eleven months pass...
three weeks pass...
Someone just sent me this article. I think the source is something called "Salseroscollective," but I'm not familiar with it.
Joe Bataan's ready for second act in life
By AL HUNTER JR.
Joe Bataan's at the movies, shoveling down popcorn, a couple of
franks, gulping soda, enjoying "Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the
Clones."
Afterward, while backing his car out of the theater parking lot, he
starts feeling strange. Blood trickles from his mouth, his body jerks
with convulsions.
"I should've been gone," Bataan said, recalling that day in May
2002. "They were about to give me last rites."
Joe Bataan, 60, the "Ordinary Guy," who pioneered the Latin/soul
movement in the late '60s and early '70s, would later learn he had
gone into diabetic shock, which can be fatal.
The frightening episode, which led to four days in the hospital,
became his "aha" moment.
"God has a mission for me," said Bataan, who didn't know he had
diabetes, though the symptoms of constant fatigue and thirst were
there. "It was like I was drowning, and the hand came down, picked me
out and said, 'I'm not through with you.' "
Bataan carries out part of his mission with a concert in Philadelphia
on Father's Day, but it's more likely his real mission started in the
late 1960s.
Born to an African-American mother and Filipino father in 1942,
Bataan (given name Peter Nitollano) was raised in Spanish Harlem,
where as a teenager, he rolled with Puerto Rican gangs, got a rep as
a tough fighter and soaked in Latin music along with that of Frankie
Lyman and the Teenagers, the Chantels, the Harptones and Fats Domino.
Bataan was busted for riding in a stolen car and spent five years in
New York's Coxsackie State Prison. While there, he learned music,
and "six months after I was released, I started making records,"
Bataan said during a telephone interview from his home in Mount
Vernon, N.Y. "I knew exactly what I wanted to do as far as music was
concerned. That stint in prison made me determined."
But what got Bataan his notoriety was his vision of merging Latin and
R&B music to create "Latin soul."
A keyboardist and vocalist, Bataan had his first hit in 1967
with "Gypsy Woman." He found an audience eager for the exotic rhythms
of salsa paired with the familiar comfort of English lyrics.
"He's the best that did it at that time," said Manuel Duprey of Funk-
O-Mart record store at 11th and Market streets. "Instead of straight-
up salsa, it was crossover."
Bataan had other hits, too: "Subway Joe," "Riot," "Ordinary
Guy," "What Good is a Castle," as well as Gil Scott-Heron's "The
Bottle" and Isaac Hayes' "Shaft."
"Here I was a youngster," Bataan said. Audiences "identified with me
because I was from a street gang." And the songs' subject
matter "connected to my lifetime."
Latin soul, described by the AMG All-Music Guide as "a blend of mambo
and pop tinged with R&B and Latin jazz, emphasizing short, ultra-
catchy tunes and infectious rhythms," became popular in the late '60s
as young New Yorkers of Puerto Rican heritage - sometimes called
Nuyoricans - were exposed to rock 'n' roll and soul music and, unlike
their parents, grew up speaking English.
"The Puerto Rican became much more Americanized," during that time,
Bataan said. Latin music grew to reflect that, especially with black
bands and Latin bands sharing the stage at the same clubs.
Preceding the Latin soul fad was "boogaloo" music - similar to Latin
soul but with less lyrical structure and more novelty. One example:
Joe Cuba's "Bang Bang."
Latin soul's practitioners included Willie Colon and the TnT Band.
The genre is recalled with great fondness, though "it came and went
fast," Duprey said.
While he enjoyed success - he was called the "King of Latin R&B" -
Bataan also was criticized.
"There were a lot of people who, I don't if they were envious, heard
I was not of Puerto Rican descent," Bataan recalled. "They didn't
feel that a lot of the typical sound I did in Latin was true salsa
because of the English lyrics."
After the trend died, Bataan helped found Salsoul Records (with the
Salsoul Orchestra, Double Exposure and Bunny Sigler) and had another
hit in the late '70s with the disco/rap record "Rap-O Clap-O."
Recently, Bataan has seen a resurgence of interest in him and his
early music. Some people thought he was dead. He recalled traveling
to Columbia, where he hadn't been in 30 years and where he had to
fulfill a strange request.
" 'Riot' was like a national anthem in Columbia," Bataan said. "When
I got off the plane, they made me sing the song to make sure I was
the real Joe Bataan."
He has seen children with tatoos of his song titles. In the mid-'90s,
students at Hotos Community College in the Bronx couldn't get enough
of him. One girl said, "I love your music. When can I get it and
where did you come from?"
Bataan's old vinyl recordings are in demand, too, as DJs use them in
house music mixes. An anthology of his songs has been released in
Japan, Bataan said, and some of his original recordings on the Fania
label can be found on CDs.
For Bataan, who is a tour commander at the Bridges Juvenile Center in
New York, the past fuels his popularity. He takes a drug to control
his diabetes. He's changed his diet, tries to swim every day. In his
car, he keeps the blood-stained shirt as a reminder of what happened
last May.
"God said 'Stop running, I have something for you to do,' " Bataan
said. "He hasn't exactly pointed out [what], but he wants me to
spread his name."
Along with a little Latin soul
― Rockist Scientist, Thursday, 19 June 2003 23:49 (twenty-two years ago)
ten months pass...
three years pass...
two years pass...
two years pass...