While Harlow wasn’t as interested in going down Fania’s Latin soul path, Arverne and Bataan embraced it, with the latter most represented on Good Good Feeling via 23 cuts. It was fun to do that.” Harvey Averneįania’s Latin soul history was a big enough tent to include a number of non-Latin performers that included Jewish musicians Harlow and Harvey Averne and Joe Bataan, a former gang banger-turned-vocalist of Filipino-African-American descent. It was an interesting experience and there were a lot of things that needed to be picked up from the Jerry Masucci and post-Jerry Masucci era, which basically ignored the artists. We should just be chucking it out as CDs for $10 or whatever it was. At first, when I worked on this music in the mid-2000s, there were people saying if you treat music this way, it will be ignored.
“Therefore, the most important songs from Fania were as important to people of all generations at that point. “With this project, I felt it was strictly a cultural way that this music seemed more relevant on a day-to-day basis within the Puerto Rican/Dominican cultures than mainstream music’s history did,” he said. Young Mods: Subway Joe Bataan (front and center) and pals During that time, Rutland also compiled lists of discographies that didn’t exist, which helped immensely when it came time to doing the detective work of tracking singles down for this anthology, a task Rutland treated very seriously. That was when a mysterious invoice unearthed by the accounting department yielded a deep cache of archival material stashed away in a warehouse in Upstate New York, hundreds of miles away from the label’s Miami headquarters. A bulk of the artwork used can be traced back to Rutland’s first tour of duty. In addition, he reached out for help from original label art and design director Izzy Sanabria, currently enjoying retirement down in Florida. But, at the same time, I found the people who had dealt with the music previously, had never really dealt with it in a historical manner that was respectful in the same way that you would treat a label like Motown.”Įnlisted by storied label executive Joe McEwen, Rutland leaned heavy on his first go-round with Fania to build the framework for this anthology overflowing with rich imagery and ephemera running the gamut from promotional shots and singles sleeves to promotional fliers and album covers. “As soon as I started working on it, I found the cultural aspect so overwhelming, it almost felt inappropriate as an outsider. “I find it a very odd thing that I ended up with this knowledge of Fania,” the Brit admitted during a recent Zoom call. Compiled and co-produced by DJ Dean Rutland (who also penned the fascinating and rigorously informative liner notes), Good, Good Feeling is a musical time capsule whose contents were curated with the institutional knowledge Rutland gleaned as head of A&R for the label from 2006 to 2009. It’s this chapter of the label’s history that’s thoroughly covered in It’s A Good, Good Feeling: The Latin Soul of Fania Records (The Singles), a four-CD/7-inch box set featuring single versions of 89 tracks from artists ranging from label stalwarts Larry Harlow and Ray Barretto to lesser-known names like Ralfi Pagan and Ralph Robles. Many of them were Puerto Rican, Cuban and Dominican and were equally enthralled by the aforementioned R&B getting pumped out from Detroit and Memphis.īoogaloo represented a hybridization of R&B and Latin music styles like mambo and cha cha that yielded a handful of hits including Pete Rodríguez’s “I Like It Like That” and Joe Cuba’s “Bang Bang.” It was a trend that led Fania to make a foray down that path in quest for crossover success from 1965 to 1975. Founded in 1964 by Dominican-born composer/bandleader Johnny Pacheco and Brooklyn-born, Italian-American ex-New York City police officer/lawyer Jerry Masucci in 1964, Fania’s demographic was a younger generation of predominantly second-generation Latin-Americans. What Motown and Stax/Volt were to rhythm and blues, Fania Records occupied the same place in the world of Spanish-language music that evolved from boogaloo into salsa by the early to mid-’70s. Archival box set explores Fania Records’ attempt at crossing over
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