Our Latin Thing (1972, 480p)
3mon 25d ago by piefed.social/u/klu9 in fullmoviesonyoutube@piefed.social from www.youtube.com
Salsa music legend Willie Colon has passed away, so here's an awesome documentary by a young(ish) Leon Gast (who later won an Oscar for When We Were Kings about the Rumble in the Jungle) about the salsa scene & Latino culture in New York, with footage from multiple concerts interspersed with life on the streets. A real slice of NYC in the early 70s!
(Mostly music & spoken word in English; some Spanish with hard subs in English.)
The Yankee Stadium concert scene, in particular, is insane! (Mongo Santamaria & Ray Barretto drive the crowd so wild with their conga battle, it literally starts a riot!)
For many years, it was only available on a few deteriorating VHS tapes. I finally managed to see it ~2009 using Ares Galaxy (before it became just another BitTorrent client, it was its own P2P filesharing network popular in the Spanish-speaking world), but in 2019 Fania Records (the company behind the film & the salsa music boom of the 60s & 70s) remastered it & uploaded it to YouTube.
Youtube description:
Our Latin Thing (Nuestra Cosa) is a musical documentary revealing the exciting lifestyle of New York Latinos during the decade of the 1970s. The film captures the New York '70s salsa explosion in all its power and adrenaline. Directed by acclaimed filmmaker Leon Gast, highlights include performance by Cheo Feliciano at the top his game with an orchestra of superstars whose backup vocalists alone includes Héctor Lavoe, Ismael Miranda, Adalberto Santiago and Pete 'El Conde' Rodríguez. Gast takes also to the streets of the Spanish Harlem where the salsa phenomenon was born, as well as into the recording studio for a peek into the creative process, featuring producer/keyboardist Larry Harlow. Our Latin Thing (Nuestra Cosa) is remastered from original tapes.
2011 interview with Leon Gast about making Our Latin Thing:
We speak to New Jersey-born director Leon Gast about Our Latin Thing, a film documenting a Fania All-Stars concert and Latino life in Manhattan (New York) in 1971. The film was reissued earlier this year and is fast becoming known as THE definitive salsa documentary. In our opinion it is one of the finest music documentaries ever made, never mind just salsa.
Salsa music legend Willie Colon has passed away
oh yeah I noticed that, when I was a kid my pops played his stuff on repeat. It wasn't really my thing, but I knew Siembra (Colon's collaboration with Ruben Blades) by memory since it was on so often. I'll have to check out that documentary.
When I was a kid, I used to put on a purple cassette my mum had of Rubén Blades's Greatest Hits (at that time, pretty much all his hits were collaborations with Willie) to give me the energy to do household chores like the washing up 🕺 Almost the first thing I thought of when TFG had a hit squad snatch Maduro was their song Tiburón from that purple tape.
Colón was doing great stuff with Héctor Lavoe in the 60s & early 70s (I think this film's title was directly inspired by the title of Willie's 1970 album with Héctor, Cosa Nuestra) shaping salsa as we know it, and somehow took things to even greater heights when he started collaborating with Blades in the late 70s & early 80s. IMHO Siembra is probably one of the best albums of all time (Kanye mic drop).
(Just pretend the last decade of Willie's life, when he went full MAGA, never happened. Cognitive decline + corporate social media = 🤪)
I got to see both (but separately) Colón & Blades in concert, arriving in the city square hours in advance to be at front, Willie in 2013 & Rubén in 2014. Shook my arse off both times 😁
- Cover of the Willie Colón album Cosa Nuestra, continuing his custom of album covers & titles playing with old gangster movie iconography, where his trombone stands in for a tommy gun.
- Italian nickname for the mafia, La Cosa Nostra > Spanish album title Cosa Nuestra > English film title Our Latin Thing
their song Tiburón
Funny thing is, I heard that song a lot when I was a kid but I didn't realize it was anti-imperialist until many years later around 2005-2010, I was watching a fan-made video and I was like: "Why are they showing all those US Navy ships? ... Oh... ...OH!"
That's one of the videos I downloaded to post on Peertube! (In the end, I think I uploaded one with lyrics not warships, but I can't tell because of the bloody "502 bad gateway" error.)