The following remembrance is inspired by the terrific and prolific writer Odilia Rivera Santos who as part of her People for the Ethical Treatment of Puerto Ricans project at http://peopleforpuertorico.blogspot.com has asked writers to - among other suggestions - address their experiences as a Puerto Rican. As such, I'd say the next piece describes more a coming-to-awareness than a coming-of-age.
A Memory
by Richard Torres
I was ten years old and wearing my dark blue Easter suit in the middle of July. The reason? My parents had been invited by friends of theirs to a celebration of their daughter’s christening being held at a community center in what the tabloids at the time referred to as Spanish Harlem but what my family – who all hailed from and/or still lived there – lovingly called El Barrio. So we gift wrapped presents purchased from Alexander’s department store – which I carried in an Abraham & Straus shopping bag – got dressed up in our finest going-out garb and made the lengthy trek from Bushwick, Brooklyn to the aforementioned Barrio. While the summer air was predictably warm, it was nothing compared to the heat inside the windowless community center. I remember instinctively raising my right hand – the one not carrying the gifts – to loosen my blue and yellow striped tie. When my father saw what I was about to do, he quickly grabbed my hand. Shaking his head, he quietly but firmly informed me that ‘we don’t do that.’ He then pointed at the people already in the center. I looked and noted that every man was wearing a suit and tie. (Even the Joe Cuba Sextet which was setting up in the far corner.) Not one had removed his jacket nor had they loosened much less taken off their tie. Understanding, I nodded. My father smiled and lifted me onto a nearby stool in front of a makeshift bar. The bartender smiled at me as I ordered a cream soda on the rocks. The hostess of the evening - and proud mother - came over to us. At my mother’s urging, I handed her the shopping bag. She thanked me with a kiss on my forehead. I smiled my Kool-Aid smile while my mother remarked that I obviously enjoyed that very much. ‘Very much,’ my father repeated with a smile of his own. I realized his smile was a lot like mine. Then Joe Cuba and his band began to play. The song was “A Las Seis.” My father reached for my mother’s hand and they strode to the dance floor. It was an action repeated throughout the community center by every couple. Within seconds of Joe’s first downbeat, the dance floor was as crowded as Times Square on New Year’s Day. Out of the corner of my eye, I could spot an old man making his way to the bar. I instantly put up the invisible barrier I’d been taught to whenever an adult stranger entered my airspace. (Basically, this consisted of mimicking my father’s do-not-mess-with-me posture.) I could tell by his unsteady gait that the old man was drunk. He ordered a Bacardi and Coke. The bartender warily gave it to him. The old man quickly gulped down half of it then looked at me. I made sure not to look away. (After all, I wasn’t a kid; I was ten years of age.) After a brief staring match, he smiled at me and gestured to the dance floor. I carefully turned my head making sure to keep sight of him in the corner of my eye. The moment was magical. It was as if it were choreographed. Well-dressed men in their suits and ties turning their beautiful women in their dresses and heels as the band exhorted them to move even faster. (To my ten-year old eyes, it was like watching folks of various hues wearing various colors becoming an iridescent dancing rainbow.) And they did, wiping out whatever woes they had with each step, shake and shimmy. The Kool-Aid smile returned to my face. The old man smiled back at me and said before he walked away: “Now, aren’t we a fucking elegant people?” I looked back at the dance floor with my parents in the epicenter of it and proudly agreed that yes, we are. Yes, we are.
December 29, 2010
December 27, 2010
Teena Marie's Path To Soul City
With the untimely death of the great Teena Marie, I decided to dig into my archives and reprint portions of my first – and a personal favorite - article on Lady Tee from the December 5-11 1990 issue of The City Sun newspaper. The result follows....
Teena Marie’s ninth album Ivory is another chapter in the continuing saga of one of music’s most idiosyncratic performers. Tunes by this professional multihyphenate (singer-producer-musician-songwriter-arranger) contain such disparate influences as Marvin Gaye, Nikki Giovanni, Stevie Wonder and, of course, her mentor and frequent duet partner, Rick James.
Marie’s albums have always been an interesting mixture of flower-child lyricism, unabashed romanticism, street-wise posturing within a neo-traditional R&B/urban structure. In other words, homegirl wants you to cry a little, make love a lot, then party afterwards.
