Consumer Guide Album

Los Van Van: The Best of Los Van Van [Hemisphere, 2000]
Like James Brown in the '70s, they record too much. But if the Duke Ellington Orchestra was this vital after 30 years on the boards, it didn't showcase the new songs to prove it. Find the right section of any large metropolitan record store and the array of Los Van Van titles will make you dizzy; for those of us without Spanish on our tongues and Latino in our marrow, they blur together. But I've never heard a compilation that didn't reconfigure my cerebellum, and on this '94-'97 selection I note that, remarkably, the remakes are on average slightly less memorable than the newer compositions--which is not to suggest that the one that crowned the last show I caught, the Yoruba-based "Soy Todo," was truly new whenever it was written. A−