Which of these three self-appointed princes will be KC’s salsa king?
Ex-cop Howard Carney has been hooked for years. While working with the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department, he was known to occasionally squeeze in a fix while on the job.
“In uniform, I used to sneak to the salsa club,” Carney says. His face registers a guilty grin. “My partner would stand at the door with a flashlight, and I’d dance a few, and he’d flash the light at me if we got a call and had to go.”
Back then, “the club” was usually Westport Beach Club, whose salsa night Carney helped launch. In later years, the Madrid Theatre, at 3810 Main, became the scene’s unofficial headquarters for one Friday night a month. Salsa nights in that majestic space attracted non-dancers, too — people who went simply to observe all the beautiful bodies in motion.
One longtime dancer likens the Madrid to New York City’s legendary Palladium; another equates it to Woodstock — both apt comparisons now that the Madrid’s salsa nights are history, too.
The Madrid’s management never had a liquor license, and its wary midtown neighbors, already fed up with the area’s late-night traffic and noise, opposed the venue’s attempts to get one. For years, the Madrid’s organizers skated over city regulations by acquiring a temporary catering permit for each salsa event. But in January 2008, an amendment to the city’s liquor code changed the requirements for obtaining catering permits, crippling the Madrid’s ability to host anything but private parties such as weddings and corporate events.
Carney, 44, is one of the city’s best-known salsa instructors and promoters. There are two others: Josh Hernandez and Victor Mabu. After the Madrid closed its doors to salsa, all three scrambled to fill the void. But rather than coordinating their efforts, they schedule events in bars and clubs on the same nights, competing for slices of a splintered crowd.
Carney, Hernandez and Mabu don’t get along. Each claims to be salsa’s most legitimate partisan. Hernandez says he welcomes the competition. Mabu says the drama among rivals poisons the scene. Carney wishes the other two would just go away.
But it’s the dancers who are vanishing, thanks to the discord. One salsa veteran told The Pitch, “If the salsa scene should die, God forbid, it would be because of the promoters.”
Carney stumbled into salsa. It was the late 1980s, he recalls, and he was at a Halloween party at a VFW hall in Lawrence. He heard exotic music coming up through the building’s stairwell and followed the sound downstairs.
“I walked into this room, and there were all these people spinning and dancing together,” Carney says. “I was amazed. I stood there for over an hour, just staring at them.”
The experience turned Carney into a voracious collector of salsa recordings, but it would take another decade for him to take his first dance lesson. In 2000, Carney finally worked up the nerve to sign up for classes at Louis Bar’s dance studio in Overland Park.
“He was a total beginner, yes; he never danced salsa before,” Bar says of Carney. Bar was born in France, and he speaks English with a beguiling trill. “He took [lessons] with me, two or three months. He is, I can tell you this, the most genuine person for salsa.”
Reconciling his two identities — part-time salsa dancer, full-time cop — wasn’t as hard as it might sound. During the decade that Carney was with the KCPD — from 1991 to 2001 — he bought narcotics undercover, worked on the vice squad busting pimps and prostitutes, and investigated murders with the homicide unit. He found dancing therapeutic.
[page]
“You know, when you deal with the worst of the world all day, and then you go out salsa dancing, you go, ‘OK, there are still decent people; not everyone’s all bad,'” Carney says. “I didn’t leave the police department for salsa, but it definitely was getting in the way of my dancing.”
He knows what to say to men who think dancing is for sissies. “They talk about Spanish fly,” he says. “This is Spanish fly. Before I started dancing, I couldn’t get a date to save my life. Now, you know, it’s ridiculous how easy it is to meet people and get a date.”
Carney easily proved his point on a Thursday night at Madrigal, a downtown bar, before he knew that a reporter from The Pitch was watching. A statuesque woman with a curtain of blue-black hair set her wineglass on the bar and, at Carney’s beckoning, joined him on the dance floor.
Madrigal’s salsa night is one of Carney’s regular events. Besides dancing, he DJs the evening’s playlist. He can count on rallying at least two dozen dancers each week, charging $5 a head at the door.
