Boogaloo (music style)
Boogaloo (also Spanish Boogalú, Bugalú ) is a style of music from New York that was particularly popular in the USA from 1966 to 1969 .
origin
According to legend, the boogaloo was the creation of Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean musicians who lived in Harlem in the immediate vicinity, partied together and mixed their rhythms. In this sense, the boogaloo was a fusion of rock and roll , bomba and son . Many musicians stated that they were mainly influenced by rhythm & blues . The term “Boogaloo” is derived from “ Boogie-Woogie ”.
The most famous boogaloo musicians were Pete Rodríguez ( Pete's Boogalu , I like it like that , Micaela ), José Calderón (stage name: Joe Cuba Bang, bang , El Pito ), Ricardo Ray ( Jala, Jala y Boogaloo ) and Johnny Colón . Jala, Jala y Boogaloo (1967) was also the first LP with the title “Boogaloo” in the title. The forerunner of the Boogaloo was Watusi by Ray Barretto in 1965 .
It is difficult to say what prompted a jazz percussionist like Ray Barretto or a conservatory pianist like Ricardo Ray to develop a genre of music like Boogaloo. Possibly it was an attempt to build on the great time of Latin American dance music in the 1950s and to make the old rhythms son , bolero and guaracha socially acceptable again, to oppose the all-dominant Anglo-American rock and pop music with a Latin American counterpoint and thus at the same time commercially to be succesfull.
The old Charanga orchestras and Latin big bands were reduced considerably: Calderón limited himself to just six musicians with his “Joe Cuba Sextet”: vocals, bass, piano, vibraphone and a combination of timbales and congas . This mix of rhythms was trend-setting for the new sound of boogaloo and beyond that to salsa . Following the example of the twist , which was very popular in the southern United States in the early 1960s, the boogaloo was supposed to accommodate fast, danceable rhythms. In its early days, the music often had an experimental character with a lot of improvisation from Latin jazz (see for example Son, Cuero y Boogaloo by Ray Barretto - 1966).
The boogaloo was presented to an American audience that was unfamiliar with Latin American rhythms to commercial success. In addition to the reduced rhythm, this also included texts in English. In the song “El pito” by Joe Cuba there are two refrains in Spanish and English: if the choir sings “Asi se goza” at first, this changes to “I'll never go back to Georgia, I'll never go back” . This was new until then; the boogaloo was increasingly sung in English. Above all, it impressed with its slang and its simple expressive content: "Push, push - bang, bang, bang" and "Yeah, Yeah" (all by Joe Cuba).
development
In its short heyday, the boogaloo achieved enormous popularity that crossed the borders of New York and even reached the Caribbean regions of Colombia and Venezuela ("Federico y su Combo"). All Latin American groups, including the salsa pioneers Eddie Palmieri and the Gran Combo in Puerto Rico, had boogaloo in their repertoire during this time . Nevertheless, the boogaloo disappeared almost completely in 1969 and then went into salsa (or into the Latin rock of Carlos Santana ). The reasons lay mainly in the lack of identification of his listeners with the music: the texts with their onomatopoeia, the Shingaling and Jalajala, were basically too banal to really address anyone. The musical line-up, especially the rhythm section, was increased a little afterwards in Salsa. No dance style of its own developed for music either; Boogaloo was danced freestyle: Classical dance elements from the swing mixed with spontaneous improvisations to the music, which were often tamped into the ground as in a twist and accompanied by the typical circular hip movements.
In 1990 Tito Nieves reissued the classic "I like it like that" in a cover version by adding hip-hop elements to the piece. However, the boogaloo has the most lasting success in Colombia , where it was celebrated with its fast rhythm as a welcome alternative to cumbia . The group La Sonora Carruseles occasionally included Boogaloo in their program ( Heavy Salsa (1998) - Salsa Brava / Salsa con Swing (2000)) and Grupo Galé celebrated its tenth anniversary with “Boogalú con Galé”.
Further development of the term
In the 1970s a street dance called Electric Boogaloo developed on the US West Coast , which has little to do with the original Boogaloo and developed under the influence of funk music and hip-hop dance. Based on the largely overlooked film Breakin '2: Electric Boogaloo , which was released in 1984, the term boogaloo developed into a political meme on social media and a violent, right-wing extremist movement, the so-called boogaloo movement .
Web links
- Article about the history of Boogaloo at salsacrazy.com (English)