Episode
Alt.Latino: They opened for Miles Davis and Sly Stone, then disappeared
- Podcast
- NPR Music
- Published
- Jun 24, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1469
- Processing state
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Summary
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 time. In this episode, Felix chats with Gonzalez about the origins of the band, and how they tried to unify the Black and Hispanic musical scenes in the city at the time. The podcast episode was produced by Noah Caldwell and edited by Otis Hart. Suraya Mohamed is the executive producer of NPR Music. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy