Harlow, Larry

Subterms

    Latest story

    113 Shares149 Views

    Larry Harlow, Influential Figure in Salsa, Dies at 82

    by

    He was born into a family of Jewish musicians, but he made his mark in Latin music, as a pianist, bandleader and producer.Born into a family of musicians, Larry Harlow was probably destined for a music career from the start. But it was his walks to class at the High School of Music and Art in Upper Manhattan that put him onto his lifelong passion.“When I got out of the subway, I would walk up this huge hill and hear this strange music coming from all the bodegas,” he told The Forward in 2006. “I thought, ‘What kind of music is this? It’s really nice.’”What he was hearing was early recordings by Tito Puente, the Pérez Prado mambo hit “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” and other energetic new Latin sounds. Soon Mr. Harlow, a Brooklyn-born Jew, was fusing those and other influences into a career as a major figure in salsa, as a pianist, bandleader, songwriter and producer.In the 1960s and ’70s, onstage and in the production studios of Fania Records, a label often described as the Motown of Latin music, he would help define salsa and spread it throughout the United States and around the world. He was affectionately known in the Latin music world as “El Judío Maravilloso” — the marvelous Jew.Mr. Harlow, who lived in Manhattan, died on Aug. 20 at a care center in the Bronx. He was 82. His son, Myles Harlow Kahn, said the cause was heart failure related to kidney disease.As a bandleader Mr. Harlow was most identified with salsa dura, or hard salsa — brass-heavy, bebop-influenced and danceable. He performed in small clubs and on big stages, including for an audience estimated variously at 30,000 to 50,000 at Yankee Stadium in 1973 as a member of the seminal group the Fania All-Stars, a show that proved to any doubters that there was a vast audience for Latin music.He was just as influential behind the scenes at Fania, the Latin label formed in 1964 in New York by Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci. Mr. Harlow was one of the first artists the label signed — his first Fania album, “Heavy Smoking,” came out soon after — but he also became part of the Fania brain trust, helping to sign numerous up-and-coming artists and producing some 250 records.Aurora Flores, a music journalist and composer who was working with him on his memoir, said Mr. Harlow had displayed an acerbic wit, an acid tongue and a willingness to defy conventions.Mr. Harlow was one of the first artists signed to Fania Records, often described as the Motown of Latin music. His first Fania album came out soon after.FaniaMr. Harlow was not just a Fania artist; he was also part of the Fania brain trust, helping to sign numerous up-and-coming artists and producing some 250 records.Fania“He’d always side with the underdog,” she said by email. “His first recording, ‘Heavy Smoking,’ featured his girlfriend Vicky singing lead and playing congas, unheard-of in the Cuban patriarchy, where women were not allowed to touch the drums. He produced the all-female orchestra Latin Fever and later, when other bandleaders refused to accept Rubén Blades into the scene because he was too white and middle class, it was Harlow who took him under his wing, letting him front his big band.”She added simply, “Larry Harlow broke the mold.”Lawrence Ira Kahn was born on March 20, 1939, in Brooklyn. His mother, Rose Sherman Kahn, was an opera singer, and his father, Nathan, was a bass player and bandleader who used the stage name Buddy Harlowe, from which Larry later derived his own stage name, dropping the E.He began studying piano when he was about 5, and he also absorbed musical influences by lingering backstage at the Manhattan nightclub the Latin Quarter, where his father led the house band. The club was owned by Lou Walters, whose daughter would also sometimes hang out there — Barbara Walters, the future television journalist.