Curtis Salgado

Curtis Salgado has one of the most commanding voices in American music — muscular, soulful, capable of holding a thousand-person room in absolute silence on a ballad and driving the dance floor apart thirty seconds later. Fifty years in, he remains one of the most distinctive and commanding presences in American music.

His sound draws from funk, soul, gospel, and R&B — absorbed from a childhood spent in the linen closet listening to his brother's records, at his mother's piano learning his first songs, and at his father's side discovering that Jess Stacy's solo on “Sing, Sing, Sing” changed what music could be.

The songwriting matches the voice. DownBeat praises his “impressive gift” as a songwriter. His originals sit alongside deep-cut covers of OV Wright, Clay Hammond, and Bobby Womack — artists he brings to rooms that have never heard of them, and makes them care.