Latin Soul King is half-Filipino

Latin Soul King is half-Filipino

By Anagaile Soriano

Affectionately known as the Latin Soul King, music artist, composer, producer and keyboardist/piano player, Joe Bataan had his Canadian debut performance in Toronto last Friday July 14, 2006 as part of Habourfront Centre’s summer festival and a celebration of Bataan’s 40 year career in music.

Well enjoyed by a very energetic, diverse crowd of old and young, his Latin-infused tunes drew the crowd dancing. Performing both lead vocals and piano, Bataan’s music is filled with infectious Latin soul grooves, sweet and tender soul ballads that is uniquely melodic and jazzy.

Young, Gifted and Brown

Born in 1942 as Bataan Nitollano to an African American mother and Filipino father, he was raised in New York’s East Harlem or what is also known as Spanish Harlem, and lived in a Puerto Rican neighbourhood. In his teenage years, he associated with street gangs, and found himself spending five years in prison for riding a stolen vehicle. In prison, he learned about music and started recording soon after his release. He immersed himself in Latin music and taught himself how to play the piano. Much of his music involved stories of life in the streets in the 1950s. He listened to musicals, rock and roll and rhythm and blues (R&B). In the 1960s he would experiment by combining funky Latin music with rhythm and blues, then later fusing Latin with English lyrics.

Joe Bataan’s musical influences include conga player Joe Cuba, Hector Rivera and piano player Pete Rodriguez, all of which are artists and bandleaders of the Latin boogaloo movement of the 1960s, a crossover of do-wop style Latin and R&B music.

Latin Soul

Joe Bataan’s diverse music style ranged from boogaloo but with a Latin soul, funk, R&B, component to disco and salsa, but is widely known for creating Latin soul music. Although the phrase “Latin Soul” is used in the early 60s and late 50s by artists like La Lupe and Tito Puente, Bataan actually created the music as it should have sounded and merged Latin music with R&B in the late 1960s.

Latin Soul, “… is a blend of mambo and pop tinged with R&B and Latin jazz, emphasizing short, ultra-catchy tunes and infectious rhythms (All music guide and Wikipedia Music Encyclopedia), but music historians also say that these developments in Latin music captures the social and cultural interplay found on the streets of Black and Spanish Harlem. Like Bataan, his music speaks about himself, love narratives, and life experiences.

Joe Bataan organized his first band in 1965 when he had his first successful hit “Gypsy Woman” on Fania Records. His innovative sounds fusing Afro-Cuban rhythms and soul brought popular hits like “Subway Joe” (Subway Joe, Fania, 1969), “Ordinary Guy” from the album Riot! (Fania, 1970), and “La Botella,” Latin version of the great Gil-Scott Heron’s “The Bottle.” As a distinguished composer and a co-founder of the Salsoul record label in mid 1970s, he recorded more than 10 albums, including his first LP on Salsoul in 1975 entitled “Afro-Filipino” which gave him the biggest hit on the American R&B charts. While Latin soul music started to fade away in the late 70s, disco started. Bataan’s smooth disco influenced “Rap-O Clap O” (Salsoul, 1979) became the first rap disco hit, not in America, but throughout Europe, just within weeks of Sugarhill Gang’s release of Rapper’s delight.

Where has he been?

According to Philadelphia Daily News article in 1997, after his ground breaking career from the 1960s to 70s, in the eighties, he spent time with Yvonne, his wife of twenty six years (who is also Bataan’s band member and background vocalist) to raise a family, help his children to be karate champs, and work as a counsellor for juveniles in New York.

In 1996, he returned to stage for a benefit concert in the Bronx (New York) with Latin music artists and colleagues Eddie Palmieri and Tito Puente in the audience, and also performed in San Francisco in 2005. Recently, he recorded an album “Call My Name” (Vampisoul, 2005) and a live album “The Message” (ITP records, 2005) which still has that same vintage sound of his earlier recordings but with a fresh twist of funky vocals and instruments. Until today, DJs use his old vinyl music recordings in music mixes, while an anthology of his music has been released in Japan. Today, his recordings from the Fania label are available on CD.

A very down-to-earth but talented King of Latin Soul artist back to take you on an explosive, funky, Latin soul music journey says, “It’s been my moniker for a long time. You know, hey, I’m an ordinary guy. Don’t expect anything else.”