It was a superb salsa workout last night as local Latin bands Diaspora and Mojito put on dazzling performances as part of the Manchester Jazz Festival.

Diaspora (whom I hadn’t heard before) took us through a whole range of music including son and samba as well as salsa. They’re a big orchestra – 14-piece as far as I could count from where I was – with emphasis on brass, piano and vocals. The style is Latin jazz, not unlike the Alex Wilson sound if you’re familiar with that: some of it just forced you to get up and move, and all of it was highly listenable. I hope to hear a lot more of Diaspora.

As for Mojito, well, I’m fanatical about their music. If you’re not familiar with them, you might think at first that they’re less polished than the very slick Diaspora, but the fact is they have an inimitable Cuban texture and spontaneity: the music is chunkily percussive, the rhythms magical and muscular, and there’s a huge charm and humour in Damian’s singing. This is real intense Cuban good-time music and it has the hypnotic power of the Orishas, the flavour of Afro-Cuban spirituality inside it. There isn’t another band like Mojito around, and hence the huge following they’ve built up.

Sure enough, they progressively whipped up the audience into sweaty salsa heaven and their final number was a crazy tour-de-force of exuberant vocal gymnastics from Damian, utterly wonderful because he shares so much joy and has such a rapport with his audience.

One plea to the organisers – could we have a real dancefloor next time so the ladies don’t break their heels on the cobbles?

I just hope the Manchester Jazz Festival has won a host of new admirers for these two great Manchester bands – and maybe for salsa too.

Bizarre news from Venezuela at the weekend. President Hugo Chavez has given orders for the body of Simon Bolivar (1783-1830), hero of Latin American independence, to be exhumed, and ‘tests’ performed on the remains.  This isn’t a matter of historical research; it’s just another sign that Chavez is marching down the familiar road that takes political bosses to paranoia and lunacy.

Bolivar was a great man in his way, and is a hero in several South American countries. With no military training, he became a brilliant strategist and led five countries – Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador and Bolivia – to independence. His great dream was a ‘united states of the Americas’ where all American countries would form a free federation.

Bolivar died of TB. But anyone who knows anything about Chavez can see where all this is leading. The ‘tests’ carried out on Bolivar’s body will reveal – guess what? That he was poisoned, either by the USA or more likely by the Colombians. Chavez has been having a border dispute with Colombia (which claims Colombian terrorists are being allowed to take refuge in Venezuela), and he will use the ‘results’ for propaganda, claiming that the Colombians poisoned Latin America’s greatest hero.

Of course no one will believe it. But it will give Chavez a chance to make trouble. Having failed a couple of years ago in his bid to pass a referendum that would let him be President for life, he’s been looking for other causes to take up, and a quarrel with Colombia over Bolivar will be one of them.

When I was in Caracas, there was a big exhibition in the City Hall there called ‘Caracas, Cradle of Liberty’. The building bore huge banners featuring the faces of Bolivar, Miranda (another nineteenth-century hero of the independence struggle) and – guess who? Hugo Chavez.

Chavez has been hijacking Bolivar’s name for a long time, calling his demagogic rule ‘Bolivarian Socialism’. By now, he probably believes that he is Bolivar. Rather than a socialist, he’s simply the latest in a long line of self-aggrandizing political bosses – what the Latin Americans call a caudillo.

It’s a disgrace that he’s dishonouring Bolivar in this way. And Bolivar’s family, who haven’t been consulted, are furious.  But it’s just part of the sad process by which political egoists descend into lunacy on the way to finally imploding.

Having written this, I probably won’t be allowed into Venezuela again. But having spent time in Caracas, which has become the most dangerous city in Latin America outside the border areas of Mexico, as well as the most polluted and traffic-ridden, I don’t think that’s too much of a problem. What Venezuela needs is Bolivar’s wide vision and generosity of spirit, not fake excuses for more tension.

Well, time to catch up. So much (too much) has happened! A couple of weekends ago I spent Saturday at Manchester’ Contact Theatre, taking part in UNSUNGFEST, an independent festival of art, poetry, performance and music. 

It was a brave venture, organised by Matt Byrne, Justin Dooley and James Byrn. They took over the whole theatre space for the day and had a constant, rolling audience with people coming in and out throughout the day from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

My share was the 7 p.m. slot, reading poems with fellow Manchester poets Jon Glover and Linda Chase – both notable teachers of creative writing as well as local celebrities. It was a great session: Jon magisterial, reading his moving and nearly-surreal poems about adventures in America (snakes under the house!) and the weirdness of having MRI scans; Linda, chromatic in the spotlight with matching red shoes, hair and A4 binder, entertaining us with her sexy and colourful poems about love on the bohemian fringes of the US counterculture.

Before that I was able to catch a good set from Steven Waling and Simon Rennie (loved a line from his poem ‘Carbon Copy’ – ‘The cocooned insect dreams the same dream as the dozing philosopher’. I can imagine Blake coming up with that!) And a fine reading from the sensitive Helen Tookey, with her haunting, introverted poems coloured and perfumed by the Wirral seashore.

Matt organised the whole thing on a shoestring and it was an amazing achievement. Let’s hope he’s already planning next year’s FEST and that it won’t remain UNSUNG!