Joe Bataan

Joe Bataan was the originator of New York Latin soul which developed along parallel lines with the Latin boogaloo and came before disco music. His musical experience began with the street doo-wop in the fifties and even included one of the first rap recordings that made it to the charts, the "Rap-O, Clap-O" of 1979. His real name is Peter Nitollano, his parents are Afro-American and Pilipino. He grew up in Spanish Harlem, where he hung out with Puerto Rican street gangs and absorbed R&B, Afro-Cuban and Afro-Puerto Rican influences. His musical career continued after a few arrests at Coxsackie state prison.

Self-taught on the piano, he organized his first band in 1965 and had his first hit with a 1967 recording of "Gipsy Woman" at Fania Records. The song was a hit in New York’s Latin market despite the words in English sung by Joe, and exemplified the emerging sound of Latin soul. Anticipating the formulas for disco music, "Gipsy Woman" created energy for dancing, alternated with what was fundamentally a pop-soul song with a cut in which two time hand claps could be heard.

Joe would take this tendency even further in "Salsoul", which fused funk and Latin with effective orchestrations full of feeling. Salsoul continues being influential as a group which pays tribute to infrequent rhythms but which focused on the future at the time they appeared. The long play incarnated the musical concept of this highly discussed, culturally conscious artist.

Bataan conceptualized musical features of the seventies as a hybrid: a section of Afro-Cuban rhythm playing patterns with Brazilian influence over orchestral funk. In many ways, his vision was after money, although most of it would go to others, and stardom would eventually elude him. Nevertheless, he managed to make his mark in the base of a new tendency as en early hit maker. His biggest commercial project was the production of Salsoul released by the Epic label and promoted in the new record market as Afro-Philipino; this record included "The Bottle" in 1975, a Gil Scott-Heron classic with an R&B wind and piano arrangement.

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