bang! bang!
Joe Cuba was born "Gilberto Calderón" in 1931 in the city of New York.
"Cuba is considered to be the "Father of Latin Boogaloo". His parents emigrated from Puerto Rico in the late 1920s and settled in Spanish Harlem, a Hispanic ghetto located in Manhattan. Cuba was raised in an apartment building where his father had become the owner of a candy store located on the ground floor (street level floor). His father had organized a stickball (ghetto baseball) club called the Devils. Stickball was the main sport activity of the neighborhood. After Cuba broke a leg he took up playing the conga and continued to practice with the conga between school and his free time. Eventually he graduated from high school and joined a band."
Recorded at La Tierra Sound Studios, NYC. Watch out for that first fade. It ain't over yet.
▼ JOE CUBA SEXTET: BANG! BANG! from "Push, Push" LP (Fania) 1966 (US)
PUSH IT TWO TIMES
5 comments:
Classy!
Stickball, by the way, is an interesting sport. It is similar to baseball, but the bat is a broom stick, much smaller than a baseball bat and the ball is a small rubber ball. Much harder to hit that small ball with that small stick and really difficult to hit it with any accuracy.
The playing field is a city street, which is not closed during play. Play is interrupted when traffic comes through, the bases are not arranged around a diamond, as in baseball, but are in a line down the street. To the best of my knowledge, stickball is not played anywhere but New York City. It is a real creation of that city.
I have Puerto Rican friends and I sometimes want to tell them just how much my family blamed everything on the Puerto Ricans. I never do. I don't think they would take it well.
They play a variation of it here in Glasgow. Very improvised as is much of the sport. They don't play in the streets anymore as there's too much traffic ; but round the courts at the bottom of flats you'll generally find a game like this, or kids kicking around the rubber ball. No rules though. That would be too taxing!
Screw it. As in your Puerto Rican friends taking umbrage. We can't be held responsible for the prejudices of our parents, man. The fact that you have Hispanic friends simply proves that you haven't inherited anything bar the memory...
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