Anyone who expressed an interest in salsa mix CDRs, send me an e-mail.

*it wd do me good to sort through it and think abt it and make tapes BUT it is on vinyl** so tapes is what they wd have to be
**apologies = i am v.old

But anyway, I will be happy to send you a copy of this. Just give me an address I can send it to.

pester me abt chasin up the swopsie. it is good for me

my computer sucks)
email me at this address,
maybe we can trade?

Julio, so that means you aren't interested in this one (as I'd expect)? I guess I should just check my e-mail. I'll be getting into more general trading of stuff later. I still have some questions about my CD burning software that I haven't figured out yet, so I'm still feeling my way around.

I'll be making more of these in the future. (Except I'm going to run out of material pretty quickly, since in order to pay for my new PC I'm going to have to cut back on CD buying.)

I'm not sure about the German dance music (which I probably won't like), but maybe we can come up with something. I'll send it regardless.

x-post:

I know that. It's Grupo Niche. "Han Cogida la Cosa" from A Golpe Folklorico. That has three really good songs on it, all at the beginning. I'll probably make a Grupo Niche comp. somewhere down the line, since there is no legitimately available best of that even comes close to pulling together their best songs. (I think that's quite intentional too.)

Then one guy said it was a song from the upcoming Los Toros Band cd. So now, six months later, it still hasn't been released.

It strikes me as kinda strange. But maybe it makes sense if it was like a "sneak preview" or "dj exclusive" kinda thing. I'm not totally familiar with latin radio programming, so i'm just in the dark.

THANK YOU!!!

That's hilarious. Did he do that?

"I think Grupo Niche's best salsa songs would actually have more crossover potential than most salsa recordings. They often reflect other currents in pop music"

Is that true? I haven't really noticed. I probably wouldn't dig it too much if they mixed in other pop stuff. Off the top, I can't think of any songs that I like mixing in pop stuff (besides reggaeton, that is).

(x-post)
I'm an idiot. I have the song on my hardrive, but I had it misfiled in the merengue section (probably selected it by accident when I was moving my Grupo Mania stuff).

"Mujer de Arena" (live, on the 22nd New York Salsa Festival/Celebration RMM 10th Anniversary, which has a few good tracks, but that's not one, though I like the regular studio version).

I probably wouldn't dig it too much if they mixed in other pop stuff.

I mean pop pretty broadly. "Han Cogida la Cosa" has that ragga/dancehall style rapping in it. I think I hear a well-integrated rap influence in the coros on some of their songs from the new album (without anyone actually rapping per se), but I also was thinking of the production (e.g., they sometimes use drum machines and pull it off, despite the salsa context; they play around more with remixes than most salsa bands do).

In the last couple months I must've heard it like 15 times.

I don't recognize who the rapper is, but maybe the program managers picked up on the fact that the song sounds hip now, because reggaeton has blown up (or the rapper may be coming up now).

"they play around more with remixes than most salsa bands do"

You mean like the gran combo revisted project? Now, that you mention it, maybe mega is playing a remix. I'll have to listen more closely next time.

You mean like the gran combo revisted project?

Yeah, except I think some members of Grupo Niche just do the remixing themselves. It's not a guest DJ thing, I think.

x-post:

I don't know. I remember it being fairly big, at least in clubs and at salsa parties. I don't know about radio play. Maybe Philadelphia and New Jersey were just ahead of New York for once.

Big Up Philly & Jersey!!

Down With New York Salsa Elitists!!

mark s, I never got your e-mail. Check your in-boxxx.

(the one that said: "Hello, I am Mr Salsist Scientist son of the late Dr Rockist Scientist the Nigerian finance minister. Plz send details of bank account blah blah")

Thank you for FedExing the 6,000,000 American dollars. You will be paid back with interest within a month or two.

From miaminewtimes.com
Originally Published By Miami New Times Thursday, March 9, 2000
©2005 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.

MUSIC

Call Me Negro
Grupo Niche says it loud and proud with salsa
By Celeste Fraser Delgado

In polite Colombian society, well-meaning mothers tell their children in hushed tones: "Don't say negro, my dear; say moreno." One word means black. The other means dark. Jairo Varela, leader of Grupo Niche, Colombia's most successful salsa orchestra, has no patience for such fine distinctions. After spending three years in prison on drug-trafficking charges he believes were racially motivated, Varela insists on calling a spade a spade.

"The racism in Colombia is clear," says the 49-year-old band leader from his office in Cali. "This has created an additional level of difficulty for our etnia," our ethnic group, "because we are black and because we are poor."

