by Ariella Stok
It was a classically Semitic combination of chutzpah and horniness that led Lawrence Ira Kahn, a white Jewish kid from Brownsville, Brooklyn to become Larry Harlow, a king of salsa, a musical movement that combined Cuban son with New York bebop, and served as much to fuel the dance floors of nightclubs numbering in the hundreds during its heyday in the early 1970s, as to define the cultural voice of New York’s influx of Latino immigrants—mostly Puerto Rican, Cuban, and Dominican—that began in the 1950s. Harlow not only was the leader of one of the hottest bands in town during the salsa boom of the late 60s and early 70s, but a pioneer who helped define and expand the genre via his ambitious arrangements and songwriting, engineering and production, and an approach that returned the music to its traditional roots while informing it with the popular sounds of his day. As the first to present salsa in a mainstream American context, Harlow was critical in positioning salsa as not just a piece of ethnic exotica, but an important cultural movement of late 20th century music.
Harlow was born in 1938, raised, and Bar Mitzvahed in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a pastoral neighborhood known for its meadows and farms prior to the building boom that was heavily colonized by a community of Jews who had been lured from their cramped, dilapidated tenements on the Lower East Side by the come-ons of land developers to “move to the country.” His was the kosher household of a musical family. His grandfather provided the piano accompaniment in silent movie theaters and was a theater critic for the Daily Forward, New York’s Jewish newspaper, published in Yiddish and English. His father, mother, Rose Sherman, was an opera singer of Russian-Jewish descent, and his father Nathan Kahn, performed in the Borscht Belt circuit in the Catskills as a musician and bandleader along with two brothers, a comedian and musician. The Khans lived in two adjoining apartment buildings joined together by a courtyard that were filled entirely with a tight-knit community of other Jewish families. It was a happy childhood filled with music, primarily that of his Jewish heritage.
“My Aunt Frida used to sit in the house and sing all the Yiddish songs,” Harlow told me during a recent visit to his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “She’d play the piano and get so excited, her false teeth would fall right out of her mouth and onto the keyboard,” Harlow describes, feigning the guffaws he and his brother Andy used to break into at this scene. He got his first taste of Latin music, in the form of the mambo and cha-cha, at the Latin Quarter, a Times Square club owned by Lew Walters. He and Lew’s daughter, future news anchor Barbara Walters, would sit together in the club’s spotlight booth and watch all the big acts of the day—Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Sophie Tucker, and Eddie Brown, with his father leading the house band under the name Buddy Harlowe, a name both sons Larry and Andy would later adopt (dropping the final e for good measure) for their professional careers. It was here that Harlow first fell in love with his favorite ambassador to Latin culture: “I got to hang out with the chorus girls, mostly Spanish women, and they would pat me on my head and say, ‘oh the cute little boy.’ They’d pull me into their bosoms and I was in heaven. I would smell their bodily sweat and sniff their costumes when they weren’t around.”
A gifted pianist whose mother forced him to practice under the threat of a raised wooden ruler that greeted mistakes with a thwack on the back of his hand, when all of Harlow’s neighborhood friends attended the local high school, he took four busses and trains to make the two-hour trip to Music and Arts High School in Harlem. He was there studying jazz, his first love, but one night after his father took him to see his favorite pianist, Art Tatum in concert at the Hickory Horse, he realized that if he practiced for every minute of his life, he’d still never be as good. His thoughts began to turn to the music he heard in the streets and pouring out of the bodegas of the Harlem neighborhood where he attended school. In the Latin music, he heard a kinship with the improvisatory structures of the jazz that he loved, and understood it as similarly rooted in the modal structures of the Eastern European music with which he’d been raised. But important to Harlow’s ambitions, he sensed here an opportunity to not only distinguish himself but evolve the music into something that wedded it to the popular sounds of the day. He started attending dances at the Palladium and playing in Latin bands made up of other Jewish guy and Italians. These early bands’ repertoire consisted mostly of instrumentals since no one in the band spoke enough Spanish to be able to convincingly sing, and performed in the dancehalls of the old Catskills hotels, where vacationing Jews were perpetuating Latin dance music and taking mambo and cha-cha lessons by the pool. Here he was reunited with the Spanish women he had fallen in love with as a kid at the Latin Quarter, except this time he was old enough to do more than get patted on the head.
