LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Ray Barrett: El Watusi
built 640 days ago
At the heart of the four-hour drama are Cliff Kirby (Ray Barrett), an elderly man stricken by Alzheimers, and his three estranged sons, drawn together by his illness. As the old man melts into his memories, past and present merge in the same image. It's an inspired depiction of the disease and the way it separates sufferers from the world around them.
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Barretto (whose surname is really "Barreto"; a mistake at the time Ray's birth certificate was filed gave his last name its formal spelling) was born in New York City. His parents moved to New York from Puerto Rico in the early 1920s, looking for a better life. He was raised in Spanish Harlem and at a very young age was influenced by his mother's love of music and by the jazz music of musicians such as Duke Ellington and Count Basie.
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Few musicians can boast a career as varied, lengthy and influential as Ray Barretto. The legendary conguero first made his name in the ’50s as an in-demand session player for jazz cats seeking a little Latin sabor, then helped usher in the boogaloo craze with his 1961 hit “El Watusi,†the first true Latin record to storm the Billboard charts. In the ’70s his work as musical director of the Fania All-Stars made him one of the heroes of the golden age of salsa. In the ’80s Barretto dabbled in funk, television and musical activism, and by the ’90s he had returned to Latin Jazz, opening it up to all kinds of new influences with his New World Spirit ensemble. Today, at 76, Barretto is still going strong, bringing his “hard hands†and keen creative sensibility to bear on his latest solo release, Time Was/Time Is (O+ Music).
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Barrett left El Paso for Pan-American Petroleum Corp. in 1963, and then four years later became chief geologist for Wolf Exploration Co., where he made his reputation as an exceptional "oil finder." As described by a 1993 Denver Business Journal article, "Finding oil is like fitting together a jigsaw puzzle. The geologist combines as many pieces of information as possible, such as seismic data or well histories, and then produces a solution after lots of tedious work." According to Barrett, "A lot of hard work probably helps improve the luck factor." Barrett's first major discovery for Wolf in the mid-1960s was the 24-mile-long, 15-mile-wide Highlight field in Wyoming. He then discovered an even larger field, the Madden field in the state's Wind River Basin.
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Ray Barrett, the county election administrator, said the Social Security numbers on the laptops were not encrypted. Encryption would have made the numbers nearly impossible for a thief to read. The computers were password protected.
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Barrett somehow found time for films in the middle of all this. Although Fred Zinnemann's The Sundowners (1960), starring Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr, had extensive location filming in Australia, these had been shot after Barrett left his homeland, and several of the interiors were shot in Britain, hence people like Ronald Fraser pretending to be Aussies; Barrett had a small unbilled role in the studio scenes, noting he was in the odd position here of playing a role that, in the location long-shots, had been played by someone else. Several crime dramas for the big screen followed, notably a couple in the Edgar Wallace B series; another monochrome mystery, Jigsaw (1963), was quite well written and directed by Val Guest but, what with Jack Warner as the star, couldn't help but feel like an extended episode of Dixon Of Dock Green.
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