Gypsy Woman

To be young, gifted, and brown in 1960s East Harlem: On the stoop, you might hear the sound of chá-chá-chás and pachangas chattering down the block. Up in apartment hallways, young men harmonized together, fantasizing about becoming the next Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. Musical movements were in flux, least of all in Uptown. The mambo palaces of the 1950s were a fond but fading memory, doo-wop and early R&B were giving way to soul, and most importantly, a cohort of mostly Puerto Rican Americans—Nuyoricans—were coming of age, seeking a stake for their generation’s sonic sensibilities. Into that moment strode Joe Bataan, knife in hand.

He was born Bataan Nitollano, son of a Filipino immigrant father and African American mother. He would later self-describe himself, on an album title no less, as “Afrofilipino,” but as a kid, he ran deep with the Nuyorican crowd around 106th and Lexington. In his teens, he helped lead a local Puerto Rican street gang called The Dragons, but a few stints in the pen encouraged him to seek a different path. He turned to music.

One day in 1964, when he was in his early 20s, Bataan found himself among a squabbling group of teenage musicians from P.S. 13. They were in the auditorium, debating who should lead the band and Bataan settled things by pulling out a knife, stabbing it into the top of a piano, and declaring, “I’m the leader!” Thus was born The Latin Swingers, which he claims was the youngest Latin band in New York at the time.

The group’s trombone player and second-in-command was Joe “Chickie” Fuente and on their business card, interested parties were told to “Call Joe or Bataan.” A promoter misread that and thought the band’s leader was “Joe Bataan.” The name stuck. The group landed a steady gig with the Tropicoro Ballroom in the Bronx and in an alternate universe, that may have been the most notoriety they ever achieved. But in 1966, a “new breed” of Latin music was bubbling up in New York that would enrapture Bataan and his band: boogaloo.

A brief primer: Boogaloo began as a dance craze, similar to the watusi, jerk, twist, etc. before it. The most common version of it involves throwing your head and arms back and forth; James Brown once described it as “one of the hardest dances in the world, I used to get dizzy doing it.” As lore has it, the Chicago/Detroit duo of Tom and Jerrio saw it being performed at a sock hop and wrote their single “Boo-Ga-Loo” in homage. Their song became a runaway hit throughout the spring and summer of 1965, begetting a string of copycat recordings by other R&B artists: “In a Boogaloo Bag,” “My Baby Likes to Boogaloo,” “Boogaloo #3,” etc. By 1966, the dance had made its way into New York ballrooms and it was here that Nuyorican house bands began to tinker with it, giving birth to a distinctive Latin boogaloo style.

The fact that English lyrics were central to the boogaloo’s popularity proved fateful for Joe Bataan. During his band’s residency at the Tropicoro Ballroom, the Latin Swingers mostly played traditional Latin dance music, with Spanish-language verses. That meant it was singer George “Joe” Pagan, not Bataan, who was the dominant voice. However, Pagan’s thick accent wasn’t ideal for English lyrics so as the boogaloo began to bubble up, Bataan took over on vocals.

Though he was a proficient enough piano player, Bataan’s best instrument was his tenor. Unlike other English-language cantantes like Jimmy Sabater of the Joe Cuba Sextet, Bataan didn’t croon in the hushed, smooth tone of a Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett. His chops, full-throated and intensely emotive, bore the influence of the doo-wop and R&B records he grew up on. That voice proved key to drawing the interest of a young record executive trying to get his new Latin label off the ground: Jerry Masucci of Fania Records.

By the 1970s, Fania would become synonymous with salsa music, but boogaloo helped keep the lights on during its early years. In the mid-’60s, George Goldner’s Tico and Al Santiago’s Alegre were the dominant Latin labels in New York and to gain an edge on them, Masucci gambled on younger, unproven musicians including trumpeter Bobby Valentin, pianist Larry Harlow and a teenage trombonist named Willie Colon. With Bataan though, Masucci found more than just a musician; here was a voice that could sell to black, white, and Latino audiences. Fania signed Bataan and put him on the path to recording his debut album, 1967’s Gypsy Woman.

On the album’s liner notes, author George Rosas writes, “Today…music has gained a new ingredient. This new ingredient has become a binding force of youth and music throughout the world…This ingredient, as you must have gathered by now, is called ’Soul’…It is difficult to indicate the type of ’Soul’ which expressed, so beautifully, by Joe Bataan. It is a hypnotizing, yet a swinging and vibrant sound.” Clunky diction aside, Fania clearly wanted to position Bataan as the label’s premier Latin soul artist.

Fittingly, the first single Bataan recorded for Fania nodded to an earlier soul classic: The Impressions’ 1961 hit, “Gypsy Woman.” However, Bataan’s “Gypsy Woman” wasn’t a cover version. Beyond an opening line that riffed on Curtis Mayfield’s songwriting, Bataan changed everything else: the lyrics, the arrangement, the instrumentation, etc. Whereas The Impressions’ mellow original had more in common, aurally, with a bachelor pad exotica record, Bataan’s song was ferociously uptempo and unmistakably Afro-Cuban, opening with a lively piano montuno and background singers yelling, “She smokes, hot hot, she smokes!”