Promoting salsa comes easily to Carney. He claims responsibility for introducing salsa nights to the Westport bar scene. He asks The Pitch not to reveal the name of the first bar owner to give in. “I’d been begging him for literally three years … but he thought the crowd was going to be gangbangers. This was, like, 14 years ago. He’s learned a lot since then,” Carney says. Salsa nights are not only peaceful, he explains, but also profitable.
Carney was still working as a police officer full time when he established Westport’s first salsa night, at the Westport Beach Club.
Bird Fleming, a scholar of African and Cuban rhythms and a longtime salsa dancer, remembers the Beach Club fondly. “I don’t think there was any other club like that in the U.S.,” says Fleming, who logged hours on dance floors on the East Coast and West Coast before coming to Kansas City in 1984. “There was a deck, there was a volleyball court, a bar, live bands. It’s funny because the first time I went, I just watched. I think I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
Proving that salsa was a viable nightclub format in Westport opened doors at other venues in the city. At one point, dancers could find places hosting salsa six nights a week. To help people keep track of salsa events, Carney says, he registered a Web site called SalsaKC.com in 1999.
“It was one happy family,” Carney says. “And then these guys just kind of came along and kind of tried to destroy it.”
Josh Hernandez moved to Kansas City from Manhattan, Kansas, in 2002. By that time, the Madrid had established its popular monthly salsa gatherings. But Hernandez found the scene lacking.
“I don’t mean this in an arrogant way,” he says, “but just so you know, the salsa music people used to play out here, the way people were teaching — they didn’t have the knowledge I had, the moves I had. It was weird.”
Hernandez is fumbling with cords to a laptop computer, which rests on the edge of the Mission Theater’s stage. This is Hernandez’s venue for salsa, on Johnson Drive. He’s preparing to teach a class, and his students will arrive any minute.
“People didn’t even know there were different styles of salsa,” Hernandez says. “There’s your mambo from the ballroom studios, which is not your street salsa. There’s your Cuban style, there’s your Puerto Rican way of dancing, there’s your Colombian way of dancing. People just didn’t know. And so, in 2002, there I am, seeing folks do the basic steps, and they’re like, ‘I’m advanced.’ I’m like, seriously, you’re advanced?”
[page]
Hernandez says he learned to dance salsa in New York City, where he grew up, at a studio called DanceSport. He went to college in Vermont, then enrolled at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, where he earned a master’s degree in communications and worked as an assistant debate coach. In Manhattan, he also taught private salsa lessons. The chairman of K-State’s math department was one of Hernandez’s students, and he convinced Hernandez that he could teach salsa for a living. Hernandez ventured to Kansas City in search of a larger scene.
He met Carney right away. At first, the two were friendly.
“I was well received initially because I was not a threat,” Hernandez says of that meeting. “People didn’t know what I knew. People didn’t know what I was bringing. People didn’t know what I was sharing.”
Carney says he helped Hernandez out when he was new to town, passing him DJ gigs that he was too busy to cover himself. “I established him as a DJ,” Carney says. “I even gave Josh a place to stay, gave him a key to my home and said, ‘I heard you’re driving all the way from Manhattan and back every weekend. Just stay here.'”
The salsa nights at the Beach Club were well established when, Carney says, he was approached by a group of DJs and concert promoters that included Tony Sosa, Alberto Nuñez and Joe Phillips. They wanted to start a monthly salsa night at the newly remodeled Madrid Theatre. Carney says he helped them promote the night and eventually stepped in as their salsa instructor. “It grew into something pretty big, where they were doing 800 people on Friday nights,” Carney says.
Carney had a full-time job then. He had left the KCPD for the private sector and taken a corporate security job with AMC Theaters. Not only did it pay well, Carney says, but also AMC needed him to fly all over the country, which gave him a chance to check out the salsa scenes in bigger cities.
“I was doing this [at the Madrid] for a hobby,” Carney says. “Sometimes I just wanted to show up and dance. I don’t want to deal with all the mess. So I stepped back.”
When Carney decided to give up promoting at the Madrid, he says, he let Hernandez know that the position was going to be available. “I actually handed it to Josh for teaching,” Carney says, “before I knew who he really was.”