Much like Wonder, she’s a classicist; her music seems to evoke rather than provoke. A Marie production is professional in the highest sense of the word. The sound is crisp. The ballads are replete with gorgeous harmonies (Irons in the Fire’s title track, It Must Be Magic’s “Portuguese Love.”) The dance tracks pump with the rhythm section out front, augmented by melodious keyboards and a light sweetening of strings (Irons in the Fire’s “I Need Your Lovin’” and Lady T’s “Behind the Groove.”) The self-proclaimed Lady Tee isn’t interested in breaking new ground; she’s a refurbisher, a nurturer. Her songs are the progeny of the past. They’re subliminal aural candy.
Her career can be divided into two periods: her internship at Motown and her attempts at crossover marketability at Epic. Her first album, Wild and Peaceful bore the distinctive touch of its producer Rick James but the LP seemed more a James project than a Teena Marie one. Except for “I’m a Sucker for Your Love,” Marie’s personality didn’t come through. The result was listenable but disposable.
The follow-up Lady T, produced by Richard Rudolph, was much better. It contained the blueprint for future Teena Marie albums: start the first side with a long dance cut and slowly wind down till it’s time to flip the record. Here was her first outstanding single, “Behind the Groove” and superb slow jam, the introspective “Aladdin’s Lamp.”
“Aladdin’s Lamp” was the prototype of what would become the Teena Marie ballad: an overflow of dense imagery sung with an innocent romanticism. In anyone else’s hands (or voice) “Aladdin’s Lamp” would’ve been utter drivel but because Marie believes what she’s singing and understands what the song is about in relation to her personal views, she becomes convincing. Like Gaye and Wonder, Marie is basically an uncoverable artist. With them, one must listen to their records as a whole for it is their voices that give their songs conviction.
The next two albums, Irons in the Fire and It Must Be Magic, were Marie’s first self-productions and followed the Rudolph formula to a Tee. Both were entertaining and contained many worthwhile cuts. Besides the Magic jam “Square Biz” - with her quintessential line “You’ve heard a boatload of other ladies rap/but they ain’t got nothing on me” - there was Fire’s sensual “You Make Love Like Springtime” and Magic’s “Portuguese Love.” These two discs, together with the incendiary duet on James’ Street Songs, “Fire and Desire,” showed Marie as a comer. They seemed warm-ups for her Talking Book or What’s Going On. Instead, there was a contract dispute with Motown and her career became Epic in label only.
Robbery, her first album for Epic, was, with the exception of “Casanova Brown,” unmemorable. Starchild seemed a smooth recovery with “Lovergirl,” “Out on a Limb” and the very best of the Marvin Gaye tributes, “My Dear Mr. Gaye.” But all forward motion ceased with Emerald City, a misguided attempt to climb aboard the Prince bandwagon. For the first time Teena Marie was churning out product and it showed.
Naked to the World was a back-to-basics album. Intimate and closely scaled, the LP had an emotional weight the bloated Emerald City lacked. With soulful songs like “Ooh La La La,” Marie was concentrating on her strengths and succeeding.
Ivory, her latest album, is a direct result of that confidence. “Here’s Looking at You” is another funk-rap hybrid. “Sugar Shack” begins with a man reciting tributes to such musical legends as Sarah Vaughan and Charlie Parker over a jazzy orchestration with Teena Marie’s scatting and segues into an all-out dance jam with an outrageous cameo by Bernadette Cooper. “If I Were a Bell” and “Miracles Need Wings to Fly” are typically sumptuous torch songs. “Mr. Icecream” is the obligatory Teena "cutesy" track, a punning song that only she can get away with. Here she dishes out every frozen allusion you can think of. Every.
Where Teena Marie has succeeded is in exploding stereotypes. She isn’t your typical white girl trying to sound Black nor is she promoted in that freak-show fashion. Marie isn’t part of that glossy urban-contemporary scene. She’s one with the culture, as gutbucket as she can be. Hers isn’t a minstrel act or an approximation of Norman Mailer’s White Negro myth. Her music isn’t wrapped in the guise of homage like a George Michael. It’s a logical outgrowth from a woman immersed in a sea of Blackness and enjoying the swim.
Teena Marie’s ninth album Ivory is another chapter in the continuing saga of one of music’s most idiosyncratic performers. Tunes by this professional multihyphenate (singer-producer-musician-songwriter-arranger) contain such disparate influences as Marvin Gaye, Nikki Giovanni, Stevie Wonder and, of course, her mentor and frequent duet partner, Rick James.
