To the Knowledge They Call Luck to Him
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Artist:Jose Ortiz
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Album:Alegres Navidades (Glad Christmases)
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Track:Al Saber le Llaman Suerte
One cold overcast morning soon after I moved to Manhattan in 1977, I set out on an adventure: I would ride a bus up to the South Bronx just to experience a frisson of its famous desolation and danger. When amidst the vacant lots and depressing apartment buildings appeared a shopping area, I alighted and heard the sound of some catchy Hispanic music coming from a speaker on the outside of a store. I went inside, bought the LP which I had just heard outside and returned home by bus, unmugged. The above song comes from that LP. Soon after, I was talking to a man who ran a very good Latin American record store downstairs in the Times Square subway station complex, and he told me that the LP was of the Puerto Rican mountain music category, but the lead singer Jose Ortiz was actually a Mexican mariachi singer. He told me a certain song on it was getting radio play, but it was the one song on it I thought was a dud. I really like the sound of the cuatro, a four-stringed tenor guitar-type instrument, played by a Sor Angel Torres. The two women singing the chorus, who are unnamed in the back cover notes, set this album apart and above other records of this style that I've come across. The distributor listed on the back cover, Evas Records, 529 E. 137th St., is the store where I bought it. With unwitting poetry, Dictionary.com translates the LP's cover title, Alegres Navidades as Glad Christmases; the LP's different title on the label, Sigue por las Nubes as It Follows by Clouds, and the label's track title, "Al Saber le Llaman Suerte" as "To the Knowledge They Call Luck to Him." The back cover misprints "le Llaman" as "Lollaman," and the front cover replaces it with "Es."
Comments (9)
Mele Kalikimaka!