Hernandez tells this story differently. According to him, the Madrid’s other promotors — not Carney — asked him to take over. Hernandez says Carney stormed out of the Madrid after an argument with a DJ who asked to be paid an additional $35 a night. (Carney disagrees with this version of events and says he had nothing to do with paying the DJs.)
“I didn’t come to Kansas City to promote,” Hernandez says. “I came to Kansas City to actually teach salsa. I was told, ‘You need to promote, that’s what we need you to do,’ so I said OK. The Madrid needed my help, so I started my Web site, KCSalsa.com.”
Hernandez claims to have spent as much as $8,000 putting the Web site together, listing every salsa event in the city on its calendar.
Of course, there was already a site that provided that service: Carney’s SalsaKC.com.
[page]
“That explains Josh in a nutshell,” Carney says. “He cut my information from my Web site and pasted it into his Web site, verbatim, and then started sending out e-mails called ‘Strictly Salsa,’ which I’d been sending out for three years. It’s like someone taking your name and everything you’ve established for years, and then saying, ‘I’m you.’ It’s like Single White Female. It’s just creepy.”
When he confronted Hernandez about the competing site, Carney says Hernandez laughed and said, “We got it covered now.”
Carney stopped using SalsaKC.com. He registered new domains: SalsaNoche.com, SalsaLoft.com, SwingSalsaTango.com, and INeedMySalsa.com.
According to Carney, Hernandez was further sabotaging him by calling owners and managers at venues where Carney had established salsa nights, telling them that he, not Carney, was the real deal when it came to salsa. Because of his longstanding friendships with many of those people, Carney says, word quickly got back to him.
The falling-out (“backstabbing,” Carney calls it) reached a boiling point at the now-shuttered River Market club Kabal, where Carney taught an hour of lessons before DJing a night of dance. “I was teaching,” Carney says, “and he came in, and I watched him approach every single person who was in my class, after the class. And one of them came to me and said, ‘He’s telling us that you don’t teach salsa the right way and that we need to come to his lessons.’ And I told him [Hernandez] at that point, I said, ‘Man, don’t ever come back to anything I’m doing ever again. I’m done.'”
Hernandez responded by banning Carney from the Madrid. “I went the next month,” Carney says, shrugging, “just to show him that, ‘You can’t really stop me from going anywhere, Josh, because I’m not doing anything wrong.'”
Hernandez claims that the conflict stemmed from simple insecurity.
“You know what it is, really?” he says. “In business, people really feel threatened by someone else doing something when they feel they should own 100 percent of the market. “It’s — how can I put it? It’s called capitalism.”
Three years ago, a tall stranger with an elegant accent and serious dance chops stepped onto KC’s salsa scene.
Victor Mabu was born in Cameroon. After a well-traveled childhood, he fell in love with salsa in Germany, where he was working on graduate degrees in agricultural and food sciences. He taught the dance later, when he lived in London for a time before coming to the United States. Family members in Raytown convinced him to move to the Kansas City area.
Mabu says he was shocked by the tension he felt on the first night he went dancing here. “I was told right away that there’s a lot of drama going on in this scene,” he says, quoting the warnings. “‘You’re a new person here. Be careful of Howard and Josh. Don’t get caught up in their problems.’ I got Howard’s friends telling me something, Josh’s friends telling me something. Even Howard and Josh told me stories. Each of them wanted me to come and work with them, telling me something about the other person.”
Dancers explained to Mabu that if they belonged to one promoter’s camp and wanted to dance at the other promoter’s event, they worried that their disloyalty would get back to the other promoter. Some dancers had stopped going out altogether. “They were dying to dance. They just didn’t want to go because it was Person A or Person B doing the event,” Mabu says.
[page]
When Mabu started appearing at Carney’s and Hernandez’s salsa nights, his skills were immediately apparent to Fleming, the longtime salsa dancer. “He was ripping the dance floor up,” Fleming recalls. “I’m glad I hadn’t committed to any other teacher before that point because I found out he was the guy I wanted to learn from, to study from.”
Carney teaches a Cuban-based salsa style called rueda, Fleming says. Hernandez’s style is Puerto Rican, known as “on the two” because the dancers begin moving on the music’s second beat. Mabu’s style of salsa dance, Fleming says, is the most sophisticated of the three.