“I’m a white Jewish Kid from Brooklyn and all of a sudden I’m thrown into this world of hot-blooded, dark-haired brunettes with fiery eyes who knew how to take care of business and I’m in cha-cha heaven. It was quite an eye-opening experience to make love to a Latin dance instructor with no body fat who had rhythym. The Latin women took me to another dimension!” At 17, in his first semester at Brooklyn College, he and some of his mambonik friends went on a week-long trip to Cuba, and once again, he was in cha-cha heaven, falling deeply in love with the music, culture, and women, for the first time hearing the Afro-Cuban music he loved played by actual Cubans. He quickly returned to Cuba as soon as he could, the next time staying a few months, and then another trip, where he laid down roots, immersing himself in the music scene and following his favorite bands around with a tape recorder, while collecting records of Cuban music, until he was forced to return home by the Cuban Revolution in 1959, hopping a flight to Miami the day Fidel Castro marched into Havana.
Once back in New York, he played for a while in a band led by Harvey Averne, but was soon fired for not wanting to take direction. “I’m a natural born leader,” he explains. He started putting together his own outfit, built around a new sound that was anchored by dual pairs of trumpets and trombones in the front, and a rhythm section in the back, like the bands he had seen in Cuba, and writing songs that expanded the traditional 1-4-5 structures of the mambo and cha-cha to include bigger harmonies made up of 7ths, 9ths, 11ths, and diminished chords. Once constructed, his band, Orchestra Harlow hustled a regular gig at Chez Jose, a Latin music club across the street from the Museum of Natural History that catered to an “uppity Puerto Rican crowd.” The club was owned by Joey Artanis (who renamed himself from Rodriguez by reversing the surname of his hero Frank Sinatra – “that’s how white he was”) who wouldn’t let anyone in whose skin was a little too café con leche. One night, Jerry Masucci, a Latin music fan who had studied in Cuba during the same time as Harlow, came into the club to see Orchestra Harlow and offered them a spot on his fledgling label, Fania, which he’d started with the goal of spreading New York salsa to the rest of the world and make a buck off the burgeoning phenomenon. Orchestra Harlow was the first outside artist signed to Fania, which at the time sold records made solely by label co-owner, bandleader Johnny Pacheco out of the trunk of Masucci’s car.
Harlow’s first record for Fania, Heavy Smokin’ was inspired by his other love, The Beatles, both in its chord structures, and its use of four-track recording, making it the first salsa album to be recorded in stereo. He was so excited by the sound he’d created, that as soon as the first acetate was pressed, he got in his car and drove to Brooklyn to play it for his father, accidentally leaving the record on the car’s roof, and losing his first recording as a bandleader. He would later pay tribute to the Beatles more overtly by dropping acid for the first time while listening to Magical Mystery Tour on repeat, and in his 1969 record Mi Mono y Yo, which featured a salsified cover of “Me and My Monkey” as its title track. That year he also decided to try his hand at a different kind of crossover success, forming the 10-piece horn-fronted Ambergris, and applying his knowledge of writing orchestral arrangements within the context of a rock band. Ambergris did a US tour, playing alongside bands such as the Grateful Dead and Small Faces, and recorded one and a half albums, which Harlow tried to have produced by one of his heroes, George Martin. According to Harlow, Martin agreed, but only if Harlow was willing to wait three years for an open spot in his schedule. Then, George Harrison offered his production services, but the band declined, thinking him not funky enough, settling instead on Booker & the MGs’ Steve Cropper, who also wasn’t quite right for the job, according to Harlow. Harlow quotes the Village Voice review of their 1970 performance at the Fillmore East, which cites the etymology of the band name in its dismissal of their act, “Whale puke? Yes they are.”
Despite his success as a recording artist for the increasingly influential Fania, he was still an outsider even after having several successful albums under his belt as the rare white Jewish guy in the big leagues of Latin music, and faced a lot of what he calls “reverse Uncle Tom-ism: What is this white boy doing in our world? Why does he play our music better than we do?” He was able to overcome many of these hurdles by hiring José Carbelo, who also managed Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri and who packaged Orchestra Harlow with his other clients so he was able to slip in through back door of the Latin clubs. As his command of Spanish improved, he was able to do the interviews he had previously declined, and started to become more accepted by the Latin music community as his star continued to rise. He describes himself and the Fania gang as the “Latin Rolling Stones,” 14 handsome, well-dressed guys who had girls chasing them in the streets trying to tear off their clothes. As an outsider, Harlow was also able to influence the aesthetics of the scene, bringing his psychedelic style (lots of jewelry, bright colors, long hair) to both the album art of Fania and the dress code of its artists.