“When I was a kid, 10 or 11 years old, Barbara and I used to sit in the booth next to the spotlight,” Mr. Harlow told The New York Times in 2010, “and we saw every show that came in there, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Joe E. Brown, Sophie Tucker.”His first interest wasn’t Latin music. It was jazz. But, he said, he wasn’t welcomed in jazz circles. “So I went into the next closest thing,” he told The South Florida Sun-Sentinel in 2009, “where I could still improvise and stretch — Latin music — and I got really good at it.”But that took some time. Mr. Harlow had been introduced to Latin music as a boy, when his father would play the Catskills, where the Jewish vacationers loved to dance the cha-cha and mambo. But by the time he was walking to high school, the music he was hearing coming from those bodegas was growing more complex. While he was still a teenager, a bandleader named Hugo Dickens invited him to play piano in his Latin band, but the first time Mr. Harlow took a solo, Mr. Dickens gave him a blunt review: He was terrible.So Mr. Harlow committed to getting better, buying up records and studying what the musicians on them were doing. While in high school he traveled to Cuba on Christmas break, and after graduating he returned there to immerse himself in Afro-Cuban music and culture, in the process expanding the Nuyorican Spanish he had picked up on the streets of New York.Mr. Harlow at the piano in an undated photo. He was introduced to Latin music as a boy when his bandleader father played the Catskills, and he became immersed in it as a teenager during a trip to Cuba.Fania Records“He was there with his reel-to-reel tape recorder taking it all in when the bombs started falling,” his son said in a phone interview — the bombs of the Cuban revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power at the beginning of 1959. That drove Mr. Harlow back to New York, but the music stayed with him.“There was no turning back,” he told The Miami New Times in 2000. “I was salsafied.”But the style that would become known as salsa was still evolving at that point. The music represented a mix of Afro-Cuban, Spanish and other influences, tempered with American jazz and refined by Cuban, Puerto Rican and other musicians living in New York. Mr. Harlow was an influential part of that swirl, first as a sideman in other people’s orchestras and then as the leader of his own groups.“Nobody was using a trumpet-and-trombone sound,” he told Latin Beat magazine in 2006, describing what he brought to the salsa mix. “It was my dream to use these instruments because then you could have a piano bass line, and then have the horns play counterpoints. So we had three to four layers of different things going on at the same time.”In addition to the many records he made and produced at Fania, Mr. Harlow was instrumental in pushing Mr. Masucci, who died in 1997, and Mr. Pacheco, who died in February, to back a documentary directed by Leon Gast called “Our Latin Thing” (1971), which chronicled a performance by the Fania All-Stars at the Midtown Manhattan nightclub Cheetah. (Mr. Gast died in March.)The film became a word-of-mouth hit among fans of Latin music and boosted the profiles of everyone involved.“We used to sell 25,000 copies of an album, and suddenly we’re now selling 100,000 copies individually, as bandleaders, and a million or more as the All-Stars,” Mr. Harlow told The New York Times in 2011, when a 40th-anniversary DVD of the film was released. “We were just playing around the ghetto, and all of a sudden we’re playing in soccer stadiums all over the world.”Mr. Harlow conducting a rehearsal of his suite “La Raza Latina” in 2010 for a Lincoln Center performance that included the singer Rubén Blades.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesOther career highlights included “Hommy: A Latin Opera,” which Mr. Harlow, inspired by the Who’s “Tommy,” created and presented in a concert version at Carnegie Hall in 1973. In 1977 he branched out from the snappy dance numbers he was known for to record “La Raza Latina,” an ambitious suite.He later led an all-star group he called the Latin Legends.Mr. Harlow earned a bachelor’s degree in music at Brooklyn College in 1964 and later received a master’s degree in music from the New School. His marriages to Andrea Gindlin, Rita Uslan, Agnes Bou and Wendy Caplin ended in divorce. In addition to his son, from his first marriage, he is survived by his wife, Maria del Carmen; a daughter, Haiby Rengifo; a brother, Andy Harlow Kahn; and three grandchildren.Late in his career Mr. Harlow would sometimes turn up on the records or in the shows of younger musicians and bands, including the alternative rock act Mars Volta. He found such homages gratifying.“When someone comes up to me and says, ‘Thanks for the music, thanks for the memories,’” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1999, when the Latin Legends played that city, “that’s worth a million bucks to me.” More

