Back to the Streets

Back to the Streets

MALO

WARNER BROTHERS

SANTANA

COLUMBIA

There have been very few attempts to bring latin music into mainstream popular culture. I don’t mean Xavier Cugat. He was on tv the other night in a 1943 Esther Williams movie called Bathing Beauty. Everybody called him “Cugie” and there were ladies with turbans, ruffled sleeves and maracas. He was a gratuitous part of a plot that involved Esther Williams as a teacher in a girls’ school; Red Skelton does a whole ballet class scene dressed in a woman’s tutu; and in another scene some girls encourage the school organist to play some hot latin music: “Let’s go below the border for some South American jive,” they say. I don’t think that’s what I mean.

Much of what I hear from radios cradled in arms moving down Avenue A or blaring from open windows across the backyards — much of that latin radio and record music sounds aggressively romantic and trashy to me. Romantic not in the deeply emotional, joy-and-anguish style I associate with black music, but in the melodramatic, gross style of popular light opera, show tunes or tv variety shows. Very probably this latin music is the Spanish equivalent of white AM radio with which it appears to share an unsophisticated obviousness. But while it’s impossible to live on the lower east side (or any other urban area with a heavy Puerto Rican/Chieano concentration) and not be exposed to latin music, it would be stupid to think that exposure constitutes an education. If much of it has been commercially coarsened or trivialized for (white) popular acceptance, I suspect there remains a good solid core of music with a vitality only hinted at on the radio stations. Most of us — myself included — don’t know about it ’cause the music is on independent latin labels, often in whole separate stores, and, well, you know, it’s in Spanish (and the only words I understand are mira and corazon). But really it’s because we ignore latin music — latin culture — unless it’s slapped in our faces (as with the infrequent pop singles like Joe Cuba’s “Bang Bang” or “Viva Tirado” by El Chicano, generally treated as novelty records). The same way we ignored — and the majority continue to be ignorant of black music and culture; and at our own expense.

It wasn’t really until this last Santana album — their third — that I made a connection between what they were doing and what I was hearing on the street. Several cuts, notably “Guajira”' and, to a lesser extent, “Para Los Rumberos,” a Tito Puente number, seemed among the most unadulterated latin music Santana had done, not unlike the stuff I had always disdained in passing on Fourteenth Street. Santana’s sound was more refined, cleaner, almost subtle while remaining straight-forward — it was better than what. I had always heard - but, I suddenly realized, I had never really listened and maybe I was just beginning to grasp what there was to listen for. This is getting perhaps unnecessarily heavy. The point is, Santana opened up this exciting back-and-forth exchange - even if it existed for the moment only in my head/—'.between their latin/rock music apd the larger body of unexplored latin music out there.

Unfortunately, the exchange hasn’t gone very far — this isn’t a revelation of personal discovery — and I still find it difficult to pinpoint the specifically latin elements, with the obvious exception of the percussion (bongos, congas, timbales), in Santana’s overall sound. But it’s put the latino-rock groups in a different perspective. I now think of them as carrying latin music, sometimes under pretty cumbersome wraps, into the mainstream,, rather than merely spicing up the rock scene. God knows whether latin music wants to be dragged into mainstream culture it’s not exactly a comfortable, relaxed place to be; in fact it can be pretty degrading. But Santana’s waded out with considerable success and now we have the even larger Malo and maybe they've opened the way for groups with little or no rock inclinations.

Right now the two groups are uncomfortably similar, at least on these two albums. Luis Gasca, first trumpet with Malo, appears on one cut with Santana and both albums share the talents of Coke Escovedo on timbales and other percussion (Escovedo’s presence is acknowledged with deeply appreciative notes on both albums; he is reported to be a new member of Santana whose personnel has changed some since this last release). The leader of Malo is Jorge Santana, Carlos’ 18-year-old brother and another guitarist; at the time of the recording his group was eight to Santana’s seven (both groups have since expanded). Their main differences fall, at least this time, in Santana’s favor: Malo has horns and a resultant unwieldy bigband density and the shortest of their six cuts is 6:28. Even worse, while they’re coming on like heavies, they feel in the end rather lightweight.

Too often Malo’s numbers reach no deeper than a merely attractive surface, giving us fairly uninventive patterns and changes, many of them already familiar from Santana’s work - itself too often repetitive. Much of the interest of latino-rock lies in the frequent changes within the texture of one song, but too many times here these changes feel arbitrary and uninspired — instead of an unexpected brilliant surprise, we are led off into a dead end. Mostly, it just doesn’t hold together. In spite of all this, it’s not an unpleasant album with at least two satisfying cuts. “Suavecito” sounds like a fine old fifties calypso number: a relaxed, very easy beat on the timbales and congas, some bright guitar work and this nice unimportant vocal. It’s perfectly flimsy, down to the rather silly lyrics (“Whenever you’re in my arms/you’re thrilling me with all your charms”) but irresistible for that very reason; I’d love to hear it as a single without the unneeded weight of the framing horn business. (This cut is followed by its exact opposite, a very bad, selfconsciously “heavy spng called “Peace that sounds like second-rate Chambers Brothers, if you can imagine that.) The other saving grace is more substantial. It’s “Cafe,” more than seven minutes but all of a piece, with respectable group vocals in Spanish and the sort of overstated latin sound that drives right through any qualms about its unnecessary force. It works just fine.

