The Bijou is screening a documentary that looks at the rhythmic music that rose from the streets of Spanish Harlem and the Bronx in the 1960s and merged funk, jazz, R&B and Afro-Cuban sounds.
And if you mention GBLN when you buy your ticket at the door, you'll get $5 off the ticket price and pay just $10. No advance ticket sales are available.
A music/beer tasting event starts at 6 p.m., and the movie starts at 7 this Thursday, March 16, at the Bijou, 275 Fairfield Ave., Bridgeport.
Here is a preview.
Its title is a play on “I Like It Like That,” perhaps the best-known Latin Boogaloo song, first made popular by Pete Rodriguez in 1967 and then through a remake by The Blackout All-Stars in 1994. In addition to Rodriguez and Colon, the film features other Boogaloo pioneers including Joe Bataan, Ricardo Ray and Jimmy Sabater.
Known as “the first Nuyorican music,” a description given to it by longtime producer (and former trumpet player for the legendary Ray Barretto orchestra and Tipica ‘73) René López, boogaloo’s lifespan was tragically all too brief, but luckily not forgotten.
We Like It Like That premiered at SXSW in March 2015. Ramirez Warren tells Billboard that he began working on the documentary after writing a story on Colon and financed his picture through grants and a Kickstarter campaign.
Born out of the mixing tastes of Cuban, Puerto Rican and black teenagers and the clubs they would all frequent in 1960s East Harlem and the South Bronx, boogaloo became a platform for not only the changing of status quo musical styles, but for the identities and social climate of New York City’s Latino youth.
By fusing mambo, cha cha and son with R&B, soul, rock ‘n roll and jump blues, the genre was truly a marriage of Afro-Cuban and Afro-American rhythms, and since it combined both Spanish and English lyrics, its appeal was widespread. But by 1970, it was gone, and salsa was king.
(With information from the Hollywood Reporter)
