News & Updates — boogaloo

One of my favorite Caribbean-born artists was master percussionist & composer Henri "Kiké" Guédon. Born in Martinique, he got his career going in the mid '60s with his band La Contesta. He played every style of Latin music, with strong funk & jazz undercurrents, to go with his Antillan and Caribbean musics (zouk, bomba, merengue, beguine, Cuban, etc) and even classical and avant-garde. He was a major Latin music star in France and enlisted world class musicians in his bands. He performed with the percussion front-of-the-stage like his idol Ray Barretto. There are some good collections and reissues of some...

The great Nuyorican percussionist, bandleader and composer Ray Barretto (Mr Hard Hands) retains a huge legacy, greatly influencing many percussionists and Latino jazz artists, and standing as a towering figure in the landscape of salsa music. He was checking out the bebop scene in the late '40s and honing his chops before getting the tap to play with Charlie Parker. He then worked in Tito Puente's band for four years in the late '50s. In the '60s he was a first-call percussionist for sessions at various jazz labels (Blue Note, Prestige, Riverside, etc), as well as playing with Herbie Mann....

Despite the working name of "Joe Cuba", the conguero Gilberto Calderon was actually a Nuyorican who grew up in Spanish Harlem. Since the first album in 1962 and into the '70s, the Joe Cuba Sextet were a very important and influential band on the newer generation of Latino musicians. With the two-tongued vocal duo of Cheo Feliciano (singing in Español) and Jimmy Sabater (singing in English) they scored a bunch of smash hits and helped fuel the boogaloo craze of the mid-'60s, fusing the soul music influence with Afro-Cuban rhythms. The group's albums contained burning hot descargas, jumping boogaloos and...

When I was a teenager I was into all this crazy free jazz stuff (which I am still REALLY into, FYI) and someone like Herbie Mann seemed like a joke to me. His awful hairy-chested nudie album cover on Push Push was disgusting to me and when a girl I knew (who was into the Grateful Dead...another band I hated in those years) expressed her fondness for both Herbie's "physique" and his music I gave her the album to take it off my hands. (I had bought it in a collection of jazz & blues albums). But the problem with...

Jimmy Sabater, the velvet-voiced Nuyorican singer & timbalista with the Joe Cuba Sextet, was the smooth English-tongued half of his lead vocal duo with Cheo Feliciano. Check out such great tunes as the smash hit "Bang, Bang", and "To Be With You" (a classic bolero, which Jimmy also cut a good disco version in '76). A native of El Barrio, he met Joe Cuba while playing stickball and the two joined Joe Panama's band. Eventually Joe Cuba took it over and transformed it into the popular Joe Cuba Sextette. They started making records in the late '50s but it was...