Boogaloo in Peru: NY Latin Soul, Cuban Big Band and Surf Rock

From Lima with Wow!

Here’s Cuba on Record’s last Record of the Week for 2024. Salud to all!

On the two-disc compilation Magnífico Boogaloo, Pablo E. Yglesias (aka DJ Bongohead) puts together a storyful collection of songs from Lima’s 1960s and seventies music scene, where for a time New York Latin boogaloo along with The Beatles ruled the radio, and Caribbean dance rhythms combined with the psychedelic screams of nascent South American garage rock.

I think you’ll want to take this trip. I was in from the first track, a cover of Joe Cuba’s whistling boogaloo classic “El Pito (I’ll Never Go Back to Georgia)” by Santiago Silva, who, I learned from Peruvian music historian Hugo Lévano’s detailed liner notes, was a Hammond organ player and “actor and jockey until he was diagnosed with a heart condition that required him to turn his attention to music.”

Other artists who Lévano introduces here include Pablo Villanueva, “Melcochita,” a singer, percussionist and comedian who appeared on the first-ever “international night” on Late Night With David Letterman (Letterman called him “the Peruvian Steve Martin”); Nilo Espinoza and Los Hiltons, who defined their sound as “tropical music a go-go,” and the Santana-esque Tito Rojas.

Here is Melcochita in a 1983 return engagement to the Letterman show, with a routine that we could generously call outdated:

Yglesias mined the songs on Magnífico Boogaloo from the archive of the Peruvian label MAG, founded by Manuel A. Guerrero, who had an enthusiasm for tropical music. “In his pursuit of excellence, Guerrero supervised the recordings himself and didn’t hesitate to join in on the backing vocals or percussion whenever needed,” Lévano writes, drolly adding that “This is probably why he took pains to sign up the best percussionists of the day.” In 1955, the intrepid Guerrero revealed that he had come back from an exploratory trip to Havana “with new rhythms” for Peruvian big band recordings, claiming obscure finds like the meme-meme and the culata (which can be translated as big butt), as well as the globally pervasive mambo.

In the 1960s, the street sound of New York City’s bilingual population arrived in Peru. Joe Cuba’s hit “Bang Bang” and particularly “El Pito” fed the creation of what Lévano describes as “a major boogaloo scene” in Lima: “Shorn of over-elaborate arrangements, the improvisation and spontaneity of the song resonated with the young generation who were avid for new music after [in 1962] the U.S. placed an embargo on the distribution of Cuban music.”

In the spirit of boogaloo, that pre-salsa New York sound, and the Havana jam sessions of the fifties, these tracks are punctuated with shouts of “wow!” and call outs among the musicians, as well as whistles. The Lima bands claim the music as their own with references to local barrios, as on percussionist Ñico Estrada’s cover of Jimmy Sabater’s Tico Records single “Salchichas con huevos,” (Estrada’s version is called “Salchicha con Huevo”), and in song titles like “Peruvian Boogaloo” and “Peruvian Guajira.”

Joe di Roma and Melcochita turn out a very groovy version of “Guatanamera” on the track “Popurri de Boogaloos,” one of the re-imagined covers here.

Trio Chicoma y su Orquesta do a clapping, cumbia infused big-band versión of the Miriam Makeba “hit “Pata Pata” (one of my personal favorites), with Cuban tumbao from the pianist nicknamed El Pato Chino.

In the 1970s, Pancho Acosta Ángeles attended a concert in Lima by the Cuban group Los Van Van, resulting in a Van Van soundalike called “Bam Bam,” recorded with his group Los Kintos.

On the compilation’s last track, Los Reyes del Ande combine Andean Huayno music with a tropical sound on “Cadera contra cadera,” which, Lévano notes, was inspired by the disco theme “The Hustle.”

Magnífico Boogaloo is out on the consummate archival label Vampi Soul. It follows other compilations of vintage Peruvian music released by the Madrid label, notably including the catalogue of Los Saicos, the band that some have described as the original punks, whose music undoubtedly left its mark on some of the bands featured on Magnífico Boogaloo.

Here’s Los Saicos’ “Demolición,” written by the great Erwin Flores in 1964:

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