FEATURE
Born Again
By the force of its living legends and revamped recordings, Classic Salsa is making a salacious comeback.
By Victor Cruz-Logo
Special thanks: Mary Kent

By the force of its living legends and revamped recordings, Classic Salsa is making a salacious comeback.

Salsa fans attending a Larry Harlow performance may be subjected to a familiar rant from the Jewish pianist from New York. At recent gigs, after exciting listeners with classic salsa compositions like La Cartera, and just before the inevitable encore, Harlow, like Moses descending from the mount, will routinely pause to address the crowd and bring them the “news.”

The Fania Records label, he says, has been sold and the new owners have big plans for the classic salsa recordings from the 1960s and 1970s. He elaborates:“And a warehouse has been discovered in upstate New York with thousands of previously unreleased recordings.” Then Harlow, known as El Judío Maravilloso (The Marvelous Jew), cues his band and suddenly, sonically, it’s 1975 all over again.

More and more often these days this sort of classic salsa déjà vu has been a recurring theme in Latin culture. Harlow and former salsa giant, now Latin jazz legend Eddie Palmieri, have stepped up (pun intended) to fi ll the shoes of departed greats Tito Puente and Celia Cruz, while routinely returning to their 1970s hits to stir their audiences. And even as commercial radio tends to ignore the greater part of that classic phase of Latin music that saw its heyday in the 1970s, top internationally recognized salsa DJs continue to play it because their fans around the world prefer it to today’s socalled salsa romántica.

As if that weren’t the only feisty resurgence of the classic sound, three different film production teams are presently in a horse race to bring to theaters the first biopic of iconic salsa legend Héctor Lavoe.

One other aspect of the old sound has survived, too: the hype and the chisme that surrounds it. For example, according to spokesperson Leda Ceccarelli of Protel Records, the company that now owns the Fania Records catalog, nowarehouse with unreleased material exists, though it makes for a good story.
And trying to get a straight answer from any of the film producers associated with the upcoming Lavoe films, JLO included, is about as easy as it was for the notoriously addicted Lavoe to quit his heroin habit.

There’s no middleman to pianist Larry Harlow. Despite fi ve bands he routinely tours or performs with, lingering projects, many interview requests and a global travel itinerary that would likely exhaust a younger man, if you call Harlow, more likely than not, he’ll actually pick up the phone. In our case, he invited us to his home.

His Upper West Side rent-controlled apartment overfl ows with his wife’s collection of art and antique instruments. Harlow’s trademark electric piano lies slyly hidden in a corner. “I just lift the lid and I’m ready to play,” he says. On the coffee table you’ll fi nd the latest salsa books, some signed by the authors with effusive dedications to Harlow.

Harlow remains a brimming, jiggling, mass of New York exuberance. He perambulates from the couch to his living room computer screen, fi ddles with his blackberry, takes a phone call, sends an e-mail, arranges an errand with his wife, then drifts back to attend the interview.

Almost bald, he wears loose-fi tting casual clothes: navy slacks, sneakers, a Bob Marley T-shirt stretched by an ample paunch. Like the music he traffi cs in, Harlow simply doesn’t know he’s aged. His habits are more those of an artsy, somewhat caffeinated, 20-something metrosexual than any senior citizen. In deed he’s as engaged and alive today as the salsa de ayer.

Now 66, he is a living legend of classic salsa, a master of the sound and more than that, a perennial hustler. For the Fania label alone, Harlow produced hundreds of albums. His own continually growing discography is expansive and features some of salsa’s historic milestones like Hommy, the fi rst and only salsa opera.

Where many have failed, Harlow has triumphed. He had a knack for fi nding the right arrangements to showcase his musicians, and his scrappy streetwise Jewish grit served him well in a business where artists were chronically conned. “What separates me from a lot of the Latins is I have a Jewish head for business. … my band was the only one who worked for Fania who got union scale,” he boasts.

Talk to many a surviving classic salsa musician about what it was like to work for Fania during the 1970s and you’ll likely hear a mixture of nostalgia and bitterness. Sure, those artists were the rock stars of the Latin scene, but they were also underpaid compared to the artists of today. And Fania musicians often felt ripped off by record label head Jerry Masucci who died in 1997. Harlow, like Rubén Blades and pianist Eddie Palmieri, often haggled with Masucci about money owed. Blades ultimately took Fania to court. Harlow doesn’t mince words: “Masucci was a crook,” he says outright, a sentiment echoed by other salsa musicians of the period.

During Fania’s glory days Harlow served as the company’s top producer cranking out album after album for various artists and getting paid a flat $300 per effort. “I was producing a record a week for fi ve years mostly for Fania … everyone thought I owned a piece of the record company because I was always there,” he remembers.

Much has changed in the industry. “Today I’ll get 20 to 30 grand for producing an album plus a percentage on the profi ts,” he says. “I used to work every day in the 70s, but now I’m working less, but living more comfortably.” And specifically, in his case—and fellow pianist Eddie Palmieri’s—there has been a resurgence of interest in the classic salsa sound. The range of jobs for Harlow has expanded. Aside from recording with cutting edge rock outfi t The Mars Volta, and gigging in New York, LA, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and Mexico, Harlow was a guest at a Harvard conference on the infl uence of Jewish musicians on Latin music.

