Latin Crossings (Steve Winwood, Tito Puente & Arturo Sandoval) - Westport Festival, Music Halle, Hamburg, Germany, 7-18-1998

I've posted a couple of rather unusual Steve Winwood albums in recent days. So what the heck, here's another one. This is probably the strangest of all. In 1998, Steve Winwood took part in a short European tour with a couple of stars from the Latin jazz world: percussionist Tito Puente and trumpet player Arturo Sandoval. They did some Latin tunes, as well as some of Winwood's hits that had a Latin influence on them. The band never released any recordings, and never played again after this tour. The whole thing probably would have slipped into the mists of time except for the fact that a bootleg of an excellent soundboard exists, which is presented here.

Winwood hasn't been that influenced by Latin sounds (compared to say, Stephen Stills, who has done a bunch of Latin-based songs), so this collaboration seems to have come out of left field. But it turns out that in 1976 he played lead guitar on a Latin music album by the Fania All Stars called "Delicate and Jumpy." He even played one song from that album here, "Picadillo." Mostly, he stayed on keyboards for this concert. But on that song and a couple others, he broke out the lead guitar instead, sounding quite a bit like Carlos Santana at times.

I applaud Winwood for taking part in a collaboration like this. Most stars as famous as he was by the 1990s would have been content to do the same thing and just play their own concerts full of their own hits. I'm guessing he did this for the love of the music instead of for what minimal money he would have made.

The only problem with this concert is it seems to get cut off before the end of the concert. The last song "Gimme Some Lovin'" got abruptly cut off near the end of the song. I fixed this by finding an audience bootleg elsewhere, then patching about fifteen seconds just to give it closure. It's such a short addition that the poor sound quality doesn't sound apparent, in my opinion. But it seems the band played other songs, such as "Oye Coma Va," a song originally done by Tito Puente but also made famous by Santana. Still, having some of this is better than nothing.

This album is 52 minutes long.

01 Con Sandunga [Instrumental] (Latin Crossings [Steve Winwood, Tito Puente & Arturo Sandoval])
02 Higher Love (Latin Crossings [Steve Winwood, Tito Puente & Arturo Sandoval])
03 Para Los Rumberos (Latin Crossings [Steve Winwood, Tito Puente & Arturo Sandoval])
04 The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys (Latin Crossings [Steve Winwood, Tito Puente & Arturo Sandoval])
05 I'm a Man (Latin Crossings [Steve Winwood, Tito Puente & Arturo Sandoval])
06 Picadillo [Instrumental] (Latin Crossings [Steve Winwood, Tito Puente & Arturo Sandoval])
07 Gimme Some Lovin' [Edit] (Latin Crossings [Steve Winwood, Tito Puente & Arturo Sandoval])

https://www.upload.ee/files/16371636/STEVWNWD1998WstprtFstivlMsicHlleHmbrgGrmny__7-18-1998_atse.zip.html

I had a hard time finding any good photos of this band. So in the end I took a screenshot of a video of them from YouTube. It's rather rough, but at least it's something. The words at the top come from a concert poster, unchanged.