Bataan himself comes in after a five bar intro, his voice carrying a touch of smokiness and a burr of vibrato when he elongates his vowels. Other boogaloo breakout hits in 1967, including Pete Rodriguez’s “I Like It Like That” and Johnny Colon’s “Boogaloo Blues,” boasted memorable hooks but the singing was middling at best. By comparison, on “Gypsy Woman,” Bataan demonstrated that he could be a quadruple threat: singer, songwriter, pianist, and bandleader.

”Gypsy Woman” was an auspicious way to launch Bataan’s career but when it came time to assemble the Gypsy Woman album, Fania was wary of going all-in on the boogaloo. The budding craze may have been a crossover hit with black and white audiences, but Fania couldn’t afford to alienate Latin music traditionalists. Many of those conservative fans saw the boogaloo as a dilution of “pure” Afro-Cuban traditions; Latin jazz star Eddie Palmieri famously derided the style as “bubblegum.” As a hedge, labels would commit to a handful of boogaloo songs on an album but also balanced things out with an array of conventional Latin dance tunes.

The Gypsy Woman album includes, for example, a pair of frenetic mambos (”Fuego” and “Campesino”), a guaguanco (”Sugar Guaguanco”), and most interestingly, “Figaro.” The latter begins as a standard cha-cha-chá but midway, slips into a Spanish-language guajira with a slinky montuno laid over a 4/4 backbeat: basically, a boogaloo. In “Figaro” we can hear the past giving way to the present; it’s like the band decided halfway through to hit ’em with the new style.”

For the dancers, the aptly named “Fuego” offers up six-and-a-half fiery minutes of parquet-pounding goodness, capped by a stellar piano performance by Bataan. George Pagan handled Spanish vocal duties on all these traditional Latin cuts, but Bataan reclaims the mic on the album’s four boogaloo songs: “Gypsy Woman,” “So Fine,” “Chickie’s Trombone,” and “Too Much Lovin’.” Of the batch, “Gypsy Woman,” is the clear standout but “Too Much Lovin’” would prove influential down the road. The fast hand claps that open the song would return on one of Bataan’s definitive boogaloo hits, “Subway Joe,” from the 1968 album of the same name.

Gypsy Woman ends with the enduring Joe Bataan classic: “Ordinary Guy.” Despite the light Latin percussion, it’s also a soul ballad at heart, the lament of a forlorn lover suffering from an epic case of self-pitying blues: “I don’t have thousands to spend or a seaside cottage for the weekend/I’m just an/Ordinary guy/You left behind”

The song would prove so popular that between 1967 and 1975, Bataan re-recorded four different versions for three albums and a single. The last is the most obscure of the bunch and though it’s not much different from the album version, it opens with guest pianist Richard Tee doling out a melody reminiscent of Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Your Precious Love.” Whether the Motown nod was deliberate or accidental, this version of “Ordinary Guy” placed Bataan within the traditions of soul music even as he was also pushing an emergent boogaloo sound.

After Gypsy Woman, Bataan would become one of Fania’s most prolific artists, releasing seven more albums over the next five years before acrimoniously splitting from the label over royalty disputes in 1972. During that time, boogaloo flew high and then, depending on who you believe, either burned itself out or was deliberately killed off by the Latin music industry in order to clear the lane for salsa. Regardless, in that brief time, boogaloo’s appeal went global. Latin music artists in countries such as Puerto Rico, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela cut their own interpretations of boogaloo and in a marvelous full circle, musicians in West African countries such as Benin, Senegal, Nigeria and others also embraced the style. Boogaloo was always a melding of different musical threads spooling from the African diaspora and here it was, a prodigal Afro-Latin-American son, returning home.

For Bataan, the ’70s were far kinder to him than many of his boogaloo-era peers whose careers rose and fell with the style’s fortunes. Ever keeping his ear to the street, he went onto release two popular disco-era albums, Salsoul in 1973 and the aforementioned Afrofilipino in 1975. He even recorded a pioneering disco rap single, “Rap-O, Clap-O” in 1979, just months after “Rapper’s Delight” had introduced hip-hop to the world.

When his career began to wind down in the early ’80s, he took it as an opportunity to focus on his family and for decades, he worked as a youth counselor at the very juvenile corrections center where he had spent quality time as a teenager. Latin soul fans rediscovered him a generation later, sparking a career revival that began in the late ’90s that’s allowed Bataan to return to a prolific touring schedule. I’ve seen him perform a slew of times and at all his shows, however else he mixes up the play set, “Gypsy Woman” and “Ordinary Guy” remain in constant rotation. The former shimmers with verve, the latter is soaked in pathos, but both remain important legacies from the moment where boogaloo broke out of el barrio and took flight across the world.