Alt.Latino: They opened for Miles Davis and Sly Stone, then disappeared
24 June - 24 mins
Podcast Series
NPR Music
This week's episode is a musical time machine. In the late 1960s, the band Zapata sprang out of a street gang in northwest Washington, D.C., with a sound that combined a variety of contemporary styles: Afro-Caribbean rhythms, soul jazz and the golden era of American R&B. The mixture worked. For a few years, Zapata opened for an astonishing number of A-list acts passing through the city, like Miles Davis, Sly and the Family Stone, Herbie Hancock and The Isley Brothers. But the band would break up in 1974, and for years their recorded material was believed to be lost. Now, surviving member Pepe Gonzalez has restored a cassette tape of Zapata's music from 1971, and is releasing it for the first...
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