JORGE SANTANA “HERE I AM” CD REVIEW
© Jim McCarthy October 2009

Here I Am is the recently released “from the vaults” compilation put together by Jorge and released on his own Misha label. It follows on from his two earlier solo recordings originally recorded for Tomato Records in New York and also re-issued on CD and available on Misha and from his new website jorgesantana.com.

Here I Am is divided into five musical ventures and opens with five songs with a definite eighties feeling in production style and arrangements with big keyboard sounds and a solid band featuring Walter Afanasieff on keys/vocals plus Phil Anastasia on Lead vocals. It features Gary Brown on bass plus Yogi Newman and Rick Lawton on congas& percussion and drums respectively.

Once Is Not Enough/Para Ti opens the CD and the remastered sound quality is decent considering these are studio demos. The song has a lilting Latin cha-cha feel. In common with Jorge’s output at this time, it falls on the R&B and pop side of the musical fence. This song furthers the Latin cha-cha feel with a raspy, fluent and sharp guitarra solo by Jorge, over the refrain of “Para Ti, Para ti”. The next tune, Isolation has a jaunty funky and light summery feel, the band also managed to fit in a five-week tour around the New York area while these demos were being shopped. The “title” track Here I Am is a mid-tempo piece that didn’t lift me particularly but is competent and features an arrangement steeped in synth washes. Runaway Love has that AOR sound typical of that era with big backing chords by Jorge, It has a rousing chorus and a sound not unlike Carlos’ output around the Inner Secrets/Marathon recorded era. Tell Me Love is another up-tempo with a great vocal by Walter aka Dean Parrish, Jorge plays fifties style rhythm guitar licks on here.

For my money the jewels on this CD follow with Jorge’s collaboration with the Mission District group Puro Bandido. Casa Bandido is pure Latino magic! It starts with a three chord, slightly melancholic refrain with excellent guitar atmospherics by Jorge and Johnny Gunn, before breaking into a salsa inflected joyous song, featuring Richard Segovia (previously of the TNT band) on timbales and Rafael Ramirez on congas and Angel Orozco on drum kit!
This is truly a great cut, both fully steeped in the San Franciscan Latino-Mission tradition but with a fresh and uplifting vibe. The song kicks with excellent compressed vocals. Superb horns and arrangement see this song would not be out of place on one of Carlos’ recent stellar releases. They name check Puerto Rico, Salvador and the Mission thru this great
and very danceable song. Jorge plays a dreamy and soulful guitar break over the middle eight and is followed by a great trombone solo. One would really like to hear Puro Bandido releasing some more stuff- this is excellent. It fades with a guitar break by Johnny Gunn-top notch!!

Latin Lover follows with a Jose Santana  (Tony Santana, Jorge’s older brother is Jose’s father making him Jorge’s nephew) rap over another Puro Bandido arrangement. This is another smoking cut which strides confidently along with superb excellent ensemble playing, including backing vocals by Heather Lauren and The Herrera Sisters.
A cascara timbale rhythm by Richard Segovia propels this cut along with a supreme gusto and features another Jorge solo full of controlled fire, followed by a flourishing keyboard solo by Steve Salinas. Yet another musical high point on this CD.

Rainbows Of Love is notable for a closely recorded conga tumbao by Yogi Newman (apparently Newman had an even bigger afro-head than Mike Carabello or Arcelio Garcia and is these days living a hermetic life, out of the music scene) and it would be great to hear congas recorded with this “loudness’ more often. This also features a stirring Jorge solo over a double time vamp.

The fourth set of tunes feature old Malo running mate Richard Bean on chief vocals and song writing. It also features Ron DeMasi from the last two Malo albums on Warner (Evolution & Ascension)
Bar Of Five instrumental shows DeMasi playing some synth and other keyboard clavinet style solo funkiness over a driving beat, the is a real cooker and these recordings hail from 1977 and were demoed at San Francisco’s CBS Studios in Folsom Street. The drummer Jerry Marshall wrote this cut and these could be DeMasi’s last recorded performances.
Sandy and Darling I Love You, originally featured on the Jorge Santana solo release, are given a different dance mix airing here and shows Bean’s pop take on Latin, with an almost Neil Sedaka feel to proceedings, with an ample disco-style beat produced by Tony Bongiovi and Bob Clearmountain.

Of great interest to Malo fans are two cuts from Sesame Street, Bienvenidos (Welcome) and Show Me How You Feel (Como To Sientes) featuring the redoubtable Tony Smith on drums and Lead vocals along with Jorge. Welcome is great as it aims to teach a person listening basic Spanish. It has great (Ascension era-Malo) horns and a pumping Pablo Tellez bass aided and abetted by Jorge on a nice piercing solo. A cool way to round off this varied CD package.

