Thursday Throwback! Incredible Bongo Band-Apache (1973)

Anyone who has been a longtime listener of hip-hop or any breakbeat-oriented form of music should recognize this song right away! And if you don’t, well, I can pretty much guarantee you have heard the opening bar before. Easily one of the most sampled drum breaks EVER, it’s been used in literally thousands of hip hop, pop, and dance tracks over the past 30 years.

The Incredible Bongo Band was a loosely organized group of session musicians signed to MGM, under the leadership of Michael Viner. They created instrumental tracks at varying tempos which were used to supplement movies and TV spots in the early 1970s. This project only lasted a couple years and remained very obscure until DJ’s like Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash discovered Apache. They would routinely play two copies of opening break on two turntables to “extend” it, much to the enjoyment of dancers and breakers during all their sets. Subsequentally, this track became a building block in hip hop culture and remains one of the most sampled pieces of music of all time!