The Story of Ray Barretto's Hard Hands album: "Africa calls me to party"

A time capsule from the conga player whose teacher was the street.

Barretto’s impressions from Africa, the ancestral source of his conga rhythms; the influence of James Brown’s soul soundtrack to those urgent days of the Civil Rights Movement, and the bilingual sound of the stages and streets of New York City would combine on this record.

On March 30, 1968, James Brown’s chartered plane landed in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, where he would perform his first-ever concerts in Africa over that weekend. As Brown was met with cries of “Mr. Dynamite! Mr. Dynamite” from a crowd of fans pressed against airport barricades, a reported thirty-five musicians disembarked from the jet. Conga player Ray Barretto, who a few days earlier had headlined a concert at New York’s Town Hall together with a dream line-up of boogaloo swingers Willie Bobo, Joe Cuba and Pete Rodriguez, also stepped onto African soil for the first time with his own band members, who included singer Adalberto Santiago, pianist Louie Cruz and timbalero Orestes Vilató.