When Harlow heard The Who’s rock opera, Tommy, he was seized by the idea to create his own version—a symphonic Latin album that could tell a complete story, rather than just being a collection of songs like most salsa records. The result, Hommy, was released in 1973 and told the story of a deaf, dumb and blind boy (Larry Harlow described the character to me as proto-autistic, before anyone knew what autism was) who was a prodigy of not pinball, but conga drums. Harlow recruited Latin music’s erstwhile queen, Celia Cruz from her artistic exile in Mexico, and gave her a big hit in the album’s “acid queen” analogue, “gracia davina,” a move that effectively brought her out of retirement and restarted her career. Hommy had its premier at Carnegie Hall, bringing Latin music for the first time out of the barrios, social clubs and salsa joints, and into a mainstream American concert venue. Harlow still gets giddy when he describes the event. “I’m pissing in Toscanini’s toilet!” he remembers thinking to himself that night in Carnegie Hall. His dressing room up in the wings of the hall had a peephole that overlooked the stage, providing a panorama of the entire house, and in his white tails and scruffy beard, he lit up a joint and blew the smoke through the opening, a small prank that symbolized to him that he, and his music, had truly arrived.
Using the same rhythm section as he did with Hommy, Harlow followed up later that year with Salsa, an exemplary album that contributed to the growth in popularity of the charanga sound, with its prominent flute leads and string sections, and would coin the sobriquet that has become his legacy. At the instrumental break of “La Cartera,” corista Aldaberto Santiego introduces his boss’s piano solo, “Ya viene, Larry Harlow,” and the singer Junior González finishes the sentence, “El Judío Maravilloso!” or the Jewish Marvel. It was a reference to Harlow’s musical hero and subject of his 1971 LP, Tribute to Aresenio Rodriguez, the Cuban composer and tres (Cuban guitar) player who was known as “Ciego Maravilloso” after being blinded as a child from a mule’s kick to his head. The nickname represented Harlow’s accepted place in the firmament of Latin music and he adopted it as his second name.
Harlow identifies his next album, Live in Quad from 1974, as the only quadraphonic salsa recording ever made. He rigged up a quad setup in the studio he partly owned, Good Vibrations, to mix a record he had recorded behind bars at Sing Sing prison, motivated by his desire to best Eddie Palmieri’s 1972 record, Recorded Live at Sing Sing, on its own turf. Unfortunately, quadraphonic sound never caught on commercially and the effort was wasted, but it was an example of Harlow’s continuously growing engineering expertise and experimentation with production, skills he’d learned by shadowing Fania engineer Irv Greenbaum. In addition to Harlow’s own recorded output, he produced over 260 albums for Fania and was instrumental in assembling possibly the most famous salsa band of them all, the Fania All-Stars.
Although by 1975, as El Judío Maravilloso, Harlow enjoyed acceptance as one of New York’s top salsa bands, the success brought heat onto his scene, and his singer Ismael Miranda convinced him that he needed protection. He had been exposed to the Santería religion during his travels to Cuba, and now began to practice its rituals.
Harlow’s 87th street apartment is a small space with every surface covered by the art and antiques he collects—Calder paintings, black and white photography, and a collection of century-old musical instruments from all over the world. Tucked into the furniture of his living room are three different pianos, none of which I can spot until he uncovers them for me. A shelf near the entrance proudly displays elegant menorahs and other Jewish iconography. He opens a cupboard and reveals a multitier soltero shrine, draped with talismans: several sets of handcuffs, beads, feathers, and he solemnly explains what each is for. I want to ask if practicing Santería, a syncretic religion derived from Christianity and known for its use of ritual animal sacrifice, is a conflict for his Judaism, but he changes the subject as he whisks me away to a restaurant for lunch, to combat his falling blood sugar level (and I suspect to ogle the female diners, judging by the amount of times he pauses mid-sentence, his mouth agape, as a pretty lady walks by.) Harlow says of the growing Latin immigrant community in New York, which numbered half a million by the 1950s: they wanted something to call their own and that’s what we gave them with salsa. Sometimes it takes the perspective of an outsider, and the chutzpah of a Jew, to give the people what they need.
Download:
"El Exigente" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1967.
available on El Exigente
"Groovin' to the Afro Twist" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1967.
available on El Exigente
"Tu Tu Ratan" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1965.
available on Heavy Smokin'
"Larry's Complaint (Me and My Monkey)" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1969.
available on Me And My Monkey / Mi Mono Y Yo
(out of print)
"El Malecon" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1969.
available on Me And My Monkey / Mi Mono Y Yo
(out of print)
"Something Happened To Me" mp3
by Ambergris, 1970.
available on Ambergris
(out of print)
"Grazin' in the Grass" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1971.
available on Orchestra Harlow Presenta a Ismael Miranda
"El Dia de Navidad" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1973.
available on Hommy a Latin Opera
"Quirimbomboro" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1973.
available on Hommy a Latin Opera
"Gracia Divina" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1973.
available on Hommy a Latin Opera
"No Queremos Sermon" mp3
by Orchestra Harlow, 1973.
available on Hommy a Latin Opera
"La Cartera" mp3
by Larry Harlow, 1973.
available on Salsa
