Okay, so it’s been a while since I featured some crunchy Funk vinyl in my Records at Random Fridays. And with the way I’ve been feeling towards my records lately it might be a while until I do again. But that doesn’t mean I’ve been neglecting my need to get funky. It’s just that I’ve been doing so via more up-to-date sources of late.
Last week I dedicated a chunk of my Urban Alternatives podcast to contemporary Funk, spinning tracks from previous Blogarhythms featurees Baby Charles, Kylie Auldist and a few others I’ve yet to shed light on. One such tune by an as-yet unfeatured band was “La Valla,” from San Sebastian 152, the new album by Bronx River Parkway, a funky Latin Soul orchestra that lists 19 names under “personnel” on their website. A handful of those names, notably El Michaels and Quincy Bright, are mainstays of numerous projects released by the Williamsburg, Brooklyn-based Truth & Soul Records label, the imprint responsible for releasing the band’s music.
San Sebastian 152, is the product of an eight day session in San Juan, Puerto Rico that saw the members of the New York-based Bronx River Parkway jamming with a team of veteran Puerto Rican musicians. The album merges vintage sounding Afro-Latin-flavored Soul/Funk/Jazz fusion with more traditional Latin dance rhythms and Latin-Jazz orchestra style numbers. And it’s so authentic to the heyday of such orchestras, and the artists and bandleaders who emerged from them, that my first listen brought back memories of the first time I brought a Fania label Ray Barretto 45RPM single home from a local flea-market and put it on my turntable.
Speaking of the “King of the Hard Hands,” the album boasts a tune titled “Song for Ray,” a break-fueled mid-tempo locomotive of a groove bolstered by a repetitive piano figure and regal brass blasts which reminded me as much of Jimmy Castor’s “Just Begun” as it did the legendary conguero it’s named for. As you might expect it’s other similar joints which favor the harder, more soulful side of the Latin spectrum, putting the spotlight on heavy beats and bass grooves, that are my favorites. “La Valla,” with it’s rolling breakbeat, thick glaze of bass, Stax-esque horn section and righteous chanting, the uptempo, cowbell-accented jam “Agua Con Sal,” “El Resbalon,” a stripped down stop/start affair that sounds like James Brown if he wrote about “Funky Plátanos” instead of popcorn, and the dancefloor destined “Donde,” with its Motown-esque piano and snare rolls, being among the highlights.
Even when the band gets ballady, like on the ’60s porn-soundtrack-sounding “Nora Se Va” and the soul-drenched, doo-wop influenced Lowrider-R&B-style number “Mi Corazon,” they sound authentically old-school. With it’s plodding tempo, haunting piano roll, ominously tolling vibes, sizzling cymbals, slow-boiling hand-drums and lonely horns, “Mi Corazon” is a whole other breed of song, a melancholy Latin-Soul ballad. It’s also one of the instances where vocals help turn an interesting musical idea into an an actual song. And for that it’s one of the standout cuts on the LP.
Bronx River Parkway “Mi Corazon”
If you’re already familiar with, or better yet a fan of, the Truth & Soul label’s catalog (who’s not a fan of the El Michaels Affair?) you should’ve realized you want this album four paragraphs ago. Fans of the renaissance Soul of T&S’s kin at Daptone Records (T&S being founded by alumni of the Soul Fire label which in turn was founded by Philippe Lehman, Daptone emprisario Gabriel Roth’s partner in the now defunct Desco Records) should check for it just on general principal. And anybody who digs on the soulful side of Fania Records’ catalog, the Soul-centric output of cats like Mongo Santamaria and the vintage sounds of Southern Soul, Midwest Funk and Latin Funk & Rock should be sweating Bronx River Parkway harder than out-of-town tourists who took the wrong exit and wound up in the actual Bronx.
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