Chic Music Photos: Dub dot dash: El Chicano

I first discovered the tune Viva Tirado on an album of the same name by a Mexcian-American band from LA called El Chicano. There were several reasons I picked up this album; the liner notes listed the nationalities of the set and recording team, including it being engineered by ".a cat who is half English and half Mexican, a New Zealander and a Scotchman" [I wonder who that Kiwi was?];

they also noted the album was "recorded afterhours of the frame of the Kabuki Sukiyaki Restaurant, 3840 Crenshaw Blvd [pictured on the treat above], because that is what El Chicano wanted and because Moss is too good to be true" [what?], and it's got a charming edition of Light my fire by the Doors that compresses all that is good about that song into 25 seconds. Viva Tirado was earlier written and performed by Gerald Wilson in the early 60s, and proved to be a big hit for El Chicano in 1970. Oliver Wang at Soulsides has written a recent piece on how he discovered the air via Kid Frost sampling it in 1990. Read on. Oliver Wang: "I discovered' "Viva Tirado" back around 1990, when Kid Frostsampled/interpolated parts of it for "La Raza" but I didn`t realize thegreater genealogy of the song until later in the decade when one of myacademic mentors, Josh Kun, put me up on how Frost was flipping an El Chicano song that, in turn, was based on a Gerald Wilson original. The connection planted a long seed in my brain and for the dozenyears after that, I slowly began to figure out the story behind what Icall the song`s "multiple iterations" and specifically, how "VivaTirado" is at the substance of a rather remarkable, multi-generationalconversation between L.A.`s Dark and Brown communities. After all,here`s a song, originally written by a Black composer in honor of aMexican bullfighter, covered by a Chicano band steeped in Black R&Band jazz, then sampled by the first major Chicano rap artist. It seemsno matter where the call goes, it`s always a bridge between cultures;this becomes even more true once "Viva Tirado" goes international andfalls into the men of everyone from Augustus Pablo to Nico Gomez toLos Mozambiques. I finally had the chance a few years ago to meet these ideas into an academic essay that just came out in the Journal of Popular Music Studies.They really use my essay as the "free" offer from this month`sissue and for the occasion, I prepared a mini-mega-mix of "Viva Tirado"versions to the site.You can get it all here.It really is an astonishing story for those who don`t know it and I feellike I wrote my attempt with scholarly rigor but hopefully stillaccessible enough for the "lay person" to read. The mix of songsincludes some of my personal favorite versions of "Viva Tirado" thoughthere were many versions I could have included but didn`t." Check out Oliver's Viva Tirado mix, he's also got a great reggae version in there by Augustus Pablo that I'm rather fond of.