    More stories

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in Music

      Larry Harlow, a Salsa Revolutionary

      by

      The musician, who died on Friday, was a true originator of the genre. An outsider, he lived a Latin music life by immersing himself in Afro-Caribbean culture.In many ways, Larry Harlow — one of the central figures of salsa and its defining label, Fania Records — was a master at mixing the diverse musical connections between New York and the Caribbean. In a career that spanned six decades, he stitched together overlapping genres like rock, jazz and R&B and various Cuban genres like rumba, son and guaracha through intimate, soulful knowledge of both musical traditions.Harlow grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and studied classical piano. His father, Buddy Kahn, was a Jewish mambo musician who led the house band at New York’s Latin Quarter club. The musician and scholar Benjamin Lapidus writes in his new book that Jews were sponsoring Latin dances with live bands as early as the 1930s in New York City. Harlow came out of a tradition of mamboniks, Jews who danced mambo at spaces like Midtown’s Palladium, various spots in Brooklyn and the Catskills hotel circuit. Jewish musicians like Marty Sheller often wrote arrangements, and radio D.J.s like “Symphony” Sid Torin and Dick “Ricardo” Sugar promoted the music. Immortal Latin band leaders like Tito Puente regularly played the Catskills, a space where young musicians like Alfredo “Chocolate” Armenteros, who became a Harlow collaborator, cut their teeth.Yet Harlow, who died on Friday at 82, wanted to go beyond the Europeanized mambo performance styles heard in the Catskills and be true to the music’s African roots. He traveled to pre-Castro Cuba in the 1950s and returned determined to combine what he learned with what was happening in New York, creating a modern synthesis of the traditional and the avant-garde. Seeking acceptance among core post-mambo musicians, he even went so far as to become initiated to the Afro-Caribbean religion of Santería to stake his claim to authenticity and earn respect from the music community.“Here was a Jewish guy hanging out with all these Cubans and Afro-Caribbeans,” he told me in a 2004 interview. “I figured when in Rome, do like the Romans do.”Harlow never tried to pretend he was not who he was. Even after achieving insider status in the Santería community, he was often photographed wearing a Star of David around his neck. He was affectionately known by Spanish-speaking audiences as El Judío Maravilloso (the Marvelous Jew), a sobriquet given to him because of his devotion to the music of the blind Afro-Cuban bandleader and mambo progenitor Arsenio Rodríguez, known as El Ciego Maravilloso (the Marvelous Blind Man). When he chose, in the early 1980s, to release an album called “Yo Soy Latino” (“I Am Latino”), the lead vocalist who delivered the lyrics was the much-loved Puerto Rican singer Tito Allen.Beyond immersing himself in Afro-Carribean spirituality, Harlow was directly involved in the evolution of salsa music, collaborating with Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci, the founders of Fania. According to Alex Masucci, Jerry’s surviving brother, Harlow was the first artist contracted to record for Fania. His first few albums, “Bajándote: Gettin’ Off,” “El Exigente” and “Me and My Monkey,” which includes a version of the Beatles song “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” traded on the bilingual, R&B-influenced bugalú sound, which united Black and Latino listeners.Harlow’s move