Rebeca Mauleón (born April 16, 1962) is an American pianist, composer, arranger and writer, specializing in salsa and other Latin American and Afro-Caribbean music.
Mauleón was born in Santa Monica, California in 1962. She began her professional career in her teen years as a performer and recording artist, and worked with many musicians in a variety of musical genres. She has written several texts and articles about the history of Latin and Caribbean music, including Salsa Guidebook.
As a producer, Mauleón has been involved in a wide array of music-related projects, from film and television documentaries to music software companies and instructional DVDs.
Her solo recordings – Round Trip, Latin Fire and Descarga en California – have attained top-ten status on Latin music industry charts. She has appeared at numerous national and international music festivals, including the Women in Jazz Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, the Monterey Jazz and San Francisco Jazz Festivals.
As musical director of Mickey Hart's Planet Drum ensemble, Mauleón has performed throughout the U.S., appearing at Woodstock in 1999 as well as on the Conan O'Brien and Regis and Kathy Lee shows. In 2001 she was the recipient of the Meet the Composer New Residencies Award, and has also been a Sundance Composers fellow.
She is a professor of Latin American, Caribbean and jazz music as well as composition, and has taught at several universities around the world. Also, she has served as a musicological consultant to National Geographic. Mauleón was appointed Director of Education at SFJAZZ in 2011.
Rebeca's powerful style at the piano and her high-energy musical direction have been dubbed "visceral" (Billboard Magazine), "fiery" (Utne Reader), and critics have lauded her as "one of the hippest band-leaders in Latin music today" (Allmusic).