Marie’s albums have always been an interesting mixture of flower-child lyricism, unabashed romanticism, street-wise posturing within a neo-traditional R&B/urban structure. In other words, homegirl wants you to cry a little, make love a lot, then party afterwards.
Much like Wonder, she’s a classicist; her music seems to evoke rather than provoke. A Marie production is professional in the highest sense of the word. The sound is crisp. The ballads are replete with gorgeous harmonies (Irons in the Fire’s title track, It Must Be Magic’s “Portuguese Love.”) The dance tracks pump with the rhythm section out front, augmented by melodious keyboards and a light sweetening of strings (Irons in the Fire’s “I Need Your Lovin’” and Lady T’s “Behind the Groove.”) The self-proclaimed Lady Tee isn’t interested in breaking new ground; she’s a refurbisher, a nurturer. Her songs are the progeny of the past. They’re subliminal aural candy.
Her career can be divided into two periods: her internship at Motown and her attempts at crossover marketability at Epic. Her first album, Wild and Peaceful bore the distinctive touch of its producer Rick James but the LP seemed more a James project than a Teena Marie one. Except for “I’m a Sucker for Your Love,” Marie’s personality didn’t come through. The result was listenable but disposable.
The follow-up Lady T, produced by Richard Rudolph, was much better. It contained the blueprint for future Teena Marie albums: start the first side with a long dance cut and slowly wind down till it’s time to flip the record. Here was her first outstanding single, “Behind the Groove” and superb slow jam, the introspective “Aladdin’s Lamp.”
“Aladdin’s Lamp” was the prototype of what would become the Teena Marie ballad: an overflow of dense imagery sung with an innocent romanticism. In anyone else’s hands (or voice) “Aladdin’s Lamp” would’ve been utter drivel but because Marie believes what she’s singing and understands what the song is about in relation to her personal views, she becomes convincing. Like Gaye and Wonder, Marie is basically an uncoverable artist. With them, one must listen to their records as a whole for it is their voices that give their songs conviction.
The next two albums, Irons in the Fire and It Must Be Magic, were Marie’s first self-productions and followed the Rudolph formula to a Tee. Both were entertaining and contained many worthwhile cuts. Besides the Magic jam “Square Biz” - with her quintessential line “You’ve heard a boatload of other ladies rap/but they ain’t got nothing on me” - there was Fire’s sensual “You Make Love Like Springtime” and Magic’s “Portuguese Love.” These two discs, together with the incendiary duet on James’ Street Songs, “Fire and Desire,” showed Marie as a comer. They seemed warm-ups for her Talking Book or What’s Going On. Instead, there was a contract dispute with Motown and her career became Epic in label only.
Robbery, her first album for Epic, was, with the exception of “Casanova Brown,” unmemorable. Starchild seemed a smooth recovery with “Lovergirl,” “Out on a Limb” and the very best of the Marvin Gaye tributes, “My Dear Mr. Gaye.” But all forward motion ceased with Emerald City, a misguided attempt to climb aboard the Prince bandwagon. For the first time Teena Marie was churning out product and it showed.
Naked to the World was a back-to-basics album. Intimate and closely scaled, the LP had an emotional weight the bloated Emerald City lacked. With soulful songs like “Ooh La La La,” Marie was concentrating on her strengths and succeeding.
Ivory, her latest album, is a direct result of that confidence. “Here’s Looking at You” is another funk-rap hybrid. “Sugar Shack” begins with a man reciting tributes to such musical legends as Sarah Vaughan and Charlie Parker over a jazzy orchestration with Teena Marie’s scatting and segues into an all-out dance jam with an outrageous cameo by Bernadette Cooper. “If I Were a Bell” and “Miracles Need Wings to Fly” are typically sumptuous torch songs. “Mr. Icecream” is the obligatory Teena "cutesy" track, a punning song that only she can get away with. Here she dishes out every frozen allusion you can think of. Every.
Where Teena Marie has succeeded is in exploding stereotypes. She isn’t your typical white girl trying to sound Black nor is she promoted in that freak-show fashion. Marie isn’t part of that glossy urban-contemporary scene. She’s one with the culture, as gutbucket as she can be. Hers isn’t a minstrel act or an approximation of Norman Mailer’s White Negro myth. Her music isn’t wrapped in the guise of homage like a George Michael. It’s a logical outgrowth from a woman immersed in a sea of Blackness and enjoying the swim.
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