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Eddie Palmieri
Vamonos Pa’l Monte
Fania / Craft
Killer.
Fire Music, salsa-style. Dazzling, in-your-face Latin jazz from 1971, steeped in Afro-Cuban tradition, blazing with political militancy. Palmieri’s signature hard trombone sound is augmented with baritone saxophone, organ, trap drums and electric piano, and Monk and Tyner come more to the fore in his own playing.
According to percussionist Bobby Sanabria, the opener La Libertad Lógico was ‘an anthem for young Puerto Ricans like me.’ Drummer Nicky Marrero says that Palmieri’s use of the snare drum was designed to emulate a machine gun. Freedom is the only sensible option, declares this terrific music. Revolt.
Ismael Quintana recalls that the title track, ‘of all the songs I recorded with Eddie Palmieri, this has to be the most influential. That song was played and requested everywhere we would go in Latin America… The lyrics were about trying to cope with the injustices in the world. It meant let’s get out of this crazy mess and so much negativity that we live in, and let’s go to the mountains.’
Ronnie Cuber and Charlie Palmieri are here… Quintana and Marrero… and Chocolate Armenteros, one of the greatest trumpeters ever to walk the earth.
A classic. Hotly recommended.
‘Musician, poet and painter Roland Brival’s 1980 album is a lost classic of Caribbean spiritual jazz. Recorded with a group of Martinique’s top musicians, and combining the bèlè percussion traditions of the island with free flowing saxophone, rhodes flourishes and languorous bass, the album was rejected by Roland’s label of the time, and was ultimately self released in miniscule quantities to a small local audience. Themes of créole identity and colonial injustice combined with universal ideas of love and longing sung in Créole, English and French sound like an Antillean answer to Gary Bartz and Jon Lucien, underpinned with the insistent rhythms of the ti bois percussion. Long unheralded in the English-speaking world, Créole Gypsy is a key piece of the jigsaw of Caribbean music.’
Superlative, thrilling, big-band mambo, cha-cha and guaguanco from 1958, featuring Ray Barretto and vocalist Santos Colon. Essential Latin jazz; the real thing.
Soulful, rootical early set from the great man, with rich, brilliant backing from percussionists Trio Mocoto.
‘Fourteen tracks of irresistible psych-spiked cumbia and Link Wray guitar from the edge of the Peruvian jungle’ (Uncut).
‘Rambunctious Peruvian Cumbia Amazonica … The unpredictable and unrestrained sound that locals lovingly called ‘llullampeo’ can be heard in all its glory in Gitanita’ (Sounds And Colours).
In 1974 the police raided Fela’s commune. Looking for dope, they threatened to pump his stomach.
Interpol head: ‘I’ll talk to you in my office.’
Fela: ‘You get office? You foolish, stupid bastard, you goat…’
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