Customer Reviews

Nu Yorica Culture Clash in NYC: Experiments

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is one of the best compilations of any kind that I've found. I found it at my library about a year ago and bought it shortly after hearing it. It has since become one of my favorite albums...and I have a freakin TON of great albums.
While listening to this album you feel like your taking a funky tropical urban ride through jamland. From the blaring horns to the funky slap bass lines and afro beats, Nu Yorica! is so musically expressive that you can almost SEE the Cuban or Puerto Rican street festivals and Harlem jazz lounges where the movement really took off.
All I have to say is that my cool music factor has been elevated to a new level because of this album. Anyone who's opinion I respect digs this when I play it for them. Seriously, a must have. GET IT!!!

This is one of the few compilations to have attained classic status. SoulJazz followed a clear concept: the impact of environment and identity in the creation of a community of musicians, specifically those musicians living in East Harlem who were of Cuban and/or Puerto Rican heritage OR African-American but enamoured of Latin music during the 1970s. Ocho is an example of the latter: an all-black group from "across the river" which combined the expected soul and funk influences with hard Latin genres. Bobby Vince Paunetto, a vibist of Italian/Spanish heritage, fused Cal Tjader with breakbeats and an operaticexploitation sensibility on "Little Rico's Theme". The Puerto Riqueno Ricardo Marrero's "Babalonia" is not only a prime breakbeat cut, it's also a masterpiece of tension and release set up by the keyboard and horn arrangements.

The NuYorican sound had been developing since at least Machito's heyday in the late 1940s and 50s, but the utopian communalism and fearless artistic leaps of the era (plus the expanded tone colors brought by electrification and radical engineering) catapulted the aesthetic into something new and startling, but the window for this music was narrow, and by the early 1980s such bold blendings of different genres would have much less commercial viability.