(Originally published in Ishmael Reed’s Konch Magazine, 3/2016)

My Russian-born great-grandfather would come home every day after work and lower the shades while sitting alone in the front room. Then he would put on tefilin, the ritual phylacteries of the orthodox jew, and recite the evening prayers. I can picture him carefully re-wrapping the leather straps around the black boxes containing sacred inscriptions and replacing them in their velvet pouch. Then I see him going to his closet, kissing the tefilin and returning them to their shelf, and bending over to pick up the box that contained his dancing shoes…because Grampa Louie loved to Rhumba.

He wasn’t alone. Ever since the Don Azpiazu’s Cuban Orchestra debuted Moises Simón’s “El Manicero” (The Peanut Vendor) in New York in 1930 (and shortly thereafter in Paris), the world was consumed with “rhumba” fever. For the record, “rhumba” was the US recording industry’s name for any and all cuban dance rhythms, including the son, the rumba, the guaracha and even the bolero. The recent advent and popularization of the radio helped spread the “rhumba” far and near, as did cheaper record players playing 78rpm records. If horse/used car salesmen like Grampa Louie loved the Rhumba, so did the avant garde: surrealist movement intellectuals in Paris were early supporters of what is in essence Afro-Cuban Jazz. According to Professor Timothy Brennan, Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dadaism, had an extensive collection of “rhumba” records, and surrealist figures Robert Desnos and Nino Frank loved Latin American art and music.

By 1940, over 90 percent of American homes owned at least one radio. Before the television, people used to pull up the rug after dinner and dance. So great was the North American passion for dancing that by 1946 Arthur and Kathryn Murray had over 200 studios in major cities throughout the United States, and a business that grossed $2 million in 1941 was grossing over $12 million by 1946. According to Ralph Giordano’s “Social Dancing in America: A History and Reference”, in 1939, a Los Angeles Jitterbug contest attracted over 100,000. “Dancing was so popular that over 2,000 war production plants nationwide had facilities for dancing during lunch or breaks.”

With respect to Cuban music, tourism to Cuba was also an important factor: the first international airline service ever offered from the United States (1920) was Aeromarine Airways “flying boat” flights to Cuba. In 1927, Panamerican Airlines began regular flights to Havana. Throughout the period, Havana continued to be an important port for passenger ship travelers: before transatlantic airplane travel (1939), boats passed through Havana on the way to and from New York City and other key ports. While Cuban music was impacting popular music in the US, the impact of US culture on Cuba was mixed at best. Langston Hughes, who visited Cuba at this time, stated that tourism to the island from the US, especially by southerners (many came with the army, others worked for US corporations in Cuba) resulted in many of the hotels that catered to US tourists suddenly not allowing Cuban mulattos to enter. The same was true for many nightclubs. According to documents relating to the involvement of the North American Mafia in Cuba, bordellos with black and mulata prostitutes were established in Havana to look exactly like antebellum southern plantations.

Enter Cugie

Before Tito Puente (or Pérez Prado) was the Mambo King, Xavier Cugat was King of the Rhumba. Xavier Cugat was born in Catalonia, Spain in 1900, and in 1905 his parents immigrated to Cuba. In 1915 his family immigrated to the United States. This was the decade of the Tango craze in the US and Europe. Cugat, trained on the violin, founded his first band, The Gigolos, in 1921. The early Tango King moved to Los Angeles in 1927, where he worked as a caricaturist and cartoonist for the Los Angeles Times.  Hollywood was where Cugat would get his big break, and he was soon leading the Tango band at the Ambassador Hotel’s Coconut Grove Club. By 1932 he is already in Manhattan, fronting his own Xavier Cugat orchestra at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.  By the mid-1930s Cugat’s watered-down Cuban and Latin music with English lyrics made him one of the biggest bandleaders in the country. In 1934 he co-starred with Benny Goodman on the weekly NBC radio program “Let’s Dance”. By 1936 he was a regular in Hollywood movies, which consistently included Cuban and Latin musical numbers throughout the period.

