Buyer Beware: Not Entirely A Good Good Feeling

Lamenting a few unfortunate omissions from Fania's Latin-Soul anthology

Duke Ellington famously described the drum as a woman. It’s also a bridge to the wisdom of elders and ancestors. A basis for communication. A call to action that is also, in the same instant, a seduction.

There’s plenty of jargony scholarly writing about the drum. But really all it takes is one crisp, carefully measured slap from a conga drum – played by a master like Ray Barretto, who is memorably featured in the Questlove Summer of Soul documentary and (sadly) less prominent in the new It’s A Good, Good Feeling, a compilation of Latin-soul from the Fania catalog  -- to become awakened to its expressive range, its centrality to the language of music.

OK, maybe two slaps. Because with two, a pulse is established. There’s a groove connotation, an agreement not just about pace but also the implied feeling between the downbeats where infinite magic happens. In African and Afro-Cuban music, the conga can suggest the level of “swing,” the stretchiness of a groove; Barretto combined the timekeeping fundamentals of playing for dancers with a rare ability to convey incremental rhythmic nuances, the kind that jazz players thrive on.

On his own records and as a sideman in the late ‘50s/early ‘60s, Barretto helped to pioneer boogaloo and Latin soul -- that easygoing party-time mix of Afro-Cuban rhythm, jazz improvisation and  R&B hooks often sung in English. (One of his early hits was “El Watusi.”) He’s a major figure with a discography that includes essential world-culture-shaping releases like Acid from 1968.

Barretto is represented on this nicely packaged anthology; there are several singles in addition to the Acid track “A Deeper Shade of Soul,” which became a staple of freeform FM radio. But given his status as both pathfinder and popularizer in the hybrid Latin-meets-soul realm, Barretto deserves more and different real estate. We should, for example, get at least one extended jam featuring his top-shelf band during its late ‘60s run of blazing records. And would it have been too difficult for Craft Recordings (whose holdings include Prestige) to include a slice of the genre’s crucial pre history, maybe a track from Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis’ deeply swinging Bacalao from 1959 featuring Barretto and organist Shirley Scott? (That’s an underloved gem right there!)

Likewise there should be more from bandleader Larry Harlow, whose records brought a suave sophistication to the style – though, in fairness, his arrangement of the Hugh Masakela hit “Grazin’ in the Grass” is included here and it is positively sublime.

And, incredibly, the curators completely overlooked the LeBron Brothers, a Puerto Rican family band whose 1967 Psychedelic Goes Latin is among the most forward-looking – and deeply grooving -- releases in the genre. The LeBron Brothers initially signed with rival Cotique records, and became part of the Fania roster after Cotique was sold. While the LeBron Brothers might have not had national hits in 1967, their records were widely influential within the community of musicians. Their absence here is a glaring omission.

It’s a Good, Good Feeling carries a Buyer Beware subtitle – The Singles. That’s all you need to know. The mission here is not to celebrate the wide range of Latin soul-jazz, or to offer context about some of its points of origin and (many!) interesting offshoots. Instead, this set simply serves up the tracks Fania released as singles. Some of those reflect extraordinary creativity. And some are pandering schlock: I was moderately interested to hear crooner Ralfi Pagan do a cover of the David Gates and Bread hit “Make It With You” but much less enchanted by the presence of a second, even less imaginatively rendered Bread cover (“Baby I’m a Want You”).

If nothing else, this set offers a comprehensive appraisal of the spirited, upbeat work of Joe Bataan, the singer and bandleader whose breakthrough came with a memorable 1967 cover of the Impressions’ “Gypsy Woman.” There’s lots of Bataan here, and most of it has a zinging, Vegas showroom sheen – even ruminative slow-dance numbers like “What Good Is a Castle?” show how Bataan and others emulated the urgent phrasing of soul singers like Otis Redding to create captivating singles. Bataan is also responsible for the giddiest moment in the set, a rare call-letters-filled trip through the jazz-radio standard “Jumpin’ with Symphony Sid.”

This rarity, which is paired with a Bobby Valentin version of the same tune, suggests that there are other treasures waiting in the Fania vault. The singles are groovy and all, but if the curators of this set had a wider mandate, we might have gotten a broader glimpse of this fascinating moment in music history.

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