With seven gold and four platinum records under his belt since forming Grupo Niche twenty years ago, Varela has come a long way from the poverty of his native Quibdó, a tiny village on the Pacific coast in the department of Chocó. At the time of his arrest in 1995, the musician owned a modeling agency, a two-million-dollar discotheque in Cali, and a $250,000, 48-track, state-of-the-art recording console. He also invested generously in the campaigns of aspiring Afro-Colombian politicians, a move Varela thinks did not go unnoticed by the nation's power elite. He is convinced that his wealth and influence got him into trouble with the law in a country he believes is not ready to accept a successful black man.

Race is particularly complicated in Colombia, where geographical and cultural regionalism have separated the sangre, those with African blood, from one another as well as from the rest of the nation. Chocó is one of many far-flung territories where the Spanish plantation system scattered African peoples. Limited contact among the black people of Chocó, the Caribbean islands, the Atlantic coast, and the inland city of Cali led to the development of distinct forms of neo-African expression in each region. What being black means -- and what it sounds like -- often depends on where you live.

Racism, the brutal common denominator of the black experience, unites otherwise very different Afro-Colombian communities. Paradoxically racism also aggravates the intense regionalism that characterizes Colombian culture in general. While Colombians of all races tend to identify by region first and foremost -- as Paisas (from Medellín), Caleños (from Cali), or Costeños (from the coast), Afro-Colombians are especially likely to put hometown before nation. The songs Varela has written for Grupo Niche include praise for Cali, Medellín, and Barranquilla, but not a single tune celebrates Colombia as a whole.

When asked about the Colombian roots of Grupo Niche's salsa sound, Varela answers adamantly: "There is no Colombian influence in my music. The influence is African." Varela does not mean the influence comes directly from the continent of Africa, however. He explains, "The melodies and the rhythms come from the African people where I grew up on the Pacific coast."

From the time he was eight until he was twelve years old, Varela played with a band of village children called La Timba. The youngsters raised funds for their pastimes by performing African-based folk music on bongos, maracas, and guiros during feast days for the saints. The children learned music from the adults around them. Varela recalls, "My town was so small all you had to do was open your eyes to see what everyone else there was doing."

In addition to the local folk music that played an important role in village life, recordings from Cuba made their way to Chocó. Varela tells how the traditional Cuban son sounded familiar: "We heard more of ourselves in groups like Sonora Matancera than we did in the Colombian groups that were coming from the other coast or from the interior." Across thousands of miles and hundreds of years of separation, Varela heard in the Cuban music the same African roots that inspired him in Quibdó.

The village burned down in 1966, sending the then-seventeen-year-old aspiring musician to Bogotá to continue his studies. At that time little of the neo-African music playing along the coasts and in Cali could be heard in the nation's capital. Varela kept playing, though, and in 1980 formed Grupo Niche, taking for his band's name a term that in Colombia describes the very darkest of black-skinned people.

"We didn't have much of an echo in Bogotá," remembers Varela, telling why the band moved in 1983 to Cali. "In Cali we had the total support of the people." A city with a considerable Afro-Colombian population, Cali began to import salsa with a passion in the late 1960s, and developed a distinctive style of dance that often required speeding up salsa records from 45 rpm to 78 rpm. By the time Grupo Niche arrived two decades later, Caleños were eager for a band that could play music to match their frantic dance style. "There was such an integration between Cali and Grupo Niche," observes Varela, "that we developed hand in hand."

In Cali Niche found a new singer, Tito Gomez, who helped break the group into the international market. The band brought their Colombian sound to the World Festival of Salsa at Madison Square Garden in 1986. Since then Grupo Niche has launched a number of solo singers and become a staple of salsa clubs and festivals. The group has toured the United States more than 100 times and played more than 1700 shows worldwide. But success has had its aesthetic downside: Niche's brand of salsa consequently settled into a rather predictable format that emphasizes the treble with the high end of the piano and a whole lot of horn. Rapid montunos satisfy the Caleño taste for fast footwork, but Varela's consistently neat arrangements aim to please an international audience that knows what it wants and wants to hear it again and again.

Although Varela's compositions continue to reference the African traditions of Chocó and other regions of Colombia, racial consciousness remained a muted concern in Grupo Niche's music until Varela's arrest. Finding himself, despite his fame and fortune, at the mercy of the same forces that lead to the disproportionate incarceration of black men across the globe, Varela's lyrics began to make more pointed statements about race.

"What happened to me doesn't have a name," Varela observes bitterly. He was convicted in 1995 of illicit enrichment, conspiracy, and money laundering. The charges centered on 48 million pesos ($27,000) Grupo Niche received from Cali cartel boss Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela as payment for a concert appearance. The band leader was released from jail a year later, after demonstrating that the court failed to consider royalties he received for his recordings from Sony Internacional when accounting for his income. Prosecutors appealed the ruling, however, returning Varela to prison at the end of 1997. He served two additional years in a casa especial, a special facility for distinguished convicts, before being released under the condition that he remain inside Colombia.

