Slice him how you like, Willie Colón is a phenomenon. He
came out of the South Bronx at the age of 17 with almost no track record at
all, and was soon the undeniable leader of the boogaloo generation of Salseros –
the ones of grown up musical.ly since the mid-1960s. And though you can’t grade
on this as if they were tomatoes, Willie is certainly one of the current
sciences most progressive and original minds, along with Eddie Palmieri,
Ricardo Ray and a handful of
others.
Not the
best instrumentalist, not even the best trombonist. Not the best showman, though his throwaway charm packs of sneaky punch. But beyond any reasonable
doubt, one of the most creative heads.
Because
Willie’s music is warm and bouncy, and plain old fun, people often don’t notice how intelligent
and serious a musician
the man really is. Serious enough, in fact that he quit at the top of last
summer because he told me. “I need to get knocked in the ass and told I’m
wrong. And I can’t see doing the same style over and over. You’ll become too
good at it - too stereotyped.”
This new album is the fruit and very fresh and juicy it is.
Not only in the obvious ways like varying the two bones sound, nor any
everything-out-of-the-window-and-start-all-over nonsense, but because it broadens
and deepens a personal style that was already strong.
If I had one reason For Willie’s success, it would be this:
win or lose, his judgments are musical judgments. As examples: he uses a
Brazilian friction drum called a quica on some of the news tracks. Now, even
Brazilian musicians too often can’t resist those cliché carnival intros. But
Willie just leaves it to do its job in the rhythm section, with no “hey fellas, looka me“emphasis.
That’s musicality, my friends.
Another example: Yomo Toro is a virtuoso of the 10 strength Cuatro,
out of Puerto Rican jibaro country music. Now, jibaro music is far from Salsa
as US country picking is from jazz. But Willie let Yomo just about take over
several of his recordings, with marvelous results. As for Héctor LaVoe, who was Willie’s lead singer
from the start, figuring out whether Willie made Hector or Hector mad Willie is chicken
and egg. And what goes for Yomo and Hector goes for Ruben Blades (moonlighting
from Ray Barretto‘s band) and for his side men too.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is full of Willie’s
remarkable gift for a kind of ingesting styles that he loves, in a way that let
you enjoy the original in the new creation. It’s a multi-layered pleasure.
And the man certainly gets around. “Toma“has Spanish from
Spain lines like I last heard in the Madrid Bull Ring. “Potpourri III” is a medley of bombas and plenas (
the bomba started as an Afro-Boricua drum dance and the plena as kind of a Boricua
Calypso). As Willie says, “it’s all old
– very tipico, very traditional“(Típico means like something “down home”). “Doña Toña,” Named for Willie’s grandmother, is full of the grace
of the old Caribbean ballroom dances. “Cuacuaracuacua,” on which Willie sings
lead, is a Bossa. “El Cazanguero”
– “is really a highbred, man!” - moves from a Brazilian style opening into a
New York Salsa feel, given an extra bounce
by adding a quica to the usual Cuban-based percussion, and then Into a Machito style Brass and Sax break. And Blades even
throws in Panamanian cholo Country singer inflections. Nice!
“I feel Campesino“bugs me, I hear occasional echoes of
Beatles accompaniments, but I can’t place them. “Guaracha“grooves on the
terrific Cuban guajira country sound of groups like trio Matamoros, with a jibaro Llanera
thrown in to keep things ecumenical.
“Que Bien Te Ves” is a kind of Puerto Rican in-joke and
Hector Lavoe’s loving parity
of Chuito, the daddy of jibaro singers.
And then
there’s “MC 2”.
A quite different kind of mixture, in which Willie told the musicians “play it how
they saw it, so you get a whole lot of different flavors in the tune. I didn’t
look for a dominant Rock feel, though after Eliot Randall threw in his guitar
solo on top it should more of a rock form.“
If you are new to salsa, please don’t get the idea that
Willie is a musical magpie making pretties out of other peoples glitter. His work
is his own, and very individual. But aside from the fact that SALSA has a very
strong tradition – like any music worth bothering with – the notion that artists
really sit around weaving from airy nothing a local habitation and a name, as an earlier William put it, is plain nonsense. To quote Robert
Shuman, no mean composer himself, we cannot originate everything within
ourselves.
John Storm Roberts
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