For guitar followers Jorge has added information on the guitars and amps used thru-out these recordings.

I had a conversation with Jorge about the future and he aims to release at least two more CD’s of material next year. He informed me he had been listening to archive recorded with Richard Kermode and Pablo Tellez from 1981 and another piece (A Bit Of Spice) recorded with Karl Perazzo, both among others, which should find their way onto the next CD release in 2010.
Of great interest is the Malo “fifth” set of recordings demoed after Ascension in San Francisco (not to be confused with Malo 5 released in New York on Traq Records, under the name of Arcelio Garcia) and featuring Pablo, Ron De Masi, Butch Haynes on percussion. Further down the line Jorge is planning to release these rarities and I know all Mission Latino heads will be looking forward to hearing this historical material.

Tags: Arcelio Garcia, Carlos Santana, Jorge Santana, Latin Rock, Malo, Mission District, NEW YORK, Pablo Tellez, Puro Bandido, Richard Bean, Ron De Masi, San Francisco, Santana, Sesame Street, Tony Smith

This is the show which taped in LA last November.
Check your local PBS schedule:

“Latin Music Legends,” a musical variety show hosted by and starring Palm Springs resident Trini Lopez, will air as a national public television pledge break special in August, its locally-based produced have announced.

It will debut Aug. 14 on KVCR, broadcast to 5.5 million households in Southern California, and then air on PBS stations across the nation.

The show, taped at the Orpheum Theatre in Los Angeles, is produced by local executive producers Dan Bohlmann, Robert Alexander of the Motion Picture Hall of Fame group and Mitchell Sussman of Raven Productions.

Besides Lopez, it will feature Julio Iglesias, original Santana lead singer Gregg Rolie, El Chicano, Tierra, Thee Midniters with Little Willie G, and Palm Springs resident Mark Guerrero, who performs a tribute to his late father, Lalo Guerrero.

Alexander said “Latin Music Legends” will air nationally on for 11 months and then “be taken to retail outlets and syndicated internationally.”

The show will air at 9 p.m.

Tags: El Chicano. East Los Angeles, Gregg Rolie, Julio Iglesias, Lalo Guerrero, Latin Music Legends, Latin Rock, Mark Guerrero, PBS, Santana, Thee Midniters, Tierra, Trini Lopez, Voices of Latin Rock, Willie G

© Jim McCarthy July 2009

The new Stephen Soderberg double DVD/Blu Ray film formats of Che Part One and Part Two has hit the stores in the UK and the two films are a breathtaking achievement. The first film concerns specifically Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s first campaign, along with Commandante Fidel Castro in the late 1950’s in Cuba to overthrow the imperialistic USA linked government of tin pot dictator General Fulgencia Baptista. The second film concerns Che’s attempt to lead a guerrilla insurrection in Bolivia in 1966 and 1967.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara De La Serna, born of middle class Argentinean origins, was to become one of the most iconic faces of the 20th century. His strikingly handsome face is to be found staring out from tee shirts, Cuban tourist advertising, protest march banners, civil rights movement graphics and multiple photographic images.

Che Guevara and Fidel Castro liberated Cuba in late I959.
The Cuban Revolution totally changed the island from a satellite of “corrupt Yankee imperialism” to the exciting, decaying, musically invigorating, forlorn “Communista” based country it is today. Che went on to fight in the African Congo and after this campaign, with a small guerrilla army in Bolivia, eventually being captured and executed on 9th October 1967.

This immediately conferred an iconic Christ-like status on “Che” and ever since his visage has been used to represent, freedom, insurrection, pop stars looking for a brush with greatness, street art and the ubiquitous tee-shirt imagery.

Both films start with a gradually developing map (the first film is of a map of Cuba, the second, a map of the complete Latin America, which highlights at the end Bolivia. It is represented as a simple, rudimentary geography lesson to set the scene and the pace. The maps gradually and determinedly reveal the district names of Cuba, such as Matanzas, Havana etc, the city names and the mountain ranges (Sierra Madre) etc. This is Soderberg’s way of bringing the viewer into the tempo and rhythm of the films. To slow you down for what is to come. To empty the viewer of pre-conceptions- this device is almost jarring but it works and is highly unusual. The films are a non-sensational and revealing look at the campaigns with a detached, dispassionate and documentary style approach to the guerrilla’s campaigns.

Che Part One leads all the way up, to the run up to capturing Havana. Before this event we see the weaselly Batista making good his escape in plain clothes. The cinema verite feel is enhanced by Benicio Del Toro’s astonishing portrayal of Ernesto Che. He more than resembles him physically and facially and in body heft. Del Toro inhabits the person of Che completely. He was “rewarded” by this by winning Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival (with Sean Penn on the judging panel). The recognised Che expert, John Lee Anderson
(Who wrote the so-far definitive Che-A Revolutionary Life) reinforces this point in the extras section of film two.

