03.18 vinyl podcast - El Chicano
On this show, I play “Coming Home Baby” recorded by El Chicano on their 1970 album Viva Tirado. El Chicano is a band that got its start in the late ’60s in East L.A., and which made a name for themselves locally with their latino-influenced covers of popular jazz and rock tunes. Viva Tirado was their first album, recorded for MCA, and in addition to “Coming Home Baby,” they cover Herbie Hancock’s “Canteloupe Island,” Burt Bacharach’s “The Look of Love,” and The Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby,” as well as the Gerald Wilson song from which they took the album’s name. They had reasonable success with the record, especially considering that it’s all instrumental.
They recorded six albums in the next six years, during which time the group saw a great deal of personnel changes, including the addition of some vocalists. Of these albums, I’d probably most recommend their 1973 self-titled disc, which has a cover of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” which is pretty decent. Maybe I’ll play it on a future show.
Stylistically, El Chicano’s sound on Viva Tirado manages to sit right between the cocktail lounge latin music of the ’60s and the rock-blues-jazz fusion of later War and Santana. On this track a raw guitar solo offsets perfectly offsets the smooth, if unusually bright-sounding, organ. This juxtaposition is illustrated by the fact that the two instruments have been placed at opposite edges of the recording’s stereo spread, with the organ in the right channel and the guitar in the left, except during a solo, when the guitar moves to the center of the sound. What would otherwise be a perfectly reasonable four-piece blues-rock track is really enhanced by the very simple addition of congas, which sit almost inconspicuously in the mix, but give the song a chugging driving force, and an urgency that contrasts nicely with the laid-back melody.
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March 18th, 2005 at 8:20 pm
Santana — yes, exactly. Mainly because of the percussion and maybe the guitar, a little. Jazzy and funky. I like that. I’ve never heard these guys before, but I’d like to hear more. And at the risk of mentioning Chicago again, did you notice that the chorus is based on the same chord pattern as “I’m A Man.”
March 20th, 2005 at 8:46 am
I just found you podcast a few days ago, and I’m really enjoying catching up. You have some really great tunes.
I have a couple questions for you.
What are you using to import your records? I assume it’s a breakout box of some kind, but I’d love to hear the details.
Also… I noticed that you include artwork with your files. How is that done? It’s a really great idea, and more people should doing it :)
March 21st, 2005 at 6:49 am
A comment to the comments:
I think it’s quite sad that Latin Rock is always being measured on (Carlos) Santana almost exclusively. There were many groups playing this kind of music during that era, and Santana was neither the first nor necessarily (in my opinion) the best and definitely not even the most original act of them all. Just keep in mind that most of his early hits were also covers: Oye Como Va and Para Los Rumberos (Tito Puente), Black Magic Woman (Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac), Evil Ways (Sonny Henry) or Jingo (Babatunde Olatunji).
Most likely Santana got that famous because he was just lucky to be featured very prominently in the Woodstock movie…
An excellent guide to Chicano Rock is the “Chicano Power” sampler by Soul Jazz Records: http://tinyurl.com/6pewq
Coming Home Baby was written and performed by Herbie Mann’s group (Tucker/Dorough) in the early 60s. There’s also a nice vocal version by Mel Torme, released as the B side of his monster Right Now (in fact that was also a Herbie Mann original).
“I’m A Man” comes rather late to the party. And it was originally written and performed by the Spencer Davis Group (Miller/Winwood) anyway… :)
As for including artwork with mp3 - try iTunes: http://www.apple.com/itunes/
On Mac OS X there are even a couple of 3rd party “iTunes helpers” available that will attempt to download the corresponding artwork from e.g. amazon.com automatically.
March 21st, 2005 at 9:59 am
Thanks for the comments everyone.
Regarding Santana, Chicago: Obviously these musicians, like most, were standing on the shoulders of giants. In my opinon, that shouldn’t detract from the subjective enjoyment of their music or from the utility of using them as examples of a given style. That said, part of what I’m up to with the Vinyl Podcast is attempting to shine a light on some artists who labored in relative obscurity, often as a result of economic, geographical and racial factors rather than on the merits of their music. Thanks, Lou, for providing some great background info.
Regarding my recording setup: I’ve gotten a handful of emails and comments about this, and in the near future, I’m going to put together a short piece on the site about my process. In a nutshell, I’m running my phono preamp into an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 card, which I can recommend without reservation as a great budget solution for high-quality audio I/O and MIDI on one PCI card.
Regarding album art: Lou hit it on the head. I’m using iTunes, which makes the addition of image files quite easy using their “album art” field. That said, attaching images to mp3s is not iTunes-specific, iTunes is just using standard ID3 tags, which should be accessible and editable using any number of mp3 playback applications or ID3 tag editors.
March 23rd, 2005 at 5:53 am
Hi Cody
> “In my opinon, that shouldn’t detract from the subjective enjoyment of their music or from the utility of using them as examples of a given style.”
Of course not… :)
It’s only that particularly Latin Rock is often being reduced to Carlos Santana only. E.g. only few know that his brother Jorge also has a big part in the music history as the guitar player of Malo.
That said, even (Carlos) Santana had their great moments, I like in particular their albums Welcome (very jazzy) and Amigo (very funky).
> “M-Audio Audiophile 2496 card, which I can recommend without reservation”
I’ve got this card in my (now almost retired) PowerMac G4/466 and it never really worked as expected, neither in OS 9 nor in OS X 10.3.x; possibly the best results I’ve got with OS X 10.2.x. On Panther I always had heavy dropouts on audio I/O if I pluged in my Roland synth to the MIDI I/O. I have bought the card when it was quite new in 2001, but I’m not sure if I just had the bad luck of being an “early adopter” because the G4/466 series always had serious audio flaws anyway. In fact I wanted to use the G4 as my homerecording studio but I ended up doing audio on my iBook with the M-Audio FireWire 410 - which works almost flawlessly by the way, except, you guessed it, with the G4… (Recently I just got a brand new PowerBook, so I’m quite happy again… :)
Actual Macs (except for the iBook and Mini) all come with a 24 bit analog audio input so all you need is a phono preamp of some kind.
You can also use Griffin iMic USB audio with their own Final Vinyl application (Mac only), which features a special EQ allowing to plug a phono player to the iMic directly without a preamp. I can confirm that it works, although I prefer to record vinyl through an amp since the turntables are plugged in anyway… :)