Nuyoricans, Hip Hop, and the Burning Bronx

Bronx, NY

A great online resource by old school South Bronx PR breaker Mr. Wiggles

The abandonment of the Bronx…
Gang life in the Bronx

Block parties and basement jams
Black, Puerto Rican, and West Indian Bronxites, MCing, freaking to the beat,  and feeling gang tensions at a good old fashioned block party from the Bronx gang documentary 80 Blocks from Tiffany's.
DJ's like Kool Herc started bringing big sound systems and chattin' to jams at public parks, tennis courts, and apartment rec rooms to play this music. Abandoned buildings were another place that kids would set up clubs.

The rise of the break
Meanwhile, a song would have a particular break which people would clamor for.

"It's Just Begun" by the Jimmy Castor Bunch (break at about 2:11)

"Apache" by the Incredible Bongo Band (break at about 2:21)

Those who danced the breaks developed styles like uprock and downrock, dancing the breaks - these were the B-Boys.

When the DJ Grandmaster Flash invented backspinning, a track could be looped by a DJ to become the basis of a hip hop song.

One important Puerto Rican DJ was Charlie Chase (born Carlos Mandes).

"Amen Brother" by The Winstons, at 1:27 is the famous six-second break that not only was used extensively in early hip hop but spawned entire subcultures like drum-and-bass and jungle

Sample-era classic hip-hop breaks-cum-beats.

From gangs to crews

Gang truce and the Bambaata dances.
Gangs reformulated themselves as competitive crews.
Some were dedicated to graffiti. Subway Montage from Wild Style, music by Grandmaster Caz

The same was true of basketball and especially  dancers and DJs. B-Boy battles in particular were serious business.

Cold Crush Brothers vs. Fantastic 5, with Puerto Ricans Charlie Chase, Ruby Dee and Whipper-Whip

Commodification and the disappearance of Puerto Ricans

Hip hop culture starting appearing in movies and other movies, and even commercials like these, and MC's started recording original tracks. As this went on, Puerto Ricans were marginalized, in part because they were more associated with B-Boying than the previously marginal MCing, and partially because they did not appear in movies - most of the US outside New York did not really know what a Puerto Rican was. With the rise of Michael Jackson, breakdancing peaked and the Puerto Ricans were out. 

The radicals, Chicanos and Nuyoricans

Some paths:
Puerto Rican folklore
Afro-Cuban traditional music
African-American soul and funk
African-American experimental jazz


Eddie Palmieri

The innovative Palmieri never signed with Fania and never stopped experimenting or making msuic outside the box. After introducing the two-trombone sound that fueled salsa, he made political music like "Justicia"and Live at Sing-Sing prison, ("VP Blues" here). He did fusion projects with soul music, like "Harlem River Drive." He was experimented with jazz music, pushing the musical theory (4th voicings and pentatonics) of jazz pianist McCoy Tyner toward Latin music and even doing way-out Cecil Taylor type free jazz.

"Vamonos pa'l monte" (with Charlie Palmieri, live in Central Park)

Grupo Folklórico y Experimental Neoyorkino

It started as a listening club in René López's basement, and opened out into one of the great experimental projects, that spawned multiple bands, and much of the Latin jazz movement. They played Cuban trad guajira, plena, Puerto Rican mazurka, and Santería batá, as well as some really swinging salsa.

Latin Jazz
Like Jerry and Andy González's projects, such as Ft. Apache Band, and many others.
 

Salsa was, among the things, a nationalist movement, as illustrated in the Fania film, Our Latin Thing (Cosa nuestra)

People have been, and still are playing rumba in the parks of New York.

Salsa poetry

Here Afro-Nuyorican Last Poet and Young Lords co-founder Felipe Luciano reading his poem "Jíbaro/My Pretty Nigger" opening for Eddie Palmieri at Sing-Sing Prison, 1972.

Luciano opening for Palmieri again, here.

Pedro Pietri, founder of the Nuyorican Poet's Café, reading "Puerto Rican Obituary" (1969)

The Young Lords

The Young Lords, whose 13 Point Plan included rights for US Puerto Ricans, the independence of the island of Puerto Rico, women's liberation, and solidarity with the Vietnamese people, began in Chicago in 1967, spread to New York (and beyond) in 1969, and was influential until the mid 1970s.