“Things started to turn after Celia [Cruz] and Tito [Puente] died,” he remembers. “Eddie [Palmieri] had just made an album with Tito, then Tito croaked. All of a sudden Eddie was playing all of Tito’s gigs.” Harlow attributes the renewed interest to the changing face of the Latin community. “A lot of Hispanics
are now professors or university students who belong to fraternities … and others are mayors of all of these cities … and when they want Latin music for a function, who are they going to call? Larry Harlow! It’s Ghostbusters!” he yells.

What’s left for this aging icon of a sound that peaked over three decades ago? “I’ll probably die on stage, but fi rst I’d like to pass the music down and keep the music going because it truly is an art form.”

After a virtual two-decade dormancy, thousands of Fania recordings from the 1960s and 1970s are getting a makeover. This past summer, in a multimillion-dollar deal, the Fania Records catalog was sold to Emusica, a company with ties to VII (International), Brit entrepreneur Richard Branson’s follow-up to Virgin Records. The future of salsa’s most distinguished recordings now lies in the hands of Emusica’s Protel Records, formerly known for its Miami Calle Ocho festival compilation CDs among other tropical and Tex Mex releases.

Today the new offices of Fania in Miami are humming with activity, says Protel spokesperson Ceccarelli. Experts in the fi eld of Latin music are being contacted, updated liner notes are being edited, master recordings are being reviewed for previously unreleased content and decisions are being made as to what Fania offerings will be re-introduced in a repackaged format first.

In total, the catalog includes more than 1,000 albums, 3,000 compositions and about 13,000 master tracks. The numbers are impressive, but the names behind the numbers are more so: Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, Charlie and Eddie Palmieri, Willie Colón, Héctor Lavoe, Rubén Blades, Larry Harlow, Bobby Valentín, Joe Cuba, Ray Barretto, to name a few.

The Protel plan for Fania is ambitious. “We want to do something on a par with what the Blue Note label did with jazz,” says Ceccarelli. With its classic jazz catalog, the Blue Note record label is known as a world leader in cover design, editorial content and sound quality. According to Ceccarelli, the fi rst Fania reissued and repackaged CDs should be available this spring.

This is all great news for living artists like Harlow and Palmieri whose past work will at last get the serious treatment that was hard to get when salsa was young and brash and record execs were cutting corners. And it’s good news for DJs like Henry Knowles and the international salsa dancers he typically spins discs and records for.

Knowles, who has been on the salsa scene for decades, is well known at salsa congresses. At these events–which occur in Paris, Japan, LA, Miami, New York and even Sweden—enthusiasts from
around the planet congregate to eat, drink, talk and dance to this older salsa not often heard on commercial radio. “There’s nothing like that old sound,” says Knowles.

Maria Lozano who handles publishing rights for the new Fania has also been busy. She has been fi elding phone calls and helping to negotiate deals for fi lm producers who want to use Fania music in upcoming films. To date she says she’s been working with JLO’s Nuyorican Productions which is presently creating a movie about the life of the iconic salsa singer Héctor Lavoe.

Lavoe, who was discovered by Fania co-founder Johnny Pacheco, recorded extensively with Willie Colón before embarking on a solo career. Born Hector Juan Pérez in 1946 in Ponce, Puerto Rico, he came to New York as a teenager in search of fame as a salsa singer. During his prime in the 1970s, he basked in the enfolding glare of the spotlight, and the gaze of his fans and admirers, but he’d also get lost in a labyrinth fi lled with black holes. When heroin addiction wasn’t dogging him, personal tragedy was. Despite his notorious tardiness for gigs, his fans never tired of wanting more of him and his fellow musicians found him to be as exasperating as he was irresistible.

JLO’s publicist did not return calls requesting an interview about the fi lm, which is to feature Marc Anthony in the role of Lavoe. Meanwhile, in South Florida, telenovela producer Harold Rosado of Amores Descarados fame, is rushing to get his own Lavoe biopic underway. He, too, has been working on a rights deal with Lozano.

And then there’s Puerto Rican filmmaker Tony Felton, the director of such low-budget island classics as Correa Cotto and El Rebelde Solitario. After disappearing from the film scene for decades, he resurfaced in 1997 with plans to make a Lavoe film. “Héctor told me before he died he wanted me to make the film,” says the mercurial director by phone from Puerto Rico.

Like any spicy salsa party, there has been bickering and sniping around the edges of the celebration. Rosado and Felton claim they have exclusive rights to the music, but Lozano disagrees, saying such rights are beyond the budget of most fi lmmakers. Felton claims JLO was duped into buying a stolen script. Meanwhile Rosado accuses Felton of being a fraud. JLO, perhaps wisely, is not talking.

La salsa de ayer continues to make a lot of noise today. H

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