It was a certain sunless Sunday afternoon and we were listening to some records at the Brooklyn Navy Yard's
DeVore Fidelity factory. Something had just come to an end, and I decided to take a look through a box of LPs to find something new. I found an album that was still sealed in its plastic wrapper. It was the seventh installment of Sonic Youth's SYR series, the album that
started it all for me. I was shocked.
Shocked. I was all exclamation points and italics.
"Dude.
Dude! You haven't even
opened this yet!"
John looked at me like it was no big deal. Choosing not to comment on my distress, he instead very calmly asked, "You want to listen to that?"
I settled down and shrugged.
"Yeah."
A couple months later and now I find sealed albums all over my apartment. Who knew? This past Sunday, I wanted to listen to something new but didn't want to spend any money, so I just took a look through my stacks. I pulled out the self-titled album by Irakere, a band I knew almost nothing about. I had purchased
Irakere at the Princeton Record Exchange and I had based the selection almost completely on the album's awesome artwork. Gazing at its furious reds and golds, there was no way I could pass it up.
I set the vinyl—a late '70s Columbia 6-eye pressing—on the Rega P3's felt platter mat and rested the soft bristles of my Hunt-EDA brush upon the grooves for a couple of rotations. Satisfied, I put the needle on the record and hurried to my seat.
The album begins with a rush of shimmering chimes. Applause soon follows. This is a live album, and it is immediately obvious that the performances were expertly captured. Urgent, present, and powerful, it's the sort of recording that makes a good system sound great, makes other recordings sound bad. I sat riveted, my face shriveling into a screwed up, helpless mess. The music is a sort of psychedelic salsa fusion, racing at breakneck speed through various genres, shouting out to rumba, slapping hands with funk, stopping on a dime and tipping a hat to hard bop jazz, while always maintaining a sense of purpose and order.
From the liner notes:
Around 1972, some of the members of the Cuban Modern Music Orchestra decided to form their own group, and by 1973 it had been organized into what is now known as Irakere. When these musicians, all impeccable soloists, left the best orchestra in the country, they had but one purpose in mind: to put all their efforts into what could be called "experimenting," joining a trend begun by others who were trying to renovate popular music.
Chucho Valdes is the band leader and plays piano; Jorge "El Nino" Alfonso and Armando Cuervo are knocking, shaking, slamming, slapping, and rattling on percussion; Enrique Pla rocks the drums; Carlos Emilio Morales is on guitar; Carlos del Puerto is on bass; the brass section is made of Carlos Averhoff and Paquito D'Rivera on sax, and Arturo Sandoval and Jorge Verona on trumpet.
Irakere was produced by Bert Decoteaux and Mike Berniker, and won the Grammy Award for Best Latin Recording in 1980. The songs were taken from the Newport Festival in New York with engineer Jerry Smith, and the Montreux Jazz Festival in Montreux, Switzerland, with engineer David Richards. Frank Laico and Russo Payne controlled the mixing board.
