Willie Colon – Che Che Cole
Willie Colon – Eso Se Baila Asi
Willie Colon – Juana Pena
As part of what has become a tradition here on Melting Pot, here’s the last record that I picked up in 2013. I was over at Gimme Gimme Records hoping I’d run into the Jim Hall Bill Evans record Undercurrent. Instead I ran into this LP, a collection of some of the best sides from Willie Colon’s first several albums for Fania, from 1967-1970. Fania records are fairly hard to pick up over here on the West Coast, so anytime I run into any of them it’s hard to pass them up. In this case, knowing most of these songs, without having owned any of these records, there wasn’t a chance I was gonna let this one go. “Che Che Cole” and “Juana Pena” both come from 1970’s Cosa Nuestra, “Eso Se Baile Asi” is from 1968’s The Hustler, every single one of the other tracks is just as classic as these, all with that big beautiful trombone from Colon. I can’t think of a better way to close out a banner year of vinyl archeology.
Cheers,
Michael