This is an unnumbered copy of the original pressing. A story told through seven albums of Latin soul meeting the hardest salsa, modal jazz, and frenetic boogaloo – sounds you’ve ever heard, with special attention to telling Bataan’s story and his groundbreaking label.
VMP Anthology goes beyond the seven albums included in your box. Alongside your box and the albums within it, we provide in-depth, original Listening Notes and a digestible multi-episode podcast to serve as your definitive guide though these records. VMP Anthology isn’t just a box set that’s supposed to gather dust on your shelves — it’s an immersive and transformative story that comes alive for you to spend weeks (or longer!) inside of. We can’t wait for you to dive deeper into Joe Bataan and Ghetto Records’ history, and the albums in this box.
Ghetto Records’ master tapes were largely lost in the chaos of the label’s closure in the mid-70s. The team at Now-Again sourced the cleanest copies of rare original vinyl, which mastering engineer Jason Bitner spliced, restored and remastered. The exception was the Paul Ortiz album Los Que Son, whose master tapes Bataan zealously guarded over the years, and which was cut in an all-analog transfer. The never heard Bataan songs on Drug Story were found on a master tape in Spain, decades after Bataan thought he had lost it forever.
Lacquers for all titles (excluding Drug Story) were cut by Bernie Grundman at Bernie Grundman Mastering. All seven titles are pressed on exclusive 180g black vinyl at GZ.
Get the full story of Joe Bataan and Ghetto Records through our podcast and listening notes booklet. The booklet, 28 pages long with dozens of photos from the era, is found in your box, it covers the story of the bands on Ghetto and the label’s creation and dissolution. Our podcast will offer a discussion of all the albums, and their histories.
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