Although it may share some of these same drawbacks - “Everybody’s Everything” has its Chambers Brothers moments and their English lyrics have never been the best — Santana is much more impressive on the whole. Even an uncharacteristically soft cut, “Everything’s Coming Our Way,” has an appeal and off-hand excellence (Gregg Rolie’s organ break); Rolie’s vocal is also uncharacteristic, sounding like recent Stevie Winwood stuff. “Guajira” is my favorite cut.. Frank sat here and translated it literally for me once and it turned out to be a dumb dance song — guajira being a kind of dance - with minimal lyrics. But that’s ok; like “Suavecito” it’s a perfectly unpretentious number and a fine showcase for a series of achingly sensitive horn and guitar solos. The structure of the song is nice and sparse, with a piano carrying the weight at the beginning and the constant pulse of clean latin percussion. Guest artist Rico Reyes has just the right edge to his lead vocals, neatly tying the song together.

“Para Los Rumberos” adds horns but uses them with more restraint than does Malo. The song, calling on several members of the group by name for short solo punches, is built on some pretty familiar patterns but is kept to a highly-concentrated 2:44 so there’s no time to be bored. “No One to Depend On” mixes English lyrics and their Spanish translations in probably the most accessible — and typically Santana - cut. It feels like we’ve been here before, but the deja vu isn’t at all unwelcome. I don’t know whether Santana are generally thought of as Great Musicians and I don’t really care. Even when they didn’t reach peaks of excitement on stage or record, I’ve found them interesting and enjoyable - something I could say of maybe only three or four other bands. Even when their sound is dense and intricate, as on “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” it doesn’t turn to mush as so many others’ do. They keep up a high-level interaction but everyone stands out with clarity and strength. And yet they’re not brilliant, just sharp. They just do it and I just like it. Ok.

“I don’t think you can really appreciate Santana unless you’re latin,” says Frank who is. But he and his brother George (Jorge) seem to agree that Santana is the group’s most “Americanized” album - pointing specifically to “Everybody’s Everything,” which is the most unsuccessful and soul-influenced cut. And here I thought it was their most latin work. Maybe my perspective’s all fucked up. Back to the streets. Hey Leroy! your mama -she calling you.

STREET CORNER SYMPHONY THE PERSUASIONS CAPITOL

The Persuasions ceased to be a pleasant, though strange, acappella curiosity with their last album, We Came to Play. That album took a more pop stance than their first, Acappella, which was more ah introduction to form than anything else: with its artificial cheers, and female chorus, the first album was more or less a scholarly dissertation on acappella as a form than it was a Persuasions album.

We. Came to Play confirmed that the Persuasions really were something pretty special. The acappella genre probably has at best a true audience of a couple thousand people, many of whose interest is more historical and curious than visceral. The Persuasions, on the basis of their first album, seemed to be nothing more than a representative sampler. They were faceless, even if their talent was obvious, because the record had to be approached as an artifact. Its stance constantly reminded you that you were . actually listening to a record. of acappella music.

They broke out of that with We Came to Play, one of the ways they did it, and it bears heavily here, was to use the same approach with more familiar material. Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang,” for instance, which is really better than the original: Cooke did it so light-heartedly that we never really had to come to terms with the fact that the guy actually was working on a chain gang; when the Persuasions do it, we’re forced to relate to it as a part of a real experience. There’s more desperation.

Street Corner Symphony finds the Persuasions working with material that is even more current. There is only one real failure (“Buffalo Soldiers,” but watch for it, it’s really bad — and placed at the beginning.) and the group’s sense of material approached perfection. I wouldn t have thought they could do any Dylan song, much less “The Man in Me.” Instead, they have taken the song and drawn from it all that Dylan infers. It is probably the best, and most exciting, evidence yet that Dylan is not just writing country and western songs.

With the Temptations medley (“Don’t Look Back,” “Runaway Child Running Wild,” and “Cloud Nine”, as well as “I Could Never Love Another (After Loving You)” which is the track before, but not part of the medley), they manage to strip Motown of everything but its roots, and it comes up gospel. There is a sense of the secularly spiritual about this record, perhaps best expressed in the treatment given these songs, and the closing medley, “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother”/“You’ve Got A Friend”. You could find any of these titles in a storefront hymnal and not blink. But the Persuasions manage to avoid any maudlin theology. They let the implications remain implications; the fact that they sound like a gospel grbup - which is partially due to the fact that they are an acappella group, partially due to the fact that they are black, partially due to the fact that they are so good — hints at it, but they don’t bludgeon with whatever religious implications are present. This isn’t Jesus rock, unless Jesus really did do the Aramaic funky chicken ... in which case, all rock is Jesus rock in which case it doesn’t matter.

But this isn’t gospel music either. “Christian’s Automobile” is approached with a humor that belies its title and the rest of the album just wouldn’t bear that analysis. I don’t know if the Persuasions are Christians, I don’t know if they think they’ve found a common strain of spirituality in certain contemporary, secular songs (they have), but what they’ve mostly done is make two albums in a row that are fun, the one better than the last.

Like Little Richard says .. .

Dave Marsh