Honest Jon’s latest compilation, Boogaloo Pow Pow: Dancefloor Rendez-vous in Young Nu Yorica is a fascinating glimpse into the ignition of a culture on the peripheral and a magnificent display of a peoples expressive breakthrough at balancing their culture of origin with the culture they discovered in modern America. The challenges of deciphering this cultural amalgamation plays a large role in the boogaloo sound, which begins immediately with Willie Rosario’s “Calypso Blues”, where perplexed lyrics question his new life as an immigrant in New York: “Don’t got the money to take me back to Trinidad, me throat she sick from necktie, me feet she hurt from shoes, me pocket full of empty, I got calypso blues.”
Boogaloo Pow Pow illuminates the diversity of Latino dance music in 1960’s New York better than previous collections and even ranks superior to Soul Jazz’s excellent New York Hustle. To say that the substantial array of styles featured on Boogaloo Pow Pow is a hybrid is an understatement. The constant but fluid shifting of Latin jazz and bolero to Cubop and earlier Afro-Cuban styles and from cha cha chá, típico, guaguancó, pachanga and salsa to the unique style of 1960’s Nu Yorica where the compilation derived its title from is all encompassing. Boogaloo Pow Pow is an empowering rhythm of scorching dance grooves, horns of fire and a proudly conscious blend of Spanish, English and Spanglish lyricism, giving the music and people a distinctive identity that rejects and leaves behind both the whitewashing of the ‘American melting pot’ and the atrocities of Latin American colonialism.
Bardos Freedoom
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