The wider music industry ghettoised Latin music. Nevertheless, it still struggled to escape the barrio. Pacheco thought boogaloo sold out Latin music’s traditions. And it ruled East Harlem for three years.” Boogaloo wasn’t the music of our parents. Our third album, Riot, outsold everybody four to one. “We were voted Latin band of the year in 1968, above Puente, Machito, Rodriguez and the rest. “Boogaloo changed the times,” says Bataan. Its title track was a Latinised Curtis Mayfield rewrite that, alongside contemporaneous boogaloo anthems – Pete Rodriguez’s I Like It Like That and Joe Cuba’s Bang Bang – signalled a generational shift within Latin music. That album, 1967’s Gypsy Woman, was recorded in a day. Within six months, they were recording their first album for Fania. One night, he arrived to find a group of teens rehearsing ploughing his switchblade into the piano, he declared himself their bandleader. “I was a neighbourhood thug – I got kicked out of school and sent to reformatory.” He fell under the spell of the reform school music teacher and, upon release, spent his evenings practising piano at the local community centre. The son of a Filipino father and an African American mother, he could pass as Latino and had risen through the ranks of barrio hoodlums. “Boogaloo was a cha-cha-cha with a backbeat,” says Joe Bataan. My thing was to maximise every opportunity.” The rise of boogaloo was its best opportunity yet.
SALSA MUSIC HOW TO
I said: ‘But Jerry, I pay my chauffeur 300 a month!’ ‘Well, then I hope you didn’t forget how to drive.’”Īverne says Fania was “a seat-of-its-pants operation then. He said: ‘You’ll learn fast.’ The job paid 300 a month. “I told him I’d never run a record label I’d never even stepped into a recording studio. He pounced when Masucci asked him to run Fania while he wound down his law practice.
Averne started a home renovation business that was lucrative – he had a chauffeur and an East Side apartment – but no fun. “Music was my ticket out.”īeatlemania ended the reign of mambo, however, and the hotels soon ditched Latin bands for beat groups. “I grew up in Brooklyn, a tough neighbourhood,” he says. Sharing his dad’s passion, Averne had been gigging between Manhattan ballrooms and Jewish holiday resorts in the Catskill mountains since he was 14. His father, a poor Georgian émigré who worked in the garment district, fell in love with the music and culture of his Puerto Rican co-workers. “Every hotel had to have a Latin band,” says Averne. Those were salad days for Afro-Cuban jazz, when Manhattan nightclubs such as the Palladium Ballroom shook to the sounds of mambo titans such as Tito Puente, Tito Rodriguez and “Prez” Prado. Harlow had played in Averne’s band, Arvito and His Latin Rhythms, in the 50s. A turning point came when their new signing Larry Harlow, a Jewish musician and Latin music devotee, introduced Masucci to a man named Harvey Averne.
It was a ramshackle operation, with their pair hawking LPs from the trunk of a car. It was a powerful thing.”Ī Dominican-born, Juilliard-trained flautist who introduced the Cuban dance craze pachanga to the US, Pacheco started Fania in 1964 with Jerry Masucci, a divorce lawyer who hated his day job but loved Latin music. Fania proved the Nuyorican community could fill out Yankee Stadium, that their artists could sell out arenas across the world. “But African American music easily crossed over to the American mainstream, whereas, until recently, crossover has been very elusive for tropical music in the US. “People often say Fania was the Motown of Latin music,” says the DJ and producer Dean Rudland, the curator of It’s a Good, Good Feeling: The Latin Soul of Fania. Salsa – their distinctive blend of traditional tropical rhythms – will become the vibrant soundtrack to pre-disco New York.Īn exhaustive new box set chronicles this history. After the boogaloo fad subsides, a new wave of innovative, charismatic young stars will rise to make Fania the premier Latin label in the US. Nevertheless, he will quickly learn to love the money it makes his groundbreaking label, Fania Records. Johnny Pacheco, a devotee of traditional Latin music, considers boogaloo “horrendous” and “not music”. Latin boogaloo – a fusion of African American R&B and Cuban rhythms reflecting the rich melting pot of East Harlem, New York – is sweeping the barrio.