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Music Special
El Judio Maravilloso
Catching Up with Larry Harlow
The legendary band leader of the illustrious Fania All Stars opens
up about the salsa renaissance and the golden age of salsa.
BY DAVE GIL DE RUBIO
Sitting with Larry Harlow in the Upper West Side apartment
he shares with his wife Wendy Kaplin, he grunts with discomfort
from the effects of diverticulitis. No retired music legend resting
on his laurels, Harlow has just returned from playing a jazz festival
in Colombia earlier in the week. During this week of downtime, he’s
prepping for a number of upcoming events, including a special screening
of the documentary Through the Eyes of Larry Harlow: El Judio Maravilloso
at the Austin Jewish Film Festival and a gig at Antone’s playing
with Grupo Fantasma, whose album Sonidos Gold he appeared on earlier
in the year. Then there’s the Latin Recording Academy Trustees
Award that Harlow will receive alongside Simon Diaz and Juanito
Marquez at the Latin Grammy Awards on November 12. After that, he
flies off to headline a concert at Cal State Los Angeles the following
day, of which the proceeds will benefit the Larry Harlow Endowed
Scholarship.
With all the accolades and recognition he has received, the 69-year-old
Brooklyn native is proudest of the work he’s doing to keep
the salsa tradition alive with the next generation. This includes
Sofrito!, a program of musical folklore he performs with David Gonzalez
and the Latin Legends Band for children, along with the work he’s
doing with Professor José de Castro at Cal State Los Angeles.
“I’ve been doing artists in residence and some arts
programs at Cal State for a couple of years now,” Harlow says
in his gravelly New York accent. “I work with them and it’s
not about money but out of love and passing down the secrets to
the next generation.” So who is Larry Harlow? Salsa afi cionados
know him as a driving force behind the golden era of Fania Records
in the ‘70s, as a multi-faceted bandleader/arranger/producer/engineer/songwriter.
The son of Latin Quarter bandleader Buddy Kahn, Harlow’s love
of Latin music was stoked while attending Music and Art High School
in Spanish Harlem during the ‘50s. It was during this time
as the teen leader of a combo that played the thriving Catskills
summer resort circuit that he started jamming with the Spanish musicians
who were also playing to Jewish vacationers enthralled by the sounds
of mambo and the cha cha cha. It was also during a Christmas break
in 1956 that Harlow made his inaugural visit to Havana. “I
went with a group called the Mambo Nicks, a bunch of Jewish guys
who were as nuts about Latin music as I was. I was 17 at the time
and getting to see acts like Orquestra Aragon and Beny Moré,”
Harlow says. “I went back in the following years and ended
up following Aragon and Roberto Faz around the island. I was in
Havana in 1959 and I could hear the bombing by Fidel Castro and
his revolutionaries outside the city. Needless to say I hopped on
the fi rst plane and got the hell out of there.”
Harlow’s big break came following a stint playing in Johnny
Pacheco’s conjunto at the 1964 World’s Fair. A chance
meet-
ing with ex-cop/lawyer Jerry Masucci at the Chez José, an
Upper West Side dinner club across from the Museum of Natural History
where Harlow played with his Orchestra on Friday nights, led to
an audition for the fledgling Fania Records.
“Masucci told me he was going to send his musical director
to come see me the following week because he was interest-
ed in signing me to his new label,” Harlow recalled. “The
next week it’s pouring out, we’re playing to tables
and chairs
and there’s nobody in the place. And who should walk in but
Johnny Pacheco.”
The next 15 years found salsa music growing by leaps and bounds
with Larry Harlow seemingly at every turn. As an ar-
ranger, he was the fi rst to put trombones and trumpets together
and later on, he wound up fusing the violins and fl utes of charanga
with the piano and trumpets of conjunto on his landmark 1974 album,
Salsa. Coincidentally, these sessions are where he got his nickname,
“El Judio Maravilloso,” when vocalist Junior Gonzalez
shouted that moniker out as an intro just as Harlow was going into
the powerful piano solo at the heart of his version of Arsenio Rodriguez’s
classic La Cartera.
Harlow fl eshed out Masucci’s idea of uniting all of the andleaders
in his stable under the Fania All-Stars umbrella by suggesting that
a particular group’s singer and a sideman be added to the
mix and that a show be fi lmed at the Fillmore.
“We couldn’t do it at the Fillmore because
it was closing, and when we wanted to do it at Central Park, we
couldn’t get a permit,” he recalls. “I suggested
the Cheetah because it had a balcony on top that we could shoot
down from and it held a couple of thousand people. Ralph Mercado,
who owned it at the time, said we were crazy and no one was coming
out to see this on a Thursday night. Well, there were lines four
or fi ve blocks down of people waiting to get in. It was a historic
night.”
The resulting 1972 documentary Our Latin Thing and
accompanying album Live at the Cheetah spread the gospel of salsa
globally and planted the seeds for Fania’s dominance in the
Latin music world. This initial success led a further opening of
doors with a pair of historic concerts at Yankee Stadium as well
in Zaire during the 1974 show held in conjunction with the Muhammad
Ali/George Foreman fi ght. As for Harlow, his Hommy: A Latin Opera,
which was a takeoff on The Who’s Tommy, became the fi rst
Latin music concept album that was also presented in memorable 1973
performances in Carnegie Hall and Puerto Rico. Harlow’s writing
of a part specifi cally for Celia Cruz drew her out of retirement
from Mexico, where she had been involved with novellas. But infi
ghting and Masucci’s disillusionment with the record industry
led to Fania’s downfall by the end of the decade.
“We were making five or six hundred dollars
a gig, but we didn’t give a crap because we were having such
a good [expletive] time and playing good music. Then the egos started
with all these little cockamamie singers,” Harlow gruffly
says before adding, “No disrespect to their talent, but Cheo
Feliciano, Ismael Miranda and Hector Lavoe would not know a B-flat
from a Carp. They do not know a chord or anything about music. Never
took a lesson or learned how to breathe. It was all ear and natural
talent. Not taking anything away from how good they are but all
of a sudden, the singers are in front of the band blocking the maestros—the
Pachecos, the Harlows, the Barrettos and the Valentins.”
More a straight shooter than anything else, Larry Harlow is far
too busy nowadays to get caught up in being bitter. In addition
to time spent as an in-demand bandleader and working in academia,
he’s written books and is being rediscovered by a younger
generation that includes proggy post-rockers Mars Volta, who had
him guest on their 2005 album Frances the Mute. But for now as always,
Latin music is Larry Harlow’s bag, and a genre for which he
has great hope.
“I don’t think contemporary Latin music—and what
I mean by that is tropical music—is going to die because it’s
a true art form,” he explains. “I think that music comes
in waves from the mambo to the boogaloo to salsa dura to the Latin
hustle to the romantic salsa to the reggaeton. But salsa dura is
always here; it’s never going to disappear.”
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