Nick Corredor, a 23-year-old bandleader and pianist, already has the charismatic stage presence of a seasoned salsero. He appears near-levitating during performances with his band La Herencia — eyes shut and fingers flying, he often gets so carried away by a riff that he leaps out of his chair. The intensity of his musicality draws the room up with him, and multi-generational crowds spin to the band’s take on classic salsa hits.
It’s surprising, then, that he hasn’t actually been performing salsa music for very long.
“This music has been in my life forever — I was born into salsa music,” he said, “but this is the first time that I’ve ever committed to playing it for real.”
Mr. Corredor grew up in Hampton Bays playing classical and blues piano and joined his middle school’s tight-knit jazz band in sixth grade. His teacher, Mark Stuckey, taught his students how to improvise and build chords.
“Our ensemble was just super-advanced. We would go to competitions and win first place in almost everything,” Mr. Corredor remembered.
In eighth grade, he and some of his most committed jazz band friends formed their own group called Road Trip. They played Sublime tributes and Bruno Mars covers at the Southampton Youth Bureau battle of the bands competitions. Until a Hampton Music Educators Association festival when the band recruited a bassist from Riverhead, he filled in the part on his keyboard with his left hand. Road Trip played together until its members dispersed to colleges across the country, all hoping to work one day as full-time musicians.
At Stony Brook University, Mr. Corredor started releasing original indie music and formed a new funk-rock-reggae band called Mecco Groove. When he graduated, the reggae group Irie Spect recruited him to tour all over the East Coast, playing bills with the Whalers in New York and Long Beach Dub Allstars in Virginia.
And then on Nov. 13, 2024 (he remembers the exact date), he got a call from a promoter in East Hampton asking if he knew a four-piece salsa band for a new Tuesday night Latin music series at Coche Comedor.
“I was like, ‘Yeah man, totally. Actually, I have my own group,’ ” Mr. Corredor said, laughing.
He quickly assembled a group — his father on congas, a family friend on guiro, and members from past bands on guitar and bass.
“In one week we learned like 25 songs,” Mr. Corredor said. “I made a repertoire with my dad, and it was clear from the start that our music tastes are old-school — 1960s-70s, salsa dura. Hard salsa.”
The gigs at Coche proved an instant hit. By the summer, that early version of La Herencia consistently packed the house, and a line often snaked around the building.
Mr. Corredor started going to salsa clubs in the city, where he met additional percussionists and a trombonist, and he invited them to play a show at the Stephen Talkhouse in Amagansett in June 2025.
“The front row was the friends and family from Coche. Everyone was dancing,” he said. “At that show, I knew that this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”
Despite the clear appetite that La Herencia’s crowds demonstrated, there aren’t many opportunities to see live salsa music on the East End. Coche closed this winter, bringing the Latin Tuesday nights to an end. Mambo Loco sometimes travels farther east but typically plays a Latin Wednesday night during the summer at Meschutt Beach in Hampton Bays. Plenty of clubs have reggaeton D.J.s, but the old-school, Fania-era sound is difficult to come by locally.
Mr. Corredor wants to change that. He hosts regular salsa socials at the Clubhouse in Wainscott, and plans to return to the Talkhouse as much as possible this summer. And he’s on the lookout for other opportunities to play with the nine-piece La Herencia.
That he’s at the helm of building a salsa scene seems almost fated — his family has done it before.
His paternal grandfather Eliecer Corredor grew up in Cali, Colombia — a city often considered the genre’s epicenter outside its birthplace in the Bronx and Spanish Harlem. As a young man, Eliecer moved to Manizales and took his collection of Sonora Matancera records, many of which form the backbone of later salsa dura records — to play for his friends.
“He pulled up and he put every one on,” Mr. Corredor said. “His friends would gather around his sound system and listen to his records.”
Eventually, Eliecer’s son-in-law Jairo Correa opened a popular salsa club in Manizales called Borincuba. His son Freddy Corredor — Nick’s father — once filled in for Nelson y Sus Estrellas’s bongo player at a massive coliseum where the city held bullfights. All of his aunts are prodigious salsa singers and dancers.
The Corredor family’s relationship to salsa music echoes the evolution of the genre itself, with its movement between New York and Latin America, and its willingness to adapt to a changing scene while staying committed to that original, irresistible clave-based groove.
On April 3, Mr. Corredor will release La Herencia’s first original track, called “Mi Ritmo Pesa,” recorded in Huntington and mixed and mastered by himself at his home studio in Hampton Bays. It somehow sounds simultaneously like it was plucked from one of his grandfather’s old records that he brought back from Cali, and something entirely fresh.