away from búgalu to a jazz-influenced update on Rodríguez’s more Africanized conjunto sound — which added more trumpets and percussion like conga and cowbell — was crucial for salsa’s gestation. His blend of jazz, mambo and conjunto would become one of the primary influences on the emerging idea of salsa. While Eddie Palmieri and Willie Colón’s innovative use of trombone gave the horn sections a more aggressive, urban sound, Harlow and Pacheco’s influence was also decisive. Harlow’s early ’70s releases, “A Tribute to Arsenio Rodríguez,” “Abran Paso” and “Salsa,” crystallized his new aesthetic. He pioneered recording with both trumpets and trombone. He gave the Cuban charanga sound, which featured flutes and violins, new life. And he incorporated the batá drum, used in religious ceremonies, into his decidedly secular project.Harlow exulted in the spirit of the late 1960s — Rubén Blades told me he was the “Frank Zappa of salsa” — and was a voracious collaborator. His bilingual Beatles cover and the album artwork for “Electric Harlow” flaunted psychedelic style. He played piano for Steven Stills and Janis Ian, and had a rock-jazz project with the Blood, Sweat & Tears keyboardist Jerry Weiss. In 1972, after Miranda left his band temporarily, he painstakingly adapted the Who’s “Tommy” as the salsa opera “Hommy,” transferring the original British characters to New York’s Latino barrios.Although salsa’s burst in popularity during the mid- to late 1970s was organic, feeding off the hip young Latino audiences from the Bronx and Uptown, Harlow helped it blow up by taking a major producing role in Leon Gast’s vérité concert film “Our Latin Thing.” The film was a breakout party for the Fania All-Stars, a supergroup featuring Ray Barretto, Colón, Cheo Feliciano, Pacheco and many others, with Harlow on piano. Last week Masucci told me that Harlow was the connection to both Gast’s involvement and the appearance of authentic Santería devotees that appear late in the film. In 1976, he recorded a celebratory musical history, “La Raza Latina Suite,” with Blades singing in English.Though Harlow wasn’t born into the traditions that birthed salsa, throughout his career he was widely accepted as a pillar of the music. He was one in a long line of Jewish musicians who have played a key role in Afro-Caribbean music, going all the way back to Augusto Coén, a Jewish Afro-Puerto Rican who led a Latin big band in 1934 that was a predecessor to the mambo kings Puente, Machito and Tito Rodríguez. (The exchange went both ways: Even the Queen of Salsa, Celia Cruz, recorded the Jewish folk song “Hava Nagila” with her band La Sonora Matancera.)For Harlow, blending cultures and genres was simply second nature. In 2005, he contributed a wide-open keyboard solo to “L’Via L’Viaquez,” on the Texas psychedelic punk band the Mars Volta’s album “Frances the Mute” — a choice that shouldn’t be considered out of the ordinary. Several musicologists and writers have recognized the influence of Cuban bass patterns, called tumbaos, as well as cha cha cha patterns, on early rock hits like “Twist and Shout,” and “Louie Louie.” To Harlow, the connection between rock and Latin, funk and salsa was natural, a product of the era when he came of age.“It was revolution time,” he once told me. “People were writing songs about protest, and me and Eddie and Barretto were changing the harmonic concept of Latin music. I was the one who psychedelicized them a little bit.” More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      15 Essentials From Johnny Pacheco and Fania Records, the ‘Motown of Salsa’