 Meanwhile, in LA...

The Chicano movement was a confluence of related struggles: an assimilationist Mexican-American movement that sought equal rights of citizenship and political representation; a labor movement organized around Mexican-American (and to some extent, Asian-American) farmworkers; a student movement that organized against the Vietnam War, police discrimination and brutality, equality of education, and negative stereotypes of Latinos in the popular media; and a nationalist movement organized around the idea of creating an independent and territorially defined nation.

The Chicano movement had political, artistic, and of course musical ramifications.  Those musical ramifications were varied, but in general they can be described as passing from a very ambiguous acknowledgement of their ethnicity to a much more straightforward racial pride.

Texas artists like Little Joe Hernández and Sonny Ozuña, who started off as younger exponents of the orquesta sound, were shut out of the mainstream music industry, much more than their East LA peers like the Premiers and Cannibal & the Headhunters, and were closer to rural Mexican culture. Little Joe Hernández, for example, had grown up picking cotton and hearing conjunto and orquesta in Central Texas. But bby the late 1960's, musicians like Little Joe were influenced by the hippie counterculture and the Chicano movement to move even more strongly toward conjunto music, with a heavy whiff of hippie-ness. His song "Las Nubes" became the unofficial anthem of the farmworker's union, and featured a hybrid aesthetic, with  a traditional conjunto feel and rhythm and Spanish lyrics, but also a drum kit and electric guitar and some almost progressive rock-sounding interludes.

Another important stream was the rock and Afro-Cuban fusion pioneered by Santana. The path is more circuitous than it might seem. Carlos Santana was born in Mexico and grew up playing mariachi music. But he hated that music and was much more inspired by blues and rock in the multi-racial band he led when he moved to San Francisco. Afro-Cuban slowly began to come in with Mike Carabelo, a high school friend of Santana's who had picked up congas in drum circles, and especially from San Francisco club owner and rock impresario Phil Graham, a transpalnted New Yorker (Born Jewish in Germany and escaping right before World War II) who had grown up dancing in the Palladium. Santana played at the legendary Woodstock festival, to tremendous acclaim, especially when the Woodstock film came out.

This model, of Chicanos playing Afro-Cuban-tinged rock was influential for many bands, such as El Chicano, which, despite largely ignoring actual Mexican music, was quite political and up-front about being Chicanos.

Later, Los Lobos, of L.A., started experimenting with traditional Mexican music, and even put it into their cover of Valens' "La Bamba" for the movie of the same name - note the trad jarocho breakdown at the end of the song (2:20). Country-rocker Linda Ronstadt, a multi-platinum-selling artist who was the best known and best paid woman in the msuic industry during her heyday in the 1970s, and who had never highlighted being an Arizona Chicana, did an all-mariachi album called "Canciones para mi padre/Songs for My Father" in 1987, and two more albums of Mexican music in the early 1990s.

Salsa

If you're interested in salsa, one of the best books on the subject, by the Venezuelan César Rondón, happens to be online through the BU library.

Before there was salsa...

There was, of course, the Palladium. Tito Rodríguez: his "voice was suave enough to sound new, but it also had the vigor and mischief to get even the young tough guys to dance." (Rondón 11). After 1963, he turned to boleros, "those tender love songs that can only be rendered in Spanish" (Rondón 14). And Tito Puente.

The early 1960's charanga boom:

Charanga Duboney, with Johnny Pacheco and Charlie Palmieri (Eddie's older brother), Rondón 13 (rendón 15)

Salsa diehard Ray Barretto began with a charanga group (and without an Afro): here's "Charanga Moderna" from 1962, featuring violinist Alfredo de la Fé.

Eddie Palmieri
Eddie Palmieri and La Perfecta's two-trombone sound (borrowed from Mon Rivera, a plena singer in Puerto Rico) was a revelation in 1962, and would provide the perfect amount of New York grit for what would become salsa.

Willie Colón and Hector Lavoe
Salsa's young roughnecks.

