Soul Men, ‘Nuyorican’ Style

Outside deejay and producer Kenny “Dope” Gonzalez’s apartment house, kids hang out on front stoops listening to hip-hop. Distorted salsa blares from passing cars and vintage R&B; wafts through open apartment windows.

The old residential area of Sunset Park is filled with the noises, styles and sensations that Gonzalez and his partner, “Little” Louie Vega, used to create “Nuyorican Soul,” a genre-busting album that fuses old-school R&B;, salsa, jazz, disco, hip-hop, house and dance-club styles, executed by an all-star roster of guest musicians ranging from jazz guitarist George Benson to hip-hop turntable whiz Jazzy Jeff, salsa great Tito Puente and dance divas India and Jocelyn Brown.

The collection has broken through the barriers that usually separate pop music these days.

Released this spring on the jazz label Giant Step Records, the album and the single “Runaway” have appeared on Billboard magazine’s dance singles, club play, R&B; and jazz charts, as well as the pop Heatseekers chart, which tracks hot prospects.

The album has also attracted rave reviews. Vibe magazine’s notice concluded: “All this diverse talent and music manages to come together into one beautiful whole. Who do these guys think they are--Quincy Jones?” Dance-oriented Orb magazine calls the collection a “magical, multicultural mystery tour.”

The term “Nuyorican” has been used since at least the early ‘70s as a way to describe with pride New Yorkers of Puerto Rican descent, but Gonzalez and Vega coined “Nuyorican Soul” as an easy and accurate way to describe their musical styling.

Instead of mixing styles for art’s sake or PC points, Vega and Gonzalez reflect in the album a love and understanding for all their influences. They make a potentially confusing hybrid comfortable and easy, opening it up to listeners that grew up far from the Bronx and Brooklyn neighborhoods.

Not surprisingly, the first fans to respond were New Yorkers. The album is an accurate documentation of New York and its blend of cultures and eras. Initially, “Nuyorican Soul” sold three times as fast in New York as it did the rest of the country (sales are approaching 55,000 nationally), thanks in part to heavy support in local clubs and exposure on Top 40 urban radio stations such as the city’s WBLS-FM. Around the city, it’s talked about in offices and at parties almost with a sense of civic pride.

“ ‘Nuyorican Soul’ has a lot to do with our lives, growing up in New York, listening to all different styles of music, hanging out with all different kinds of people,” says Vega, 32, a Bronx native who, like 27-year-old Gonzalez, is of Puerto Rican descent and grew up in a neighborhood where Latin and African American cultures collided.

“The good thing about ‘Nuyorican Soul’ is we get a little bit of everybody liking it,” continues Vega, sitting on a black couch in the living room of Gonzalez’s cramped apartment and recording studio. “People from the jazz scene, people from the Latin scene, people from the dance scene, and fans of these artists themselves.

“We also wanted to show people the fundamentals of dance music. You have jazz, you have funk, Latin, soul hip in the dance genre. It was great, ‘cause we got a chance to work with a lot of our influences. People we loved over the years, and been collecting their records. It was like a dream come true for us.”

In putting “Nuyorican Soul” together, Gonzalez and Vega chose artists that had shown a similar love of experimentation.

“All these artists on the album have tried many different things in their careers,” says Vega. “George Benson conquered many different genres, from pop ballads to R&B; to jazz. Then you have India, who does salsa, dance music. That’s who we wanted, people who were very open-minded about blending styles of music. People who could give.”

The album features everything from Benson playing guitar and scatting on the polished “Can You Do It” to a beat-heavy yet smooth version of Bob James’ “Nautilus.” Though “Nuyorican Soul” does jump from genre to genre, it does so with consistency, grace and a cool, club-culture attitude. It also comfortably combines the world of spontaneous jamming and scatting with the calculated world of studio technology.

“Louie and Kenny are the type of young visionaries that keep music vital and exciting,” says Benson. “They mix a knowledge and respect of the past with new and creative ways of thinking. They have succeeded with completely unique ways of recording, and I truly admire their artistry and passion.”

*

Gonzalez’s two-story townhouse sits in the colorful Southwest Brooklyn neighborhood that he grew up in, situated almost under the elevated tracks of the B-train, a 20-minute ride from downtown Manhattan. The neighborhood is a mishmash of old row apartments, corner bodegas, semi-dilapidated storefronts and tiny Spanish cafes.

You know someone has to love this environment to stay there (as Gonzalez plans to do) rather than move to the hipper, more centrally located (for a musician) streets of Manhattan.

“This is where I keep the old-school hip-hop, this is ‘70s disco, this is Latin jazz . . . “ says Gonzalez, conducting a tour of his massive record collection. Every available shelf and even the linen closets are stacked with records.