      by

      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPlaylist15 Essentials From Johnny Pacheco and Fania Records, the ‘Motown of Salsa’He packaged New York attitude and a new spin on Afro-Cuban beats, and changed Latin music forever. The flutist, composer, arranger and bandleader died this week at 85.Johnny Pecheco co-founded Fania Records, which became home to salsa’s greatest talents.Credit…Chad Batka for The New York TimesFeb. 17, 2021In many crucial ways, Johnny Pacheco’s life told a typical New York Latino story: He was a Dominican immigrant playing Cuban music for a mostly Puerto Rican audience. Like many self-styled New York entrepreneurs, he knew he had to hit the pavement with his product and get to know his customers face-to-face, driving around Harlem and the Bronx selling records out of the trunk of an old Mercedes-Benz.Pacheco had been working several variations of the son genre at the Bronx nightclub Triton’s, making a name for himself, according to the scholar Juan Flores’s book “Salsa Rising,” by adding a hop and flashing a hankie while dancing onstage to a hot new style called pachanga. Dreaming of starting his own record company (and in the midst of ending a marriage), he met Jerry Masucci, an Italian-American divorce attorney with a love for the Cuban sound. The two hit it off so well they started a new record label they called Fania, which became home to salsa’s greatest talents.Pacheco and Masucci’s experiment blew up beyond their wildest dreams. By capitalizing on the streamlining term “salsa,” which had appeared years before in Cuba and Venezuela, Fania Records conflated the Afro-Latin fad bugalú (think: “I Like It Like That”) with the remnants of Cuban sounds blunted by the radio silence of the post-Revolution embargo to create an international dance mania. Making stars out of Puerto Ricans like Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe, the Cuban diva Celia Cruz, a Brooklyn Jew named Larry Harlow, and a Panamanian troubadour named Rubén Blades, Fania Records spread the new Latin groove from Yankee Stadium to Kinshasa, Zaire.Here are 15 examples of how Pacheco, who died this week at 85, and his Fania cohort made music history.Johnny Pacheco, ‘El Güiro de Macorina’ (1961)From his second album, “Johnny Pacheco y su Charanga,” this is a riveting distillation of Pacheco’s early pachanga sound, featuring the full effect of a Cuban charanga-style orchestra, heavy on the flutes and violins. The relentless percussion embellishes lyrics that tell the story of a woman who scrapes the percussive güiro instrument to the narrator’s satisfaction. If you can picture Pacheco quick stepping on the downbeat, you’re witnessing the creation of New York-style salsa dancing.Johnny Pacheco featuring Pete ‘El Conde’ Rodríguez, ‘La Esencia del Guaguancó’ (1970)Pacheco’s collaboration with the underrecognized vocalist Pete “El Conde” Rodríguez (not to be mistaken for bugalú’s Pete Rodríguez) captures a more polished stage of his career. Propelled by the guaguancó rhythm that would become salsa’s go-to template, Rodríguez’s edgy, velvety rasp recalls Afro-Puerto Rican peers like Ismael Rivera and Cheo Feliciano. Pacheco’s arrangements, creating an easy flow between piano and horns, were rapidly becoming the salsa sound.Fania All-Stars, ‘Live at the Cheetah’ (1971)Pacheco and Masucci’s coordination of the Fania All-Stars, an unimaginably potent group of the emerging stars of the genre, was perhaps the most single-handedly important factor in salsa’s rise. This recording, made at the Cheetah Club, which once hosted bugalú as well as the first production of “Hair” before its Broadway run, features lengthy jams like “Anacaona,” a tribute to a rebellious female Taíno leader, with powerful vocals by Cheo Feliciano, backed by Willie Colón, Larry Harlow and Ray Barretto, among many others.Johnny Pacheco with Celia Cruz, ‘Químbara’ (1974)Celia Cruz was already a star with Sonora Matancera when she left Cuba in 1960, replacing the legendary La Lupe as Tito Puente’s lead singer in 1966. Her collaboration with Pacheco on “Celia and Johnny” was key to propelling her to recognition as the Queen of Salsa. Pacheco’s precision pacing and evolving wall of sound made this guaguancó a dizzying, onomatopoetic utterance of percussive instruments.Héctor Lavoe, ‘Mi Gente’ (1975)Probably salsa’s most beloved and talented vocalist, Héctor Lavoe was in many ways emblematic of the New York Puerto Rican experience. His wistful, nasal vocal style evoked that of a country boy simultaneously losing himself in and partying the hell out of the big city. Written by Pacheco, the emotional power of “Mi Gente” derived from its ability to bring New York’s diverse Latino community together to celebrate a dynamic self-awareness in the middle of a grinding fiscal crisis. The studio version is great, but the “Live at Yankee Stadium” version is the classic.Willie Colón, ‘El Malo’ (1967)Born and raised in Mott Haven’s gritty tenements in the Bronx, Willie Colón recorded his first album at age 17, inspired by a sour, mocking tone that Barry Rogers gave his trombone in his collaborations with Mon Rivera and Eddie Palmieri. Although there’s lots of bugalú here, this is stripped-down proto-salsa. Colón’s role in inventing salsa’s attitude through the “Malo” persona is evident here, the songs insisting on Spanish-speaking, Latin-dancing authenticity filtered through a gangster-style, street-fighting sense of heart.