by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Last time he rolled through town with his crates, Soundway Records founder Miles Cleret, of Brighton, England, was showing off the dusty yet devastatingly funky Afro-beat platters he’d excavated in Ghana and elsewhere (which had fattened his label’s debut, the noted Ghana Soundz anthologies).

His latest excursion, though, happened on this side of the Atlantic, and the payoff is gathered on the forthcoming comp Panama! Latin, Calypso and Funk on the Isthmus 1965-75. This jaunt was triggered by an e-mail exchange with Costa Rican music enthusiast Roberto Ernesto Gyemant, who ultimately co-compiled the record.

“I went there once, for about a month, and did a bit of work,” confesses Cleret, “but he did a similar thing to what I did in Ghana, in terms of sticking with it, keep going back, finding the scratched records that sounded good and then trying to find clean ones to master from. So it was a joint effort.”

In some respects, Cleret finds Ghana and Panama similar. Both are relatively small countries, with proportionately tiny recording industries catering mainly to a couple of cities, and neither made the task of scrounging up vintage grooves easy. “It was similar, the process of tracking down musicians and producers, going to the old factories and radio stations, and piecing together the jigsaw puzzle.”

In other ways, however, Panama is rather unique. One intriguing thing is the numerous English-language tracks on the record. “Panama is one of those strange places—everyone assumes it’s a Latin American country, but because it’s got this canal going through it, which is one of the biggest international hubs, it draws people from all over the world. The bars in Panama City and Colon were very international—they’d be for the sailors, the Americans, people from the Caribbean as well as obviously Latin American people. It’s a very interesting mix. The black population, which came from Trinidad and Jamaica about 100 years ago—they all speak English. It’s a dual identity. On the one hand, there’s a very Latin musical scene, but on the other side, there are the calypso and soul-and-funk element that creep in as well.”

Challenged to choose a gold medalist among his Panamanian selections, Cleret hems and haws for only a moment. “I think this guy—track number three, Bush y Sus Magnificos—he helped Roberto more than anyone in the whole project. He’s a big guy on the scene there.

“Even though ‘Nana Nina’ is one of the more straight-ahead Latin descarga tracks on the album, for me it typifies the difference between Latin music from New York and Cuba, and that which comes out of Panama and Colombia. It’s that much harder, rawer sound, and the cowbell—when we were mastering, the guy doing it was like, ‘Wow, they put all the horns at the back of the room and the guy on the cowbell right up front.’ It’s the most important part of the music, and that’s the difference, that raw, rhythmic, very African treatment of the percussion that typifies the music from the region.”

With Andy Williams at Salon Daomé on Friday, March 10, 10 p.m., $10

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