The films are told in truncated but seemingly real time, they capture both the idealism and the tedium of the guerrilla’s life in the Cuban plains and its mountains. Benicio Del Toro convincingly portrays Che’s asthma attacks worsened by the rainy weather and the gruelling conditions, particularly in the higher altitudes of Bolivia in Part Two. The films are greatly helped by being almost entirely in Spanish with English sub-titling. The alternative of the main leads speaking in English with Spanish sub-titles would be too awful and absurd to contemplate. It is a major tip of the hat to the filmmakers who went outside the USA to finance the film, to achieve this completely necessary use of the mother language.

The two films are both an inspiration and a creative triumph. Soderberg brings his uniquely dispassionate and slightly clinical style of direction to the proceedings. We don’t get much more of the inner life of Guevara but the films do fill in many gaps in the knowledge of his campaigns and their details. Which for many are shrouded in myth and basic iconography.
These films will re-introduce Che to a whole new world, so much different from that world of only forty years ago. It is startling to realise how much was done with so little in the case with the Cuban revolution and how those limited resources worked badly against Che and the guerrillas in Bolivia, South America. The CIA backing counter forces in the country wanting to stop him in his tracks did not help either. They were two very different campaigns with two ends of the spectrum in terms of outcomes.

Another Soderberg triumph, both in terms of the weightier than usual content and his subtle and reflective use of layered dialogue and superb mixtures of camerawork, in terms of
colour and in the overall tonal palette of the two interlinked but contrasting films.

Tags: Che Che Guevara, congas. Batista. CIA, Cuba, Cuban music, Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, Havana. Salsa, Latin Rock, Latino musica

Jerry Salas joined the legendary El Chicano in 1973, which were one of the most visibly successful bands to emerge from the East Los Angeles Latin-rock scene in the early 1970’s.
After creating a buzz in East L.A. in the late ’60s, El Chicano signed with MCA in 1970 and recorded its debut album, Viva Tirado. At that time the Band were led by Freddie Sanchez and were named The V.I.P’s but a quick name change to the more controversial El Chicano, heralded a new career arc.
The instrumental title song, which was written by jazz pianist Gerald Wilson, was released as a single and became El Chicano’s biggest hit; the recording reached number 28 on Billboard’s pop singles chart and number 20 on its R&B singles chart. On regional L.A. charts, "Viva Tirado" spent about 12 weeks at number One. "Viva Tirado" was inspired by Mexican bullfighter Jose Ramon Tirado and hit the right spot, it was an instrumental that occupied that hip zone, similar to others like Hugh Masekela’ “Grazing In the Grass’ and Ramsey Lewis’s “Wade In The Water”.
Santana ruled the roost in terms of Latin rock success and international exposure but El Chicano had a great grass roots following in the Mexican-American neighborhoods of the southwestern United States. After the Viva Tirado LP, El Chicano went on to record several more albums for MCA, including 1971′s Revolucion, 1972′s Celebration, 1973′s El Chicano, 1974′s Cinco, 1975′s The Best of Everything, and 1976′s Pyramid of Love & Friends. Jerry Salas also comments here “As far as Viva Tirado was concerned, don’t forget it was also on the Jazz charts at the same time as the others, this was a first. Also we did "This is El Chicano” in 1977 on Shadybrook Records, we should have got a hint by the name of the label.”
El Chicano’s second biggest hit came in 1973 when MCA released the brown-eyed soul classic "Tell Her She’s Lovely" as a single. Nationally, the tune (which features Jerry Salas on lead vocals) wasn’t a major hit; "Tell Her She’s Lovely" only reached number 40 on Billboard’s pop singles chart and number 98 on the magazine’s R&B singles chart. But in Mexican-American neighborhoods, the song was huge — among Chicano Baby Boomers, "Tell Her She’s Lovely" was a significant addition to El Chicano’s recorded and live canon.
The band made a long overdue return to the studio with 1998′s “Painting the Moment.” Which was essentially a solo effort by Bobby Espinosa. Released on Thump Records, this CD marked the return of original lead guitarist Mickey Lespron, who had not recorded with El Chicano since the 1970s. At the present time, El Chicano are touring with original members, Fred Sanchez, Bobby Espinosa, Rudy Regalado and Jerrty Salas.
Jerry Salas also leads a Christian band and has played large gigs in Brazil; both live and televised. He is also producing recordings for the Christian market.
This CD is a further testament to his wonderful “brown-eyed soul,” style of vocalizing as well as his strong rhythm guitar playing.
Recorded with family members, “Salas” is a strong outing which starts out with high register guitar and a strident vocal from Salas on the opener “Drive.” It has a poppy feel with a hot Latin groove. Nice congas and timbales, which are supplied by War’s drummer Sal Rodriguez, are brought high up in the mix. The albums ten cuts are mostly written by Jerry Salas, apart from one co-written with producer John Avila and “A Woman Like You” was written by Enrique Corro.
“You Will Always Be Loved,” has big chords and a synthesizer refrain on the intro. It’s a hopeful song that sings of trust and it has a jangling feel with nice flanged acoustic guitars and phased cymbal whooshes in the backing track.
“Shut Up,“ is a regga-fied piece that mostly works well, I usually have a problem with American musicians playing their “version:” of reggae, usually it’s too overplayed, especially by the drummers and guitarists. But here, Salas keeps it simple and simple is always best for reggae derived music. “Best Of Your Life.” follows and is piano-led plaintive song with Latino undercurrents to the song. Nice flanged acoustic guitar again from Salas and Bob Bobles bring an
melancholy vibe to a song of hopefulness and advice, to the broken dreamers among us. The song is sung by and helped with backing vocals from Salas’ family members.
This music is quintessentially Californian in scope and approach. There is that life-affirming aspect to the music, it must be the weather but this kind of music always has a very positive and vibrant feel within its grooves. And with the Latino feel present it is ideal music for hitting the open road on a gloriously sunny day. It brings to mind the more poppy end of El Chicano or some aspects of The Doobie Brothers.
“A Woman Like You,” is a straight-ahead poem to meeting that special woman, with another excellent brown-eyed soul vocal by Salas. The guitar is bright and fluent and dips in and out of the song with feeling.
“Because Of you,” sports another soaring vocal by Salas and
again is a love letter to his special woman. Tasty acoustic guitar adds depth and further lyricism. I love the way Latino male and female vocalists have that Afro American feel to their singing but yet it is a Brown pride version, a totally unique vocal style.
“Blood To Blood.’ is a slow-burner, which starts building to a Hammond B3 organ interlude, which further ups the ante with massed vocalising. “Everlasting Love, “ is a romantic poem set with a Godly theme to a acoustically based rhythm track.
Finally “Hiding My Emotions, “ is a rocker with two locked guitars high in the mix. All in all, a pleasing CD, full of generally mid-paced songs in a soulful setting. The production is good with no discernable nods to current production techniques. It’s a straight ahead recording with
obvious interest to all lovers of Salas’ work with El Chicano and enthusiasts of Latino rock style vocals.
Total CD playing Time = 46:34