“Victor teaches a very refined, classic style called New York cross-body style, which you find also in Miami and Los Angeles,” Fleming says. “It’s really harder than the cumbia style. Cumbia is really easy … but the cross-body style, that’s what they use in competitions.”
In 2008, Mabu started teaching salsa at Bella Studio in Westport. He brought with him a collection of world music that was deeper and more diverse than what was used by his peers. Soon, he was taking DJ gigs from both Carney and Hernandez. After working with them both, he says, he thought he might be the key to reuniting the salsa scene.
“I had that mission. I tried to bring everyone together,” he says.
It didn’t work.
“I talked to Josh, who was willing to meet with Howard. Howard had just been so hurt by him that he didn’t want to have anything to do with Josh.”
A year and a half after his failed diplomacy, Mabu now finds himself at odds with both men.
It happened with Hernandez first. “His true personality came out on the phone,” Mabu says. “He said, ‘Why don’t you slow down? Everyone knows it’s Howard and I that are the main people in the scene, and there’s a third guy named Victor who is struggling to be established.’ That was the last straw. I told him, ‘You are that courageous to tell me this BS on the phone, after all that I’ve done for you. I’m going to show you that a small guy who is new to the area is stronger than you and Howard both.'”
Mabu’s dispute with Carney started last fall. According to Carney, Mabu was passing out fliers at Madrigal for an upcoming salsa event of his own, to be held on the same night of the week, just a few blocks away, at the Cadillac Room. Carney says he asked Mabu not to pass out fliers at Madrigal for a competing event on the same night, in the same part of town.
“He wanted to argue,” Carney says of Mabu. “He tried to tell me that half of the people in the bar — and there’s over 100 people there — were his students. In other words, he brought those people to Madrigal. Which is a complete fucking lie. If any of those people were his students, he got them from Madrigal. But I didn’t say that to him. I said, ‘OK, Victor, don’t come back.'”
Mabu detailed the exchange in an October 6 e-mail that he sent to his mailing list of students. Under the subject line “Salsa Drama in KC,” he wrote, “Last Thursday at the Madrigal, Howard Carney accused me of using his venue to recruit students, promote myself and ask for DJ gigs. He told me I was no longer welcome to his venue so I am looking for a Thursday venue for my students and friends to practice and socialize.”
Had Mabu not publicized the conflict in his e-mail, it would likely have failed to draw attention from the dancers. But now, one dancer tells The Pitch, “everybody knows.”
[page]
The salsa community remains divided. Hernandez thinks the competition is healthy. He believes such challenges result in a better product for the customers, the dancers. “The scene is so big and so untapped, you can sustain three or four events on the same night,” he says. “None of them is going to be packed, but the big picture is, we got more people dancing. That’s a good thing.”
But the scenario Hernandez paints — lots of half-empty events — is bad, Carney says, because once a bar owner is burned by an unprofitable salsa night, that door might remain closed for a very long time.
The split saddens dancers such as Fleming. He misses the days when he could count on seeing all his friends — whom he calls his “dance family” — in one room.
Still, nothing stomps out negative vibes like a night of sultry, hotblooded booty shaking. January 21 at the Conspiracy Room (the cheerfully lighted sidecar adjacent to the Uptown Theater on Broadway), people trickled in from rain-slicked streets until the blond wood of the dance floor was nearly obscured by dress shoes and high heels. Onstage, Mabu DJ’d a seamless stretch of salsa, merengue and cumbia music. The sea of twirling bodies attested to his ability to draw a crowd.
At a quarter to midnight, a latecomer to the Conspiracy Room joined his friends on the dance floor. He’d split his dance card, starting off at Madrigal for Carney’s salsa night. He reported to an acquaintance that the dance floor there was crowded as well.
On the cold Thursday night in Kansas City, salsa was in high demand, and Fleming had his choice of partners — old, young, tall, short, novice, professional. Early in the night, he danced slowly, but as the hours passed, his moves became more daring, his steps higher and wilder, sometimes drawing hoots from a crowd of dancers standing at the rail overlooking the floor.
“I’ve invested a lot of time and money into dancing,” Fleming says. “If I can’t dance six nights a week, I’m going to at least dance two. And on those two, I’ll just dance like there’s no tomorrow.”
