Spanish Harlem incident
The Fania label arose in the Big Apple. Jim Irvin hears it blossom.
“A splendid, bustling, full-colour celebration.”
NEW YORK, March 1964, and a new label, Fania, is launched by Latin bandleader Johnny Pacheco and his lawyer Jerry Masucci, primarily to take control of Pacheco’s recordings. He had been born in the Dominican Republic, was uprooted to New York in 1946, aged 11, and became a star playing Latin music in the charanga style. Though mambo kings like Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez (‘tito’ means uncle) were still filling the uptown clubs they’d ruled since the cha-cha-chá craze of the 1950s, their music felt too square and remote for second generation Puerto Rican and Cuban kids raised in Spanish Harlem and Brooklyn, who wanted a sound that spoke to them the way blues, Motown and soul did for their AfricanAmerican neighbours. Kids like trombonist Johnny Colon and self-taught Afro-Filipino street-tough Joe Bataan, who began to experiment with soul and blues changes over Latin rhythms while singing about their real lives, in English. This kind of hybrid – a pop-soul song, sometimes with a call-andresponse aspect, driven by percussion polyrhythms – became known as a “boogaloo”, probably after a big New York dance hit of spring 1965, Boo-Ga-Loo by Tom And Jerrio.
The search for Latin soul wasn’t new.
An older alumnus of Tito Puente’s band, conga player Mongo Santamaría, helped point the way with his huge, mainstream hit, an irresistible, Latinised version of Herbie Hancock’s Watermelon Man in 1962. His subsequent covers of hits for CBS were dubbed “Latin soul” and others of his generation, like timbale player and bandleader Willie Bobo, developed the sound. But boogaloos were more popular with younger musicians, not least because the older generation bristled at their slangy, slice-of-life lyrics and the implication that traditional homeland styles were no longer enough.
Within a year, Fania was signing other artists and one of them, the energetic Harvey Averne, took over day-to-day running of the label, signing important players in the rise of Latin soul, among them Santamaría, Larry Harlow and Bataan, who, influenced by doo wop and boogaloo, revamped The Impressions’ Gypsy Woman as his first single, quickly following it with an influential album
Riot!. But it was in the realm of the 7-inch single where boogaloo and Latin soul experiments made the most sense. It’s A Good Good Feeling: The Latin Soul Of Fania Records (Craft) ★★★★ collects 89 examples, all of them 7-inch sides released by the label between 1965-1975, across 4-CDs, with an edited 28 track edition on double vinyl. It’s a splendid, bustling, full-colour celebration of this brief, fascinating form and, mostly, it cooks. Curiously, the biggest boogaloo hit, Joe Cuba’s Bang Bang, though in the Fania vaults, isn’t here, presumably because it was originally on the Tico label.
Some cuts, such as Ray Barretto’s Soul Drummers and A Deeper Shade Of Soul – both from his 1967 album Acid – nail the hybrid perfectly, perhaps because he’d been looking for it for a while. In the linernotes to Acid, singer Pete Bonet describes how, after Barretto’s smash Latin soul forerunner El Watusi in 1962, his boss had felt “caught between two worlds…the world of beautiful conservative music and the world of swinging music.” That tension erupts in the best tracks here. True, some of the concepts have dated, Bobby Valentin’s Bad Breath and Harvey Averne’s The Micro Mini are pretty embarrassing, but their energy endures, which also makes up for the occasionally shaky sound quality of some of the masters.
Later signings like Ralfi Pagan fundamentally just sang soul, the Latin element dialled down, while others signalled Fania’s future as the home of salsa, the new Latin sound which managed to be both swinging and conservative, and would keep Fania’s all-star players in work for the rest of their lives.
With Bobby Gillespie dropping an autobiography, and various deluxe editions underway, the once headlong Scream are ready to reveal hidden depths, and these third album demoes are the crown jewels. The crux: how much of Screamadelica’s magic derived from chief producer Andrew Weatherall’s touch? As Gillespie and guitarist Andrew Innes reveal in Jon Savage’s linernotes, “Wevvers” was initially a provocateur – the catalyst whose futuristic methods in mixing Loaded liberated their songwriting from guitar/bass/ drums tradition. Across four separate studio settings, we hear them thrashing out influence/sample-based ideas in often dense sound collages, which Weatherall (plus The Orb’s Alex Paterson) would later unclutter, adding ’90s psychedelic zing: Don’t Fight It, Feel It growing from three interwoven keyboard parts, instrumental Inner Flight first sketched with a Gillespie vocal, and Shine Like Stars drifting on with tablas and gamelan bells, before Weatherall’s edit. So much joy in the creation, it makes for wonderful listening.
“Reminiscent of soul, jazz, folk and blues, it’s familiar yet utterly unique.”
THE CORONATION of Haile Selassie (AKA Ras Tafari Makonnen) as Emperor of Ethiopia in 1930 didn’t just inspire a religion in Jamaica but also, in his attempts to modernise Abyssinia, gave rise to one the most covetable musical strains East Africa has ever produced, a hybrid reminiscent of soul, jazz, folk and blues that, thanks to its spacey pentatonic scales and lopsided rhythms, is instantly familiar yet utterly unique.
Selassie loved brass bands and orchestras, ensuring almost every government and cultural institution had one and competed for the best musicians. As global communication improved, the army and police bands would pick up on the latest James Brown and Otis Redding records, and members would supplement their incomes playing clubs behind the country’s most popular vocalists. The golden age of swinging Addis Ababa was short lived, however: a coup in 1974 put in power a hardline
Marxist government, the Derg, that took a dim view of nightclubs, pop music and the arts. Ethiopia’s cultural life never quite closed down, of course, but it was closed off from the world, with Aster
Aweke one of only a few to be heard outside her homeland in the cassette era that followed.
In 1997, French producer Francis Falceto started compiling the game-changing Éthiopiques CD series, which ran to 30 volumes and triggered a surge in interest in Ethiopian musicians past and present. Though prices for original vinyl can be prohibitive, the music produced in the decade between 1969 and 1978 is easy to collect if you like pristine reissues, and you don’t need to be a cratedigger to get your hands on the best stuff. Only around 500 singles were released, mostly in picture sleeves, and just 30 or so long-players, several of which are now available on labels such as Heavenly Sweetness or Mississippi/Change.
Knowing where to start can be daunting – well, can you read Amharic? – but you won’t go wrong with these 10 albums.