Latin music was hot in New York in the 1930s, and Cugat sold millions of recordings for Columbia records. Latin dance clubs had their own listing in The New Yorker magazine’s “Goings On About Town” section. The music that Cugat and other society bandleaders recorded is generally considered to have been “crossover dreck”, but was massively popular in its time. One modern reviewer described Cugat’s 1950s recording of the song “Babalú” this way: “Xavier Cugat takes a hymn to Chango and turns it into a Looney Tunes soundtrack. You can almost see the cartoon cannibals dancing around the cauldron of boiling missionaries during his silly nonsensical “rap.”” High society clubs that presented Cugat-type fare, such as the Waldorf Astoria, Taft Hotel or Stork Club in Manhattan were, as a rule, segregated, and that included musicians. Scholar Cristobal Diaz Ayala’s final assessment of Cugat and his contemporaries such as Enric Madriguera is that at least they were “excellent musicians who provided great exposure for Latin music in the USA.”

The Conga King

“One, two, three, kick.” In 1933 Desi Arnaz Jr. moved from Santiago de Cuba, in Cuba’s Oriente province, to Miami, Florida. According to his Wikipedia entry, in his memoirs Arnaz said that: “I know of no other country in the world” in which “a sixteen-year-old kid, broke and unable to speak the language” could attain the success he had. Hundreds of hotels and resorts were built in the 1930s in Miami Beach, giving the city its still distinct Art Deco district. This area, along with New York and Chicago, became a center for Latin music nightlife. According to Josephine Powell, Desi Arnaz Jr. began playing “foxtrots with a rumba beat” in Miami, and at some point caught the eye of Xavier Cugat. Cugat, who was known never to miss a novelty or marketing opportunity, saw a doozie in the handsome, light-skinned, Conga-beating Arnaz.

He was proved right. Arnaz was a huge hit, becoming “Mr. Conga” while fronting Cugat’s orchestra. The conga was a national smash: in 1938 Cab Calloway recorded “The Congo-Conga”, and in 1940 “Goin’ Conga”. The “Conga” rhythm is a watered-down version of a Cuban carnaval rhythm played by a comparsa. A comparsa, described by Alejo Carpentier as an “itinerant ballet”, was a group of 30 or more (Afro-Cuban) dancers, singers, percussionists and horn players that paraded together through the streets during the annual carnavales.

Arnaz became a broadway star, acting alongside Puerto Rican dancer and singer Diosa Costello in the musical “Too Many Girls”. “Too Many Girls” was made into a movie in 1940, and Arnaz appeared in many others, eventually going on to star in the most watched show in US Television history, “I Love Lucy” with his wife, comedienne Lucille Ball.

But going back to 1936-’38, the Conga craze’s peak years, Cugat had so many engagements that he made two Xavier Cugat orchestras, with Arnaz leading one while Cugat led the other. There was Arnaz, conga drum strapped to his shoulder, leading the socialites of Miami and New York (and the world over) snaking through the concert halls, hands on shoulders, “One, two, three, kick”, doing the Conga line. 

Neo-Africa in the Americas

Cuba was one of the first Spanish colonies to begin importing Africans in the early 1500s, and was nearly the last in the hemisphere to end the slave trade (1865) and to abolish slavery (1886). After 1808, imports of Africans to the United States was illegal (though clandestine importation did continue), but thirty years later, the trade in Cuba was thriving, and an estimated 165,000 Africans were imported from 1835-1840. Though Africans of many different nations were imported to the Americas South and North, following Ned Sublette’s scholarship, the two main layers were generally the Kongo/Angolans and the Yoruba of what is roughly today Nigeria and Benin. 

Kongo/Angolans refers to a diverse group of Bantu-related peoples, coming from an enormous area that stretches from Cameroon down to Angola, and includes the Central African Republic and Congo (the region is somewhere near a third of the size of the United States). Ned Sublette notes that Kikongo-derived words like ngombe (cattle) and ngubá (peanut) remain in use in Cuba to this day; in the Southern United States we are familiar with the term “goober” for peanut. The presence of an ‘mb’ or ‘ng’ in a word, especially as related to Afro-Latin music, is generally associated with Kongo culture. Thus terms such as mambo, samba, cumbia, merengue, charanga, bomba, tango. Conga. Rumba.

