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Posted by: Faque Reply with quote Add User to Ignore List
 West Sixth Stumbler
Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 7:12 am
Joined: 20 Apr 2004  Posts: 68
 Post Post subject: Che Che Kole - Antibalas


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I know MBP and Jugoe drop the Che Che Kole Soul Makossa mix out and about....I found this interesting piece on the antibalas webpage forum:
(btw, new 5 song Antibalas ep (3 new songs, and 2 mixes) available at www.antibalas.com)


Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2005 11:22 pm Post subject: Che Che Cole

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http://www.cantstopwontstop.com/blog/2004/01/che-che-cole-to-future-just-want-to.html

Monday, January 05, 2004 CHE CHE COLE TO THE FUTURE

Just want to second Doug Wolk's paean to Antibalas' "Che Che Cole", which for me was easily among the best cultural, not just musical, moments of 2003.

For one it happened to touch on one of my private obsessions this past year, which has been trying to quickly learn as much about early 70s Latin music as possible, and my growing comfort level with the idea of polyculturalism. (On the latter, check this interview Vijay Prashad.)

The song:

Che Che Cole is a cover of the Willie Colon & Hector Lavoe salsa classic from 1971. The single features a Makossa version and an Afrobeat version. Both are pure fire.

The history (first, a shout out to Peter Shapiro for launching me on this journey):

Colon was an ex-Bronx gang member during the mid-60s and a contemporary of South Bronx movers like the Ghetto Brothers, Savage Skulls, and Savage Nomads, who began revolutionizing salsa in the late 60s. Young, street-smart, hardcore (his album covers tended to highlight gangsta themes), he was also polyculturalist to the core. The bilingual (in Spanish and a West African dialect I don't know). lyrics to "Che Che Cole" came from a Ghanaian children's rhyme he learned, and he set the song to a Puerto Rican bomba rhythm, before adding salsa sabor.

This was an era when salsa bands were going Afrodiasporic, experimenting with--as the title of Grupo Folklorico's classic album put it--"concepts in unity". The most obvious touchstone for Antibalas' experiment is Fania All-Stars' NYC performance with Manu Dibango of "Soul Makossa", but going strong at the same time were Cortijo and his Time Machine and Eddie Palmieri's Harlem River Drive, while on the west coast, groups like the Escovedo's Azteca and Cesar Ascarrunz' San Francisco band were rocking a new sound.

Unlike the bugalu moment of the mid-60s, when Latin bands mostly de-clave'd to move toward North American black funk and soul, the new hybrid sound of jazz, rock, soul, Afro-Cuban, and Afro-Rican sounds leaned south to Latin America and east to Africa. The diversity of ideas--sonically, culturally, politically--that came out of that are just boggling to me. You could begin at the end of the 60s by drawing a line between, say, Ray Barretto's "Acid" and JB's "Sex Machine Live" album and then see the connections begin to multiply as the new decade begins. Palmieri to Mayfield to Bartz to the AEC to Wonder to Santana to Cortijo and the web just expands.

In this Bush unilateralist world, it seems as good a time as any to revive the open-hearted riddims and ideas of that period. In fact, if Antibalas has often been accused of being too retro-purist, this form of cultural globalization feels more in line with their one-world politics and better displays the range of the individual band member's talents and riddim-knowledges (from dub to vodun to santeria, and on and on). Kuti's Afrobeat did not evolve far (blame the cult of personality, perhaps), and while classicism has its place, it rarely intersects with right-now relevance. If this is Antibalas' new groove, it's a wide open and promising one, and, if things can be right in this world, might become the soundtrack of this coming summer's protest season.


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