Various – The Soul Of Spanish Harlem

Description

I’m sitting have dinner with Bobby Marin – who has spent nearly 50 years in music, making scores of Latin records across every sort of style – and we’re talking about gigs. Bobby grew up on 107th Street Spanish Harlem and was a teen in the 50s. ‘Did you see James Brown?’ ‘I saw James Brown so often that it became boring…Jackie Wilson was something else’. Bobby was describing how music came into his life – how his brothers played mambo records and the radio was alive with the early sounds of rock’n’roll. This compilation focuses on the sort of Latin soul records made by Nuyoricans in a very small window in the late 60s, before it was blown away by the onslaught of the golden years of salsa. The recordings were strongly influenced by the street corner harmony records of the late 50s and especially by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers – who had two Latinos in their ranks.