As for the Yoruba, from the 1820s to the 1860s an estimated 275,000 were brought to Cuba. In this case, looking at the example of Brazil is helpful. While Sublette notes that without the Kongo/Angolans there would be no Brazil, period, the Yoruba presence there is also overwhelming. Since at least the 18^th century, ships sailed between Salvador, Bahia and Lagos, Nigeria several times a year carrying clothes, fruits, shells, and other items necessary to practice the Yoruba religion. Or as Yedda Pessoa de Castro has it in “Towards a Comparative Approach of Bantuisms in Iberoamerica,” “This type of trade was destined to meet the demand of the local population as it concerned the products necessary to maintain african religious cults or used in the candomblé houses condemned by the press of that epoch as noisy cults frequented by persons of all classes (ital in cited work).” The Salvador-Lagos line was shut down by the British, colonial masters of Nigeria, after a 1903 cholera outbreak.

Here it is instructive to note the difference between Catholic South and Protestant North America for Africans.  Except for New Orleans, with its famous Congo Square, African languages, drums and dances were generally outlawed in British North America. In Latin America, in contrast, the Catholic church considered Africans to be human and capable of salvation through the Catholic faith. Especially in situations like Cuba’s where Europeans were massively outnumbered by Africans, the church was content to make sure that Africans were baptized at birth and read the last rites at death, even as they preserved their African languages, drums and dances in between.

The carnaval and three kings day were central to the continuing transmission of African culture. The three day period leading up to lent on the Catholic calendar was “when slaves and free africans danced in the streets all day.” In colonial times, Africans elected kings and danced in the streets of Cartagena, Colombia and in Mexico in front of Melchior/Baltazar, the Black king from the Christian Epiphany story. The great Cuban musicologist Fernando Ortiz wrote of the carnaval comparsas “in monstrous costumes that marched double file down the street to a rhythm that their leader beat on a frying pan. Periodically, the leader would accelerate the rhythm” and the members of the comparsa would begin “leaping, dancing, climbing up the window grills,” and trying to startle the women who watched the street from inside. Some groups carried a large effigy of a scorpion or a snake that they ritually “killed” at intervals.” The immolation of the snake and the  “snake dance” is related to the Dahomeyan snake cult.

…which means that a hundred or so years later, conga-crazy North American and European elites – and defense workers – were doing a Dahomeyan snake dance.

Repression of Everything Afro-Cuban

In the first three decades of the 20^th century and beginning immediately after the war of independence from Spain, some 700,000 Spanish and Canary Islanders immigrated to Cuba. Dr. Cristobal Diaz Ayala provides an answer to this seeming contradiction: “It’s the only case in the world where something like that happened, that after the end of a war, where normally the group that loses the war is kicked out of the country, in this case the Spaniards began arriving to Cuba the following year in greater numbers than were leaving. In the first 30 years of the Republic Spanish immigration to Cuba was greater than in the whole previous century. Why? To whiten Cuba.”  Many of these immigrants were the first to leave when the “blacks and reds” took over during the Cuban revolution of 1959, but others did not wait so long. Like Xavier Cugat’s family, for instance.

According to Professor John Chasteen, after Independence the cultural models of Europe and the United States were paramount in the Cuban elite mind. Chasteen notes that “U.S. occupation and subsequent U.S. tutelage constantly reminded the Havana elite of their need to banish “savagery” and “backwardness”, and demonstrate “progress” and “civilization”. It simply would not do, any longer, to have Kokoríkamos climbing window grills and comparsas of “Africans” symbolically immolating giant snakes in the streets.”

Neo-African practices were thus in the crosshairs, especially Afro-Cuban religious practice. Ned Sublette has made the startling point that “Santería”, the syncretization of Yoruba religion with Catholicism, or rather the disguising of Yoruba religion as Catholicism, occurred after the end of slavery. As Cristobal Diaz Ayala told it to Sublette: “Something curious happens: that in the colonial period, Ned, the black people had more freedom to play their drums than they had after Cuba was a republic.” Neo-African music was also suspect. According to Larry Crook: “For the white upper class, the rumba was little more than a barbarian expression of an inferior and primitive culture and was intimately tied to such things as drinking, rowdy and licentious behavior, and crime. The negative associations were taken to such a point that a study of criminology in Cuba, first written in 1906, included a chapter on the rumba.”

The reaction was predictable. So it was that the magnificent comparsas that danced their Neo-African choreographies in lavish costumes throughout Havana were banned.  The ban lasted from 1913 to 1937. Yoruba dances were banned starting in 1920. Jordi Pujol notes that a notice in the Diario de la Habana of Septrmber 5, 1921 stated that “the Chief of Police reminds all that you must comply with the ordinance of April 5, 1919, which prohibits the playing of drums and other instruments of African origin, and the movements and phrases that accompany them.” In 1925 the mayor of Santiago de Cuba banned the “conga dance” and bongo and conga playing in the upcoming carnavales. The mayor’s name was Dr. Desiderio Arnaz.