Colón/Lavoe album covers

From Lo mato: "Calle luna, calle sol" by Willie Colón with Hector Lavoe (Rondón 68). Lavoe sings:
"Put your hand in your pocket, pull out your knife and open it. Listen to me, in this neighborhood they've killed a lot of tough guys. In these tough streets, you can't relax. Be careful with your words - you're not worth a kilo." 

Their albim "Asalto Navideño" - a pun mixing their usual street tough image with traditional Purto Rican Christmas caroling (sort of) - incorporated the cuatro from música jíbara.

It also contains the first of many experiments by Colón with non-Cuban music - not only música jíbara, but Panamanian murga. Colón's later "El gran varón"  deals with homosexuality and AIDS

Héctor Lavoe
Lavoe, who was born in Puerto Rico and came to NY as a young man, was popular in part because of how much his voice was heard as reminiscent of música jíbrar, even though he was no traditionalist. He was wont to insert an improvised "Le lo lai" from música jíbara whenever the mood struck, even in a non-Puerto Rican song like the apocalyptic masterpiece "Todo tiene su final" ("Everything Ends"). New York Puerto Ricans identified very strongly with him, and songs like "Mi Gente/My People" (here sung with the Fania All-Stars in Zaire - Cuban music and salsa have been popular in West Africa since the "rhumba" days - in 1975, for the Ali-Foreman "Rumble in the Jungle"). He also sang religious themes, such as the santería-influenced "Aguanile."His most famous song was "El cantante," about a famous singer whom despite his fame and acclaim, has just as much pain as anyone else, which became sadly auto-biographical as Lavoe's inner demons took over his life through the 1980s and 1990s until his death in 1993.

Rubén Blades

After Hector Lavoe left Willie Colón's band in 1973, Blades took up Rubén Blades as singer. A college-educated Panamanian from a well-off politically leftists family in Panama, Blades worked at the mailroom of Fania before getting artists to record some of his songs, and finally emerged as a singer himself and the composer of complex and thoughtful, often politically tinged songs that were popular throughout Latin America.

"Plástico"

The "Stairway to Heaven" of salsa, "Pedro Navaja."

Eddie Palmieri

The innovative Palmieri never signed with Fania and never stopped experimenting or making msuic outside the box. After introducing the two-trombone sound that fueled salsa, he made political music like "Justicia"and Live at Sing-Sing prison, ("VP Blues" here). He did fusion projects with soul music, like "Harlem River Drive." He was experimented with jazz music, pushing the musical theory (4th voicings and pentatonics) of jazz pianist McCoy Tyner toward Latin music and even doing way-out Cecil Taylor type free jazz.

"Vamonos pa'l monte" (with Charlie Palmieri, live in Central Park)

Ray Barretto
Another polyfacetic artists. We already heard his proto-boogaloo "Watusi."

In traditional/típico mode, doing Arsenio Rodríguez's "Bruca maniguá"

In more modernist mode, "Cocinando"
In swinging salsa mode, "Más vale un guaguancó"

And mixing everything, "Canto abacuá"

Johnny Pacheco

Johnny Pacheco, aside from co-running Fania Records and leading the Fania All-Stars, was himself a well-known flutist, with a deep típico feel.

Larry Harlow

The Fania bandleader and pianist. Here rocking it with singer Ismael Miranda on "Abran paso" (with great period video) and "Abandonada fue." He was also deeply típico. His neckname, the "Judío Maravilloso" (Marvellous Jew)was derived from the nickname of his idol Arsenio Rodríguez, "El Ciego Maravilloso" (The Marvellous Blind Man): Larry Harlow's "Suéltala" vs. Arsenio Rodríguez's original "Suéltala"

Harlow's "Divina Gracia," featuring Celia Cruz, from Hommy, a salsa version of "Acid Queen" from The Who's rock opera Tommy

Harlow's son/charanga phase: "El paso de Encarnación"

Celia Cruz

"Quimbará" with Johnny Pacheco

And in her pre-NY phase in the Sonora Matancera in Cuba, singing "Burundanga"

Grupo Folklórico y Experimental Neoyorkino 

It started as a listening club in René López's basement, and opened out into one of the great experimental projects, that spawned multiple bands, and much of the Latin jazz movement. They played Cuban trad guajira, plena, Puerto Rican mazurka, and Santería batá, as well as some really swinging salsa.

