The party happened last week, but today's the birthday of one Juan Pablo Pacheco, one of the major architects of classic Fania salsa.
It took me ages to realize Pacheco was Dominican (in so many ways salsa was popularly coded as Cuban-Puerto Rican). And to fully appreciate what an outlier he was.
Not only was his dad a bandleader for the Trujillo-sponsored (but nonetheless jamming) Orquesta Santa Cecilia, but he arrived in NY in the 1940s, before most other Dominican families, and his family integrated into a community of musicians in one of the Golden Eras of Latin music -- mambo!
A while ago, he talked about a memoir he was writing, one that would cover his formation and the incredible innovations in sound recording, stagecraft and image management that shaped some of the most enduring New York musical products of the century. I have yet to see any sign of the completed book, but it's one I'm dying to read.
In any case, here's a little taste of Pacheco at his prime, Fania All Stars in their African tour doing "En Orbita." Check how he conducts the band with his whole body, like a rumbero eliciting the drum beats with hips, feet and shoulders.
Juan Flores, still one of the few people to write about the ecstatic utopian music form called bugalú/Latin boogaloo, reconstructs a conversation between Jimmy Sabater and Joe Cuba before the first time the band played "Bang Bang" at a "Black" dance at the club that would become the Cheetah:
"It was a black dance, the morenos, morenos americanos de Harlem and stuff, you know, they had black dances one night a week there and at some of the other spots. So that night we were playing selections from our new album We Must Be Doing Something Right that had just come out, the one with 'El Pito' on it, you know, 'I'll Never Go Back to Georgia, I'll Never Go Back...' The place was packed, but when we were playing all those mambos and cha chas, nobody was dancing. So at the end of the first set, I went over to Joe Cuba and said, look, Sonny (that's his nickname), I have an idea for a tune that I think might get them up. And Joe says, no, no, no, we got to keep on playing the charts from the new album. Then toward the end of the second set, I went on begging him, and said, look, if I'm wrong, we'll stop and I'll buy you a double. so finally he said o.k., and I went over to the piano, and told Nick Jimenez, play this... Before I even got back to the timbal, the people were out on the floor, going, 'bi-bi hah! bi-bi hah!' I mean mobbed."
I have a special love for bugalú, born the same year I was, 1966. The songs are not as melodically or rhythmically sophisticated as salsa or soul, but they cook! They always sound like you've walked into the middle of a party -- a really great party. As much a dance as a song, it's infectious; passive listening is near impossible.
Joe's band, the Joe Cuba Sextet, was radical, stripping down the lush mambo orchestra to conga, timbal, piano, vibraphone and bass, where even the melodic instruments have a share in carrying the beat, the beat, the beat. And the vocals, erupting from every corner, "corn bread, hog maw and chitlins" "cuchifritos, lechón, lechón, lechón." Cheo Feliciano soneando. Heaven.
UPDATE: Joe Cuba will be viewed at the R&G Ortiz Funeral Home located at
204 E. 116th Street, NYC 10029 between 3rd & 2nd Avenues.
212.722.3512 on Wednesday & Thursday, February 18th & 19th from
2 to 10 p.m.
A funeral mass service will be held Friday
morning at 11 a.m. at St. Paul's Church located @ 213 E. 117th Street,
between Park & Lexington.
Longtime musical globetrotter Rob Weisberg has a cool survey of Obama praise songs in the WNYC art.cult blog. A lot of Kenyan and African-American samples I hadn't seen before, including the one below, from Congolese singer now in DC Samba Mapangala featuring awesome 14-year-old Minneapolis rapper Fanaka Ndege ("hip hop meets rumba").
Rob played some of these and other good stuff in his WFMU show, Transpacific Sound Paradise Saturday and tonight at 6 pm. So tune in while you wait for polls to close. Relax. Dance a little.
Hearing the rooted Puerto Rican and Cuban songs recorded by this cult band in the mid-70s in these two releases, the folklórico part was clear. But seeing the experimental took a little more thought.
But if there was any doubt that the band looked forward as much as backward, you only had to hear the rendition of "Perdón" toward the end of the second set at Hostos.
Jerry González, likely the heppest cat left in all of Latin musicdom, steps to the mike with his trumpet (up to then he'd been on percussion only). The rest of the band watches and waits. Through the mute, the notes are clear as a knife edge, unhurried. All the lessons of bop mellowed but still biting.
He steps away from the mike, fidgets, moves over to another mike, but clearly in control of time and space, molding it with an insinuating melody that remains intelligible even as it's unspun and reconstituted at the molecular level.
We all hold our breath. Brother Andy, Jerry's oldest collaborator and leader of the band, watches too. Until it's time for the band to come in, a guaguancó heavy on the percussion, Andy's bass the heartbeat, Oscar Hernández's piano the circulation. Abraham Rodríguez and young turk Pedrito Martínez sing Trío Los Panchos overlapping harmonies over the rolling drums.
And then, when Jerry hesitates between mikes, Pedrito leaves him his mike, moves up front and begins a rumba that moves the song from celestial to grounded, out of the coco and into the body. The mind-body dialectic not as opposition, but as call and response, a metaphysics of Ochún (pace Víctor Hernandez Cruz).
And that is where you hear what the Fort Apache Band jazzheads Andy & Jerry heard back as smartass teens in their Bronx basement: that New World Africans in the Caribbean (whether Black or jincho or jabao) knew how to construct fractals of sound, break the false modernity of cement and welfare, played in the key of life. That folklore is a myth; descargas are not past, but multiplying universes.
The salsa hardcore was there in the sold-out hall. A group of musicians drove all day after a late gig in Columbus, Ohio, to be in the audience. Others came from D.C. and other corners of the second Boricua diaspora away from the Barrio homeland. People you'd never see in one spot anywhere else anymore.
And thinking back to the Buena Vista tsunami, I knew why some roots do better in the market than others. That moving, steadfast supergroup appealed to the imperial nostalgia the U.S. has for Cuba. A group like GF&EN is a kick-in-the-face reminder that colonized boricuas, at least then (hopefully still), took all their traumas and rewired them into software for enduring.
So many things to love about this vintage mid-1970s video of Oscar de León performing Beny More's "Mata Siguaraya."
This performance falls well within my argument that U.S. critics completely misread salsa as retro, a return to tradition, when it was more a move in two directions at once -- into the past for some repertoire, for individual musical skills (the drums, the drums), and into the future with the stagecraft, the arrangements, absorbing the funk lessons of everyone's choreographer James Brown and the rock excess of Jimi or The Who.
Watch the hypnotic swinging fringe, which recalls vintage Tina, the "modern" (electric) but "traditional" (stand-up) bass, the early "cadenú"/bling aesthetic (the better to see the shine in the back of the arena), the "voz de vieja" chorus, the drawn-out scatting verses, trombone- and trumpet-driven montuno superimposed with those crazy moves (again, for the benefit of the back of the room).
Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go So many friends raved about this. But I realized I get impatient with gothics. Must be the obligatory genteel reticence of it all.
Ed Park: Personal Days: A Novel A comedy of social manners for the cubicle age. Nicely plotted even when it dips into the absurd. But I could'a done without the tour-de-force punctuation-less email that ties all loose ends.
Hanif Kureishi: Something to Tell You: A Novel A bittersweet sequel of sorts to Buddha of Suburbia and Beautiful Launderette: What happened to all of us old brown punks now that we're middle aged.