Gonzalez also has an entire room devoted to his two turntables, some headphones and record shelves, and another room to a home studio. This is where Gonzalez and Vega--who lives across the Hudson River in Cliffside Park, N.J.--spend a lot of their time. Even as they talk in the adjacent living room, you can hear an engineer in the studio busy mutating sounds on a computer.

Little Louie Vega is petite and compact, the flip side to Gonzalez, who is stocky and large. Their personalities are also far-flung--Vega chatty and outgoing, while Gonzalez tends to be shy and quiet. Together, however, they had a common goal: to use their musical backgrounds to reach a contemporary audience.

On this album, Vega and Gonzalez came up with the foundations of the songs and recorded the basic rhythm tracks with a studio band, then worked with each guest artist on an individual basis. Roy Ayers, whose 1978 R&B; hit “Sweet Tears” was remade for this album, says that working on “Nuyorican Soul” was an inspirational experience.

“[Louie Vega] made me want to come and do ‘Sweet Tears’ better than I did it originally back in 1978,” he says. “I think the concept of this album is giving a lot of musicians from the jazz, pop, blues and Latin jazz market exposure to a new audience. It’s unique, and I’m just proud to be on it.”

Apparently Tito Puente, who worked with the pair on the soundtrack for the 1992 movie “The Mambo Kings,” shares those feelings. At a record release party for the album in May, Puente was filmed hugging both Vega and Gonzalez while announcing, “These two guys is geniuses. Very creative, a beautiful future. I’ll be retired and they’re taking over.”

Though Vega and Gonzalez hold Puente in the highest regard, the two didn’t identify much with Latin music during their formative years.

“Our parents used to listen to salsa all the time in the house,” says Vega, a nephew of salsa singer Hector Lavoe. “But salsa was our parents’ music, and as a kid you want to put your own dance or hip-hop record on.”

Gonzalez laughs. “I hated salsa music growing up. I wasn’t into it at all. I was like, ‘Why? These horns!’ It wasn’t until later that I came back around.”

In his early teens, Vega attended jams at the nearby Soundview and Bronx River projects featuring local rappers and deejays Afrika Bambaataa, Jazzy J and Red Alert. Vega says he began deejaying in the late ‘70s at a local roller rink and went on to spin records at such such seminal clubs as the Sound Factory and Vinyl in downtown Manhattan.

Gonzalez started out deejaying parties in his hometown of Brooklyn, then landed a job at a local record store and began collecting records while expanding his knowledge of dance music. He became renowned in hip-hop circles and began releasing his tapes on his homemade label Dope Wax.

Vega and Gonzalez met seven years ago through a mutual friend, producer Todd Terry.

“We were into different vibes, but hit it off,” says Vega. “Kenny loves a lot of hip-hop and house, I loved ‘70s classic R&B;, disco and dance music. But while most deejays just did house remixes, we weren’t afraid to dig into jazz, dig into Latin flavor, or hip-hop. We’d bring all those elements into house music. We’ve always taken chances.”

Their experimentation paid off. By 1991, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson and Saint Etienne were seeking remixes by the team, which called itself Masters at Work.

“We’d take records you’d never hear in clubs and make them into club tracks,” says Vega. “We were doing B-sides on records that had nothing to do with the songs, and calling them Masters at Work dubs.

“We’d get these pop groups like Debbie Gibson and say, ‘Let’s hit the B-sides and do it in our style,’ and we’d get it out there ‘cause it was like on Atlantic Records. So you’d have a serious house guy like Frankie Knuckles playing Debbie Gibson in clubs, and people would be, like, going, ‘Debbie Gibson?’ It became very popular, and everybody wanted a Masters at Work dub.”

It wasn’t until they were doing some production and remixing on the “Mambo Kings” soundtrack in 1994 that the Masters began dropping the music of their cultural roots into their popular mixes. They made 1995’s Latin-flavored house hit “Nervous Track” under the moniker of Nuyorican Soul.

That’s when they came up with the concept for an album of the same name. Vega and Gonzalez took some time off, organized the artists and began recording “Nuyorican Soul”--without the backing of record-company money.

“It hurt our pockets, but we felt good about it,” says Gonzalez. “We didn’t care about the money. We just thought this could only be shopped as a finished album. Also, we didn’t want anybody to mess with or change our ideas.”

Vega says that they were never concerned about targeting an audience commercially.

“We didn’t make it for the market in the U.S. or Europe,” he says. “We just made it for music lovers. We wanted it to take you to different moods and atmospheres, something you can play anywhere. But it seems to be catching on. I think there’s a lot of people out there who are just wanting something different. We want to do several volumes of ‘Nuyorican Soul.’ While this one is like a history of dance music, the next one may take you somewhere else. Hopefully, you’ll never know what we’ll do next, ‘cause we’ll always be doin’ something different.”

*

Hear the Music

* Excerpts from this album and other recent releases are available on The Times’ World Wide Web site. Point your browser to: https://www.latimes.com/soundclips