Like every legendary document label worthy of its legacy, Fania Data was significantly attuned to each nice music and savvy self-promotion. So when it initially assembled the cream of its late Nineteen Sixties artist roster (Ray Barretto, Joe Bataan, Willie Colon, Larry Harlow, label co-founder Johnny Pacheco, et al.) to play a membership date collectively because the Fania All-Stars, it was as a lot a celebration of the thrilling sounds on New York Metropolis’s Latin music scene as a shrewd advertising train. Abetted by visitors Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri, the ensuing reside albums, 1968’s Reside on the Crimson Garter, Volumes 1 & 2, supplied proof-of-concept for the supergroup as a novel experiment.
Three years later, Pacheco’s enterprise companion on the label, Jerry Masucci, set his ambitions far larger. Boogaloo, the as soon as in style mid-’60s hybrid of Latin and R&B, had fizzled out. However its youthful vitality was absorbed into newly energized takes on the standard Afro-Cuban types Pacheco championed, performed by conjuntos with professional precision and jazz-level chops, flamboyance, and above all, cultural satisfaction. The brand new pan-Latin sound would grow to be referred to as salsa. And the Fania All-Stars – now encompassing each label fixtures and newer recruits – had been reconstituted for a particular live performance to be each recorded and filmed. Masucci envisioned a “Latin Woodstock” that might put the eyes and ears of the world on the infectious vitality of salsa, the NYC neighborhood that birthed it, and naturally, Fania.
Take heed to Reside on the Cheetah, Vol. 1 now.
Recorded on the night of Thursday, August twenty sixth, 1971, the 2 volumes of Reside on the Cheetah represents in lots of respects the Massive Bang of Nineteen Seventies salsa. The assembled All-Stars crowded onstage – together with conga participant Barretto, trombonist Colon, pianist Harlow, percussionist Roberto Roena, and bassist Bobby Valentin, together with very good vocalists Cheo Feliciano, Hector Lavoe, Ismael Miranda, Bobby Cruz, Adalberto Santiago, and Pete “El Conde” Rodriguez – greater than lived as much as the billing. Cheetah’s flashing-lights crammed, two-thousand-capacity ballroom of dancers supplied an ideal surroundings, as evinced by the synergy of the attendees’ clave and Valentin’s nimble bass on the hard-charging opener “Descarga Fania,” or the frenzy the percussion triumvirate of Barretto, Roena on bongos and cowbell, and Orestes Vilato on timbales induce on the magnificent “Ponte Duro.”
Different moments possess the celebratory heat of a homecoming. Feliciano’s showcase “Anacaona” (the anthemic Tite Curet Alonso-penned tribute to the long-lasting Taíno cacica and insurgent) alerts his triumphant return to performing after years of self-imposed retirement battling drug habit. Cruz and pianist companion Ricardo Ray’s propulsive “Ahora Vengo Yo” – their return to the NYC stage after a interval in Puerto Rico – heralds the duo’s subsequent success via the last decade. “Estrellas de Fania” and the 16-minute “Quitate Tu” – epic soneros that includes the entire assembled singers in spherical robin improvisation – evoke the exhilaration distinctive to standing on the precipice of one thing momentous. As Fania’s in-house designer and the All-Stars’ grasp of ceremonies “Dizzy” Izzy Sanabria declares from the stage at one level with all the eagerness the second deserves: “¡Que viva la musica! Latin music power – yeah!”
Simply as Masucci hoped, the Reside on the Cheetah albums – together with their dynamic accompanying live performance movie/El Barrio documentary, Our Latin Factor – propelled salsa, and with it Fania, worldwide. Inside a number of years, the All-Stars would famously promote out Yankee Stadium, inaugurate Roberto Clemente Coliseum in San Juan, and play the “Rumble in the Jungle” live performance in Zaire as they ascended to superstardom (and all of its trappings and problems). However Reside on the Cheetah, Volumes 1 & 2 makes the case that their chemistry was by no means higher than on the recent summer season evening in midtown Manhattan that set all of it off.
Take heed to Reside on the Cheetah, Vol. 1 now.
