The Berríos Brothers and their father (with the micro
by Antonio Mejías-Rentas
REUNITED: Composer Larry Harlow conducted a 40-piece ensemble in the staging of his classic 1977 recording – as part of the Aug. 1 Lincoln Center Out of Doors concert series. The concert at Damrosch Park in Manhattan featured a special performance by Rubén Blades, who sang lead vocals for the Grammy- nominated album.
It marked the first performance together in decades of two o salsa’s most respected musicians.
Harlow, a fierce pianist audiences best remember as “el judí maravilloso”– said it wasn’t hard to get the Panamanian singersongwrite to recreate. “Rubén had just finished being the tourism minister for Panama. He hadn’t performed for four years and he was raring to go,” Harlow said in an interview.
Harlow was a rising salsa star at New York’s Fania label in the early ’70s when Blades worked in the mail room. Harlow recognized Blades’ talent and eventuallly hired him for his band, helping launch one of salsa’s most distinguished careers.
“He said it was payback,” Harlow said of Blades’ acceptance. “Reuniting with Harlow, a true star in this genre and an old colleague at Fania, is important to me,” Blades said in a separate interview. “It will mean going back to pieces of my past, to when I started in New York as a young undocumented [worker].”
To mark the historic performance, Código Music, which now owns the Fania catalogue– is releasing a re-mastered, limited edition of Laraza latina.
Harlow said he had dreamed for years of staging a live performance of the rare salsa suite, which tells the history of Afro-Caribbeanmusic. The lone other time it had been performed live was in a 2009 student production at Cal State Los Angeles, where Harlow endows a scholarship. It was there where Harlow met Cuban singer Adonis Puentes, who will be featured at the New York concert.
While Blades could commit only to the New York show, Harlow said he hopes to take the show on the road, perhaps with salsa stars Luis Enrique or Gilberto Santa Rosa singing the lead part.
HE WROTE THE SONGS: Roberto Canto- ral, the Mexican composer of some of the best known Spanish-language songs of the last century, has died.He was 80.
His songs — El reloj and La barca are among the classics — were performed by the top stars in the Spanish-speaking world. As one of his country’s top composers, he was a strong advocate of copyright laws and had been the president of the Sociedad de Autores y Compositores de México since the ’80s.
He was als o the father of actress Itatí Cantoral. Roberto Cantoral reportedly fell ill while at his home in Brownsville, Texas. He was put on a flight to a Mexico City hospital, but his wcondition forced the pilot to land the plane in Toluca, where he was hospitalized and shortly thereafter died, on Aug. 7.
The SACM said that El reloj and La barca each were recorded over a thousand times. Hispanic Link. Has notado que por mucho que trabajas y te