…his son was Desi Arnaz Jr. 

While the real rumba was outlawed and its practitioners hauled off to jail for playing the bongo, Cugat and Arnaz made millions playing “rhumbas” at society clubs in New York City, Hollywood, and Miami Beach. It turns out that Desi Arnaz Jr. was hardly a “penniless Cuban immigrant.” Again, according to Wikipedia: “Desi Arnaz was born Desiderio Alberto Arnaz y de Acha III in Santiago de Cuba to Desiderio Alberto Arnaz (1894-1973) and Dolores de Acha (1896-1988). His father was Santiago’s youngest mayor and then served in the Cuban House of Representatives. His mother, Dolores Acha y de Socias, was one of the most beautiful and prominent women in Latin America, and her father, Alberto, was one of the three original founders of the Bacardi Rum Company. The family owned three ranches, a palatial home and a vacation mansion on a private island in Santiago Bay, Cuba. The 1933 revolution, led by Fulgencio Batista, overthrew the American-backed President Gerardo Machado, landed his father in jail for six months, and stripped his family of its wealth and power… Arnaz and his parents then fled to Miami, Florida.”

Arnaz Sr. was one of Machado’s inner circle, and Machado one of the most corrupt Presidents in Cuban history (which is saying something).

Bruca Maniguá and the real Mr. Babalú

Yo son Carabalí, Negro de nación. Sin la libertad, No puedo vivir. Mundele acabá, Con mi corazón. Tanto maltratá, Cuerpo ta fuiri. Yenyere bruca maniguá Ah Eh!

I am Carabalí, Negro born in Africa. Without liberty, I can’t live. The white man has finished My heart. So much abuse, He’s killed my body.   The bush doctor is casting a spell (on the white man)

Ignacio Arsenio Travieso Scull (professionally, he used his mother’s maiden name, thus “Arsenio Rodriguez”) was born in 1911 to a family of fifteen in the rural interior of Matanzas province. Arsenio’s family were descended of Kongos, and his grandfather taught him the Palo Monte religion. According to the most popular story, a young Arsenio – it’s not clear at exactly what age, seven, eight, or twelve – poked a mule in the rear with a stick, and received a violent kick to the head. The boy lost his left eye immediately, and the use of his right as well. Alternatively, it is said that he contracted a disease that made him lose his sight. Arsenio seems to have dedicated himself to music after that point, to the benefit of dancers the world over: known later as El Ciego Maravilloso (The Blind Marvel), Arsenio would go on to be called “the father of the Son Montuno” and indeed, “the father of Salsa Music.”

Miguelito Valdés was born to a Spanish father and Mexican (Yucatec Indian) mother and raised in the tough neighborhood of Cayo Hueso in Havana. Cayo Hueso, near the Havana docks, is one of the neighborhoods known as a Cuna de Rumberos – cradle of rumberos – for its proximity to the wharves and its population of dockworkers who banged out rumbas on wooden shipping crates. The Valdes family appear to have been santeros, practicioners of the Yoruba-based Afro-Cuban religion.  Miguelito was a handsome “mulato claro” or light mulatto – as he grew, his color would open doors to him that remained shut for many of his friends, something that seemed to cause him much anger in his life.

Miguelito left school at 11 to work as an automobile mechanic. In classic poor hustler style, he became an amateur boxer, winning the amateur welterweight belt in 1929. He was known as the “singing boxer” because he sang his answers when interviewed on the radio. After winning the title, he quit boxing and decided to pursue music full time. In 1937 he and six other members of the Orquesta Los Hermanos Castro left to form an orquesta as a cooperative in which all members would have a stake. The band, which would become the most influential in Latin America in the late 1930s, was called Orquesta Casino de la Playa.

Miguelito and Arsenio had been friends since at least the early ‘30s. In 1937 Miguelito Valdés took a number of Arsenio’s compositions to Casino de la Playa, who recorded “Bruca Manigua” at session for RCA Victor. The RCA sessions, which included numbers like “Dolor cobarde” and  “Cachita” proved such a massive success that Diaz Ayala says they “changed the history of Popular Music in the Caribbean