‘Our Latin Thing/Nuestra Cosa Latina’ (1972)This low-budget ’70s film directed by Leon Gast has the grainy subterranean feel that permeated later movies like Charlie Ahearn’s hip-hop origin story “Wild Style” and Glenn O’Brien’s reconstructed post-punk fever dream “Downtown 81.” The best visual record of Fania All-Stars rehearsals, club gigs, impromptu bembés and street festival performances, it also stars the Africanist-hippie-fusion wardrobe of salsa dancers of the time. Just a few minutes in, on “Quítate Tu,” you can see how Pacheco effortlessly commands the multitudinous chorus of star singers while directing horns and percussion.Ismael Rivera, ‘Las Caras Lindas’ (1979)Known as “El Sonero Mayor” (The Greatest Singer) in Puerto Rico, Ismael “Maelo” Rivera’s sound was formed through his collaborations with his childhood friend, the percussionist Rafael Cortijo. Recontextualizing the rustic bomba and plena genres by adding more instruments, the Rivera-Cortijo sound flowed easily into New York-style salsa. “Las Caras Lindas” comes from Rivera’s solo period with Fania — it’s written by the renowned songwriter Tite Curet Alonso and celebrates the beauty of Afro-Puerto Ricans.Ismael Miranda con Orchestra Harlow, ‘Abran Paso’ (1971)Harlow was a singular figure in the salsa scene — he was born and raised in Brooklyn, the son of a mambo musician who couldn’t get the Cuban sound out of his head. A whiplash pianist, Harlow named himself “El Judío Maravilloso” (The Marvelous Jew) after his hero Arsenio Rodríguez, known as “El Ciego Maravilloso.” “Abran Paso,” sung by his favorite vocalist, Ismael Miranda, is at once an invocation of Santería mysticism and a metaphor for an emerging Latino community.Héctor Lavoe, Willie Colón and Yomo Toro, ‘Asalto Navideño’ (1970)This was a Christmas album with a twist — rather than trot out the Fania All-Stars to do salsa versions of “Silent Night” and “Jingle Bells,” Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe decided to record classic Puerto Rican aguinaldos with a kind of Bad Santa New York feel. This album is inescapable around the holidays if you have extended Puerto Rican family, balancing reverence for tradition with an incredible sense of swing. A highlight is the first appearance of Yomo Toro, sometimes known as the Jimi Hendrix of cuatro, a rustic 10-string lute that explodes from the vinyl.Ray Barretto, ‘Indestructible’ (1973)The emotional percussive core of the Fania All-Stars, Ray Barretto was a remarkably versatile conga player whose career ran the gamut from bugalú to salsa, Latin jazz, and even session work for the Rolling Stones. His mid-period excellence is crystallized in “Indestructible,” which rode unparalleled waves of frenetic dance energy. The title track describes a promise salseros make to themselves to keep getting up no matter how many times they get knocked down.Rubén Blades and Willie Colón, ‘Siembra’ (1978)For many years the best-selling salsa album of all time, “Siembra” was the culmination of the Blades-Colón partnership. The album is an attempt to fuse a cinematic concept of New York Latino life with the idea of a classic rock concept album, and the performances are singular and immortal. As a songwriting team, the two had no competition; Blades was at the top of his vocal game, and Colón’s arrangements were never more brilliant.Tommy Olivencia and Chamaco Ramírez, ‘Planté Bandera’ (1975)Another anthemic crowd pleaser, “Plante Bandera” alludes to the growing sense of nationalism and pride that tied together salsa fans, as well as a growing awareness of Latino presence in the United States and the projection of the salsa genre itself. Chamaco Ramírez’s sometimes-overlooked plaintive style hits all the right notes, and the band’s percussive momentum, punctuated by a tenacious horn section, pushes the lyrics to their maximum effect.Rubén Blades, ‘Bohemio y Poeta’ (1979)The multitalented poet/troubadour/Hollywood actor shines here on his groundbreaking solo album, combining lyrical elements of Cuban nueva trova with lush Colón orchestral salsa arrangements. With songs like “Pablo Pueblo,” he defined the working-class Latino subject, disillusioned with urban misery after being promised the American dream. On “Paula C” he remembers a lost love with the skill of a Magic Realism boom novelist.Ricardo Ray and Bobby Cruz, ‘Sonido Bestial’ (1971)Ray and Cruz were one of salsa’s most successful internationalizing forces, spreading the promise of its sound to countries like Colombia, in particular. Evolving from their bugalú roots into a mainstream salsa machine, Ray and Cruz have a following of rabid devotees. This particular track features a break based on a Chopin étude, which is always a live crowd-pleaser.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More