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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
RIP, Don Cornelius.
Read.
Listen.
Watch.
Etta James was a singer who I always enjoyed on the periphery…in other words, I never made a concerted effort to really get that deep into her catalog but I understand, on a very basic level, that this was a Very Important Artist and not just because she sang one of the very best ballads ever sung in the history of people singing ballads. 1
So for this appreciation, I’m not going to try to pull off some “Etta James’s most important songs” post because I simply can’t claim to know this. I [...]
Continue reading ETTA JAMES: AN APPRECIATION
It seems apropos (morbid too, perhaps) but days after the man who discovered her passed away – that’d be Johnny Otis – Etta James died today. NPR has a remembrance.
Again, sorry that the site looks like a death roll right now but as I’ve said before, this is going to happen more and more amongst our soul heros.
Rest in peace, Etta.
One of the most important figures in L.A. music has passed; Johnny Otis, dead at 90.
If you ever wanted to understand just what made him so remarkable, here’s as good a place to start.
Once I come up for air from all this work, I’ll try to say more.
(In better news, just recorded Sidebar #21 w/ Syl Johnson. At least some of our legends are still with us).
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”:
Ralph MacDonald just passed away. He wasn’t always as well known as a solo artist since the most prolific part of his career came as a percussionist for hire, but in that regard, he was world-class and one of the most important percussionists for countless 1970s and early ’80s jazz and R&B artists. He was also a highly undersung songwriter, having penned several absolutely classics alongside his writing partner William Salter.
I wanted to whip together a personal list of favorites that MacDonald helped craft. If you’re like me, you might very well [...]
Continue reading RALPH MACDONALD: UNIVERSAL RHYTHMS (RIP)
Funky16Corners reports that Howard Tate has passed away.
In honor of the late Mr. Tate, here’s one of my favorite A/B-sides from him:
Howard Tate: Stop b/w Shoot ‘Em All Down
From 7″ (Verve, 1967)
I’m too brain-dead tonight to properly articulate what makes this single so damn good but even though I typically hate saying, “the music speaks for itself,” in this case, I think the sides do the job better than I can right now.
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