Soul Music.

• Author: McKissack, Fred
• Position: Cachao, Rolando Alphonso, Thomas McCook, and other Cuban jazz musicians - Brief Article

As a teenager, I dug Duran Duran, Prince, the Specials, the Ohio Players, the Buzzcocks, the Jam, the Beatles, the Who, Cool and the Gang, George Clinton, even George Jones. And I coveted my father's collection of jazz, blues, and early 1960s lounge.

Now, twenty years later, I still base my musical tastes on what makes me bop my head. On a recent trip to my hometown of St. Louis, as I was traveling through central Illinois, where the radio landscape is as flat as the state's topography, the great Cuban bassist Israel "Cachao" Lopez and the Jamaican legends the Skatalites saved my wife and me from going nuts.

But this musical trip also caused me to revisit the notion of black music. When we talk about black music, we have a tendency to start in the Delta or Motown, or Philly, Compton, and Harlem. We don't usually mention Havana, Kingston, or Port-au-Prince. What attracted me to Cachao was mostly his music, but also that he looked like my dad's Uncle Lemuel. The brothers in the Skatalites looked like folks on my mom's side of the family. In essence, they all looked like family. The music industry needs to get away from the parochial indexes it has created to divide music and come up with something more substantial, worldly, and honest.

So, as the kids say, let's kick it old school for a little while, because these artists are, for lack of a better word, gods. While leaving Chicago, which is a frighteningly long ride through miles of traffic jams and suburban tract housing, I listened to Cachao Y Su Ritmo Caliente from Havana to New York. The music made me long for a place I've never been and a time several years before my birth.

This fifty-minute CD is split between two studio descargas, or jam sessions--the first in Havana in 1957, the other in New York in 1961. These descargas feature jazz legends from Cuba and the United States. But the central feature is Cachao and his double bass.

While every track on this CD rocks the house, it is the throbbing beat of "Caballos Locos," the last song on the album, that will touch your soul. Cachao is joined by Marcelino Valdes on timbales, Frank Anderson handling the piano, and trumpeters Clark Terry and Jimmy Nottingham in a beat that is as cool as it is kinetic. The CD highlights the fusion of Cuban and American jazz influences. It is clean without being antiseptic, soulful without being sentimental. If your head ain't rockin' when you listen to this tune, then you are seriously devoid of funk.

But...