latin binge

as much as i love variety in my food, sometimes i just want to binge. i don’t mean in a gorge-and-gag way, but simply sticking with a good thing for a bit.

szechuan tienfu peanuts, for instance, i can eat for days. watermelon too. right now i’m on a mango kick, the small, intensely sweet, 5-for-4 bucks kind you find in chinatown.

with the early arrival of the new york summer, i’ve been hiding out in my a/c’d crib, binging on music of one sort or another. for the next several months, i plan to post on a regular basis my genre-obsession-of-the-moment.

feeling somewhat tropical, i’ve been looking south for breezy relief. this being new york, latin music is creatively driven by conflicting impulses to stay true to your roots while reaching out to other communities. call it boogaloo or nuyorican-plus, it’s all groovy.

like better known contemporaries joe cuba or jimmy sabater, camilo azuquita was looking beyond salsa’s traditional lexicon to funk’s syncopated chatter on “guajira bacan" (vaya, 1975). a blunted traipse in uptown swing beats, it is most recently heard on souljazz’s exquisite “barrio nuevo” compilation (1999). more props is due souljazz for reissuing “babalonia” by ricardo marrero + the group, an irresistible party track on the “nu yorica!” (1996) compilation that was also checked by northern soul archivist keb darge on the “jazz spectrum” collection (bbe, 1999).

whenever i hear fankie ruiz’s salsa romantico classic “la rueda”, i am reminded of the sights and sounds of washington heights on a steamy summer afternoon as george and i muster whatever’s left in our wobbly legs for the final stretch of our annual “manhattan walk” (a day-long meandering hang session from south ferry to 215th via b’way). it can be found on the "historia musical de frankie ruiz" compilation (polygram, 1996).

trinidad’s black stalin (aka leroy calliste) is a game experimenter who spent the past two decades giddily mixing disparate elements like soulful cuban horns, slinky steel drums and robotic vocoder vocals. he took a different route to new york by trading some of calypso’s buoyancy for dub’s smoky inflection that permeated nyc’s clubs in the late ‘80s. “we ready” (b’s record, 1988) was not as popular as his hit “burn dem” but still made some noise in new york's caribbean community. i bought this record partly because, as noted on the back cover, the once influential brooklyn-based calypso label also owned and operated b’s restaurants.

reaching deeper into the ‘80s new york club sound was wally badarou. a session regular at the legendary compass point studios in nassau with credits like m’s “pop muzik”, talking heads’ “speaking in tongues” and the soundtrack for hector babenco’s “kiss of the spider women”, badarou was also known for his quirky underground hit “chief inspector (precinct 13)” (island, 1986). but it’s the loose-jointed “hi-life” that transports listeners to a new terrain where festive polyrhythms dance around a whistle-like motif, magically evoking both the look and feel of the islands and the ecstatic abandon of club revelers.

Posted by cellpharmer at June 16, 2005 07:21 PM