Sometimes when things get bad, music gets good.

¡Diablo! que tú no puedes conmigo . . .


HENRY COLE’S “EL DIABLO”
by Ned Sublette

That diabolical cackle.

You might know it from Tito Allen’s 1973 interpretation of Rafael Hernández’s “El Diablo,” on Ray Barretto’s landmark Fania album Indestructible. That was during the boom of what was then being pitched by Fania as salsa, a simple, easy-to-promote word that erased multiple histories.

Now Tito Allen’s back, and there’s that laugh again. This time, he’s reprising the song with drummer / bandleader Henry Cole (two syllables: Co-le) and Villa Locura featuring Tito Allen, on SIMPLE, Cole’s second album as a leader.

Cole’s recording of “El Diablo” doesn’t otherwise sound like Barretto’s. With drumset, barriles, and electric guitars, uptempo from Barretto’s slow-grind guajira, it amounts to a live-band bomba remix of Allen’s iconic interpretation.

There’s a making-of video in which you can see the players crammed together in Electric Lady Studio. Listen to Cole’s countoff: the time is organic, not mechanical, and they’re playing together, with some overdubs of course, including Allen’s lead and a funky synth solo by Luis Perdomo, the brilliant Venezuelan-born jazz pianist.

After thirteen years traveling the world together in Miguel Zenón’s quartet, it’s no wonder Cole and Perdomo communicate well. That’s one of the musical spaces Henry Cole inhabits. As I write these words, he’s about to go out on tour with flamenco-jazz pianist Chano Domínguez. I’ve run into him in Luanda, Angola; in Xalapa, Mexico; in New York, where he lives; and I almost coincided with him a few months ago in Cuba, where he has relatives. But he’s from Mayagüez, on the west coast of Puerto Rico. If he were to go back for a visit, he’d fly into Aguadilla’s airport, eighteen miles north, which is named for . . .

Rafael Hernández.

Barretto’s version of “El Diablo” wrenched Hernández’s 1939 song into the 1970s so persuasively that almost everyone who knows the song now, knows it from that version. That’s how Cole learned it. But, as Fania sometimes did, they left Hernández’s name off the label credits, listing it merely as public domain.[1]When Cole realized that the song was from the (enormous) repertoire of Rafael Hernández, he made a more personal connection with it.

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