Jim McCarthy
East Sussex.
England.
March 2009

Questions for Jerry Salas

(1)      Is this your only solo recording, or are their any others??
“This is my first solo release though I’ve recorded a lot of stuff.”
(2) What are you favourite El Chicano tunes and why??
“Chachita" which was the B-side of "Tell Her" because it’s soooo moody & heartfelt, "Gringo en Mexico" because of the vocals & was so different from what we were doing at the time. "What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You" Just because it rocks so hard! We wanted to release it after "Tell Her" but MCA didn’t, it would have been a smash! Check out the number of plays on You Tube.”
(3) Can you describe what “brown-eyed” soul means to you??
  “We named it The Brown Sound" we were always      introduced as the creators of The Brown Sound. It’s nothing more than an appreciation of all music played with our own undeniable heartfelt style.”
(4)      What do the songs on “Salas” mean to you??
“The songs I wrote for this CD are meant to uplift anyone who is going through or has gone through a hard spot in their life. In 2003 my wife of twenty years was on her deathbed made me promise to do just such a CD & I did.”
(5)      Do you wish to talk about your Christian faith at all??
“My faith is the reason I was able to write what I did and raise two teenage girls as a single dad. My church family in Portland Oregon pulled me through my wife’s passing.”
(6)      What are your musical influences??
“My father & older brother both played guitar & sang professionally, they were great teachers. I was also lucky enough to see Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles and the Stones live in the late sixties to name a few, Gino Vannelli used to come see us at the Whiskey in Hollywood, I loved his jazz pop stuff as well.”
(7) What are your future music plans???
“I’m currently writing material for a new El Chicano CD as well as a new solo CD. I wrote and submitted a song with my nephew Sean Salas for the movie "Angels & Demons", It didn’t make it but you can hear it on You Tube it’s called "Illuminati" Oh by the way, I’m also in the movie playing a Cardinal.”

Tags: Bobby Espinosa, East LA, El Chicano. Jerry Salas. Viva Tirado, Fred Sanchez, Jim McCarthy, Latin Legends, Latin Rock, Tell Her She’s Lovely. Santana, Tierra, Voices of Latin Rock