Típica '73

"Mañoño," with Adalberto Santiago

"Pa' gozá," recorded in Cuba with Cuban musicians

Meanwhile, in Puerto Rico

Puerto Rican Rafael Cortijo's group (featuring Ismael Rivera) (Rendón 12), here in the early 1960s

El Gran Combo, a later outgrowth of Cortijo's Combo

La Sonora Ponceña, featuring pianist Papo Lucca: "Boranda"

Willie Rosario

Post-Fania salsa (salsa romántica)

Salsa romántica: Lalo Rodríguez, Frankie Ruíz

Marc Anthony and La India together on "Vivir lo nuestro"

Gilberto Santa Rosa "Bomba de tiempo"

Victor Manuelle

Neo-traditional salsa

Jimmy Bosch

Spanish Harlem Orchestra

Latin Jazz
Like Jerry and Andy González's projects, such as Ft. Apache Band, and many others.
 

Salsa was, among the things, a nationalist movement, as illustrated in the Fania film, Our Latin Thing (Cosa nuestra)

People have been, and still are playing rumba in the parks of New York.

Bonus: Salsa poetry

Here Afro-Nuyorican Last Poet and Young Lords co-founder Felipe Luciano reading his poem "Jíbaro/My Pretty Nigger" opening for Eddie Palmieri at Sing-Sing Prison, 1972.

Luciano opening for Palmieri again, here.

Pedro Pietri, founder of the Nuyorican Poet's Café, reading "Puerto Rican Obituary" (1969)

Bonus: The Young Lords

The Young Lords, whose 13 Point Plan included rights for US Puerto Ricans, the independence of the island of Puerto Rico, women's liberation, and solidarity with the Vietnamese people, began in Chicago in 1967, spread to New York (and beyond) in 1969, and was influential until the mid 1970s.

Doo-wop, boogaloo, Latin soul and other Afro/Latin/American mutants

Doo-Wop
Seminal New York City doo-woppers Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers

From left to right, Jimmy Merchant, Herman Santiago, Frankie Lymon, Joe Negroni, and Sherman Garnes. Negroni and Santiago were Puerto Rican; Merchant, Lymon and Garnes African-American.

Boogaloo: "Cha-cha-chá with a backbeat"(1966-'68)
The quote is from the late Prof. Juan Flores, in an important chapter in his book From Bomba to Hip Hop, reproduced here.

From the documentary I Like It Like That 

Musically, boogaloo was piano vamps and percussion patterns from mambo and cha-cha-chá with soul music's backbeat, plus Spanglish lyrics, and a brash and youthful rock n' roll spirit.
 

Joe Cuba's "Bang Bang" (don't let the false end at 2:45 fool you!). Keep an eye out for the timbales.

Joe Cuba's previous hit, "El Pito (I'll Never Go Back to Georgia)" (which gets some of its DNA from a famous predecessor we've seen in this class before).

Pete Rodríguez "I Like It Like That."  The bassline is essentially borrowed from Peggy Lee's "Fever" and some of the lyrics from Chris Kenner's 1961 "I Like it Like That."

  

Héctor Rivera "At the Party"

Johnny Colon's "Boogaloo Blues"

Proto-boogaloo

Noro Morales' before-its-time "Mississippi Mambo"

Ray Barretto's "El Watusi." (Bonus: LA R&B group The Orlons' "Wah-Wahtusi" with some pretty awesome video of the original Watusi dance). Willie Torres' "To Be with You". Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz "Lookie Lookie",  "Mr. Trumpet Man", and "Colombia's Boogaloo"
(Based in part on the Anglo Californian Herb Alpert's Tijuana Brass, especially "Whipped Cream" and "Lonely Bull")

Boogaloo travels:
Boogaloo by boogaloo-hater Eddie Palmieri : "Ay Que Rico", featuring Cachao on bass and Cheo Feliciano singing) and "The African Twist" (in English)
From Puerto Rico (not New York) "Gran Combo's Boogaloo"

Boogaloo, Latin Soul, and other Black-Latino fusions

African-American Latin Soul:

Willie Bobo "Fried Neckbones and Some Home Fries"

Pucho and His Latin Soul Brothers "Got Myself a Good Man"

Cuban and Puyerto Rican Latin Soul:
Mongo Santamaría's "Watermelon Man" King Nando: "Fortuna" (from the LP "Orchard Beach Sing-a-ling")

Lebrón Blues: "Funky Blues"

Afro-Filipino-Nuyorican Joe Bataan in a category of his own
 "Gypsy Woman", "What Good Is a Castle",  "Ordinary Guy"

Nuyorican rock?