"They told me we made bad money," Varela protests, "but they didn't say anything to white artists who played on the same payroll. [Venezuelan salsero] Oscar D'Leon and [Puerto Rican salseros] El Gran Combo played there. So did Colombian acts, like [vallenato singer] Carlos Vives. There was no equality."

Grupo Niche continued to tour extensively without Varela and released two albums under his remote direction. For A Prueba de Fuego (Trial by Fire, 1997), the jailed leader approved the band's interpretation of his new compositions by cell phone. In the casa especial, the authorities allowed Varela to install a computer on which he composed, arranged, and played back the material for Señales de Humo (Smoke Signals, 1998).

"Maybe the quality of these projects suffered," Varela admits, "but the sacrifice and dedication it took to keep going more than makes that up for me."

A Golpe de Folklore (With the Force of Folklore, 1999) is Grupo Niche's first release since Varela left jail in October of last year. Free from prison Varela also has extricated himself from Sony. Varela cut the disk on his own label, PPM, Professional Music Producers. His eldest daughter, Yanila Muñiz, runs the U.S. office of PPM out of a small warehouse in the Doral district of Miami. Whatever the source of Varela's income, the production value of A Golpe de Folklore suggests PPM has more than enough money to generate high-quality recordings and manage an extensive distribution network. The strong name recognition of Grupo Niche makes it seem likely Varela's label will succeed where smaller, garage startups fail. The first single, "Han Cogido la Cosa" ("They've Taken Up That Thing"), protests the common use of racial slurs to make jokes. The song repeats a number of traditional racist jabs, only to reverse them in the end. The chorus demonstrates the kind of unequal treatment Varela believes has victimized him: "Black man running is a thief/White man running is an athlete." During the improvised soneo, singer Willy Garcia suggests another way to see the black man. "Let's do the real accounting," he sings. "I am a black man. I am a salsero. My drum plays the message."

The rage behind the humor in "Han Cogido la Cosa" is palpable. The arrangements, however, are as polite as ever in Niche hits. Despite centuries of oppression, each instrument patiently awaits its turn. No matter how ugly the world may be, there are no messy descargas here. The orderly instrumentation might be a way of keeping a cap on the rage, a way of holding back what threatens to explode. As if following the hypocritical mores of Colombian society, the song's most pointed chorus fails to be heard on the recording at all: "Don't call me moreno," read the liner notes, "call me negro."

Eddie Palmieri: Los Cueros Me Llaman
Joe Cuba Sextette [canta: Cheo Feliciano]: Aprieta (Oye Como Va)
Cheo Feliciano: Anacaona
Justo Bentacourt: Psicologia
Larry Harlow [canta: Celia Cruz]: Act II: Gracia Divina [from Hommy]
Angel Canales: Sol Mi Vida
El Gran Combo: Don Goyo
Willie Rosario: Boba
Fania All Stars [canta: Ismael Rivera]: El Nazareno
Mon Rivera/Willie Colon: Mosaico #2
Ruben Blades/Willie Colon: Pablo Pueblo
Hector Lavoe/Willie Colon: Triste y Vacia
Sonora Poncena: Ahora Si
Tipica 73 [canta: Jose Alberto]: Baila que Baila
Louie Ramirez [canta: Azuquita]: En un Beso la Vida

(People in other countries: I will send your packages once I have done the usual security clearances to determine that you are not terrorists.)

...Or (heavens forbiddo!) (*2*) neither of my mail-e's did reach you after all?

If *1* be positive, I'd need your address to send you something.

I could try to e-mail any of you the tracks for the alternate classic salsa mix (so that those of you who can make your own copies could assemble that version). I listened to it again this morning (in between shaving and getting a shower) and it's definitely a smoother mix, with less extreme variation in the volume, and a better flow from one track to the next. (Not to bum out the people who got the first version.)

mark s, yeah, I know. It's unrealistic to demand that others love what I love on exposure to it, since I certainly don't always love what I've been given, downloaded, etc.

x-post:

Hi, Ned.

mission accomplished seein as a got a hataz meta-thread yay! (which is actually very mild and probbly justified)

pore old lady di has bn waitin for my "lesson" on unicorn since may 2003 i think

gaz, I never got an address from you, so you're not getting one yet. (Either that or I got it and misplaced it.)

I am listening to my classic salsa mix (second edition) and I can't believe how great it is so far.

don, I sent you a bunch of e-mails about the things you sent me, but they all bounced.

Lord Custos, I have lost the information you sent (in my old account), but I think I'll just make this a gift to you rather than a trade.

gaz

I've made "Robaeyat el Khayam" my Oum Kalthoum Kind of Blue, as in: "If you don't like this, you probably aren't going to get into the other stuff." Hadeeth el Roh. . . I don't think I have that. If I do, it's one I don't like much.

Sorry, my e-mails to you kept bouncing back to me, so I decided to just comment here.