|
|
Alfredo Linares y su Salsa Star: Baila Montuno
From 7″ (Caliente, 1973)
This appears on Linares’s 1973 Sensacionales! album but I didn’t catch wind of it until I picked it up on 7″ first. I’m a huge fan of Linares’s work and so I was pleased and a bit stunned to realize that, unless I’m totally off-base, this is a cover of Bobby Matos’s “Nadie Baila Como Yo” (from his seminal My Latin Soul album of the mid/late ’60s). Matos isn’t credited (not an unusual happenstance) but certainly, there’s more than enough musical [...]
Continue reading ALFREDO LINARES: BAILA BAILA!
Sad news: Jimmy Sabater, the “velvet sound” of Latin soul, just passed away. To me, Sabater is one of the most undersung of the boogaloo giants, the literal voice to many of the style’s great hits. I had a chance to interview him a couple of years back for the liner notes to the Joe Cuba Sextet’s We Must Be Doing Something Right and am grateful to have had that opportunity.
Sabater and Cuba were, for the most part, inseparable from one another. It’s impossible to consider the accomplishments of one without crediting [...]
Continue reading REMEMBERING JIMMY SABATER
I’m going to try to get a better post up soon but I did want to say that one of the things I liked about Castor is that he was one of the young Black musicians from uptown who go fascinated with Latin boogaloo and ended up recording a few of them on his debut album in 1967, including this cover of Joe Cuba’s “Bang Bang”:
Earlier in the year, a documentarian named Mathew Ramirez Warren contacted me about a possible interview. Mathew is putting together a full-length film on the history of Latin boogaloo – We Like It Like That – and obviously, this is a topic near and dear to me. Before he came out to interview me, he sent me a few clips of what he had already shot.
I was floored.
The story of Latin boogaloo, in my opinion, has been remarkably ignored. There are any number of theories to explain that relative absence (we don’t have [...]
Continue reading WE LIKE IT LIKE THAT: SUPPORT THIS BOOGALOO DOCUMENTARY
 
I’ve been revisiting the music of Pete Rodriguez lately after realizing how little of his catalog I had ever bothered to really sit with. Sure, I had been a fan of his big hits – “I Like It Like That,” “Oh That’s Nice”, “Micaela” for a while but I had never explored much else until I was asked to write the liner notes for Right On! Ahi Na Ma! and found myself digging back into Pete’s recordings (not the least [...]
Continue reading PETE RODRIGUEZ: ON THE TURN
  
Fajardo Y Sus Estrellas: El Burro Boogaloo
Descarga de Kiki
From Fajardo’s Boogaloo (Kubaney, 1967/8)
Joe Quijano: El Loco
No Me Digas Na’
From The Party Album (Cesta, 1967/8)
Ray Terrace: Manteca
From Home of Boogaloo (Tower, 1968)
Boogaloo’s popularity compelled many artists to record boogaloo albums even if they weren’t born n’ bred for the style (which is to say, younger, Nuyorican, doo-wop raised, and non-Latin music purists). In some cases, that resulted in some truly awful boogaloo albums that [...]
Continue reading COME FOR THE BOOGALOOS, STAY FOR THE BONUSES
Ozzie Torrens: Mia’s Boogaloo
Day Tripper
From Boogaloo In Apartment 41 (Decca, 1967)
It’s been a hot minute since I’ve written much on anything boogaloo. I haven’t abandoned my interest but I basically got backlogged with so many Latin soul records over the last couple of years, it had the weird effect of suffocating my interest in actually writing about them. Thankfully, Torrens LP – a longtime “want” – finally came through and having only been acquainted with the title track, I didn’t realize how frickin’ great this LP was.
Had I ever [...]
Continue reading BACK TO THE BOOGALOO: OZZIE TORRENS & PETE RODRIGUEZ
I should have done these a while back but better late than never. When you start researching Latin soul, you realize it’s hard to come by reliable artist discographies, especially when they record for different labels over the course of their careers. In some cases, you have to disentangle a lot of confusing information, such as the surprising number of errors on the joebataan.net site or the fact that Remo re-released a couple of Rodriguez’s albums with new titles.
I was going to add my Speed Records discography but Reynaldo82 already has one up (I [...]
Continue reading THE JOE BATAAN & PETE RODRIGUEZ DISCOGRAPHIES
|
gigs No gigs currently scheduled. I am available for private parties such as weddings, et. al. |
chatter