazette Kicks

Recipe for ritmo: Toss together a bunch of musicians from Mexico, Cuba, Puerto Rico, New York, Colombia, Uruguay and the U.S. Midwest. Sizzle and cook. Ay, MAMA, ¡Que Flavor!

Yes, MAMA. As in Madison Area Music Awards. The winner, for the best new Latin album of 2003? De nuevo en la escena, from Que Flavor.

Thanks to QF's super-danceable roots rhythms, its winning disc, and Mad City's longtime love affair with la música latina, this Cubana-Wiscana rumba band boogies into the summer scene on a roll. Que Flavor takes standards from the Buena Vista group, some timba-son from Havana's Los Van Van, a little reggae, smidges of cumbia, merengue, mambo and cha-cha-cha and jams with them. It's playing from the heart, not the charts, that gives QF its MAMA-league dance groove.

"Getting the MAMA was a very big surprise," says bandleader, vocalist and jack-of-many-instruments Bobby Alemán. "I just went to the award ceremony [at the Orpheum, in March] because I wanted to support the local music scene, especially Latin music. It was bién Hollywood. I wasn't prepared at all, and I had to get up and give a speech."

In the beginning, Que Flavor was "K Flava'" -- just Alemán and fellow habanero Armando Piloña, playing bass and conga at the Casbah in early 2002. "It was an audacious experiment -- ‘let's just do it and see what happens,'" says congero/timbalero Roberto Rengel, who joined up a few months later.

Local rumba aficionados would drop by to sit in, among them Sergio Rico Vacilón (vocals, lead guitar), Ruben Márquez (vocals, rhythm guitar) and Rengel, who quickly became QF core members. The duo had become a conjunto, and Casbah's customers couldn't sit still when the band struck up a son. When the floor got crowded couples spilled into the street. "It was a real rumba," Alemán says, "like the ones I loved in Havana."
- Isthmus