Barrio Band 1971

(In Puerto Rico itself, salsa- and rock-lovers would end up being opposing sub-cultures)

Midterm listening study guide

Tresillo
3+3+2
X . . X . . X . / X . . X . . X .

Cinquillo
2+1+2+1+2
X . X X . X X ./  X . X X . X X .
Note that this is basically the tresillo with two extra beats
X.xX.xX. / X.xX.xX.

Habanera
3+1+2+2
X . . X X . X . /  X . . X X . X .
q . e q   q 
Note that this is basically the tresillo on top of the 1 and 3 of a straight 4/4.
X . . X . . X .
X . . . X. . .

Clave (son clave)
3+3+4+2+4
X . . X . . X . . . . X . X . . .
or the same thing backwards, like this
X .  X . . . X . . X . . X . . . .
Also, see here




Matachines

Alabado

Southwest mission music: https://www.loc.gov/item/raelbib000141/

Música Jíbara

The music of white Puerto Rican peasants
Instruments

Güiro

Cuatro

Sometimes bongo and guitar

High vocal style, often with décima rhyme scheme and "Le lo lai"

Bomba

The Afro-Puerto Rican dance/drum form

• Multiple barrel drums, with one playing the lead part
• A shaker and a piece of bamboo played by drumsticks
• Call-and-response singing
• Interaction between lead drummer and dancer

Plena

The mixed race Puerto Rican carnival music on topical themes

• Small, medium and large panderetas
• Güiro
• March-like rhythm

Plena also existed in urbanized forms using large urban bands with bass, piano, and multiple horns.

***********************
Mambo
The Cuban based dance music popular at the Palladium
Instrumentation

• Full percussion - Timbales, Congas, and Bongo/Cowbell
• Piano and bass
• Large horn section, playing in percussive blocks, layered parts, or together in fast snaky melodies
• In the case of Pérez Prado - "the grunt"

CuBop

The experimental fusion between Cuban music and jazz, innovated by Mario Bauzá of Machete and his Afro-Cubans, and the collaborations of Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo, and also performed by Cal Tjader and Stan Kenton, shares the instrumentation of mambo. A few differences are:

• The use of extremely dissonant and modern-sounding chords.
• Sometimes, switches between tumbao and swing feels

***********************
Rumba

The Afro-Cuban drum-dance.

Includes

• Conga drums
• Clave
• Woodblock
• Sometimes other stuff
• Couple dance
• Guaguancó, the most common form of rumba has the "dum dum-doom" rhythm

***********************

Son (Pre-Arsenio version)

A Cuban dance music.

Instrumentation

• Claves
• Bongos (which are switched for a cowbell in the montuno section)
• Tres (Cuban stringed instrument)
• Maracas
• Bass (sometimes strong bass, sometimes something else, like marímbula)
• Güiro
• Often a single trumpet

***********************

Danzón
Instrumentation

• Lead flute
• Violins
• Timbales
• Güiro

Multiple sections, the last a mambo

• Sections separated by timbales-led breaks with all the instruments playing in unison
• Instrumental, no vocals (except maybe a repeating chorus in the mambo section)

***********************

Latin Influences
The New Orleans tresillo/habanera

• Maracas and the clave/Bo Diddley rhythm 

• The Latin instruments (güiro, etc.) and syncopated bass lines of the early 1960s hits of Tin Pan Alley

• Fast three chord jams borrowing from Cuban music. Compare the white group The Rascals' "Good Lovin'," a cover of African-American artists The Olympics' version of a Cuban guaracha by the Sonora Matancera (with Celia Cruz).

Chicano Pride

The Chicano movement was a confluence of related struggles: an assimilationist Mexican-American movement that sought equal rights of citizenship and political representation; a labor movement organized around Mexican-American (and to some extent, Asian-American) farmworkers; a student movement that organized against the Vietnam War, police discrimination and brutality, equality of education, and negative stereotypes of Latinos in the popular media; and a nationalist movement organized around the idea of creating an independent and territorially defined nation.

The Chicano movement had political, artistic, and of course musical ramifications.  Those musical ramifications were varied, but in general they can be described as passing from a very ambiguous acknowledgement of their ethnicity to a much more straightforward racial pride.

Texas artists like Little Joe Hernández and Sonny Ozuña, who started off as younger exponents of the orquesta sound, were shut out of the mainstream music industry, much more than their East LA peers like the Premiers and Cannibal & the Headhunters, and were closer to rural Mexican culture. Little Joe Hernández, for example, had grown up picking cotton and hearing conjunto and orquesta in Central Texas. But bby the late 1960's, musicians like Little Joe were influenced by the hippie counterculture and the Chicano movement to move even more strongly toward conjunto music, with a heavy whiff of hippie-ness. His song "Las Nubes" became the unofficial anthem of the farmworker's union, and featured a hybrid aesthetic, with  a traditional conjunto feel and rhythm and Spanish lyrics, but also a drum kit and electric guitar and some almost progressive rock-sounding interludes.

Another important stream was the rock and Afro-Cuban fusion pioneered by Santana. The path is more circuitous than it might seem. Carlos Santana was born in Mexico and grew up playing mariachi music. But he hated that music and was much more inspired by blues and rock in the multi-racial band he led when he moved to San Francisco. Afro-Cuban slowly began to come in with Mike Carabelo, a high school friend of Santana's who had picked up congas in drum circles, and especially from San Francisco club owner and rock impresario Phil Graham, a transpalnted New Yorker (Born Jewish in Germany and escaping right before World War II) who had grown up dancing in the Palladium. Santana played at the legendary Woodstock festival, to tremendous acclaim, especially when the Woodstock film came out.

This model, of Chicanos playing Afro-Cuban-tinged rock was influential for many bands, such as El Chicano, which, despite largely ignoring actual Mexican music, was quite political and up-front about being Chicanos.

Later, Los Lobos, of L.A., started experimenting with traditional Mexican music, and even put it into their cover of Valens' "La Bamba" for the movie of the same name - note the trad jarocho breakdown at the end of the song (2:20). Country-rocker Linda Ronstadt, a multi-platinum-selling artist who was the best known and best paid woman in the msuic industry during her heyday in the 1970s, and who had never highlighted being an Arizona Chicana, did an all-mariachi album called "Canciones para mi padre/Songs for My Father" in 1987, and two more albums of Mexican music in the early 1990s.

Mexican-American Rock

Pacoima, California's own Ritchie Valens.

L.A.'s Julian Herrera in 1956 was an important forebear. (And also had a wild backstory...)

In Texas, younger  orquestas also started taking on rock and r&b stylings. Little Joe and the Latinaires, could do more ranchera style, more English-langauge rock/rhythm & blues, and some stuff in the middle.

In a similar vein, Sonny Ozuña's band Sunny and the Sunliners (earlier, Sunny and the Sunliners) could be muy Tejano (here), or sing straight-up Sam Cooke-style Rhythm & Blues

By 1964, Mexican-Americans were important in the "garage rock" trend. 

The Premieres, from LA,  (here in 1964)...

... Cannibal and the Headhunters, also from East L.A., opened for the Beatles on their 1965 tour. 

... and ? and the Mysterions, from Detroit. They had their big hit "96 Teardrops" in 1966. 

These groups did not overtly highlight the fact that they were Mexican-American, and to a certain degree even masked it. There were some moments in they revealed it, as in the introduction to Texas-born Sam the Sham (Domingo Zamudio) and the Pharaohs'  "Wooly Bully" from 1965. Thee Midniters of East L.A. did a song called "Whittier Boulevard," an instrumental with a brief "Arriba, arriba!" at the beginning and named after a popular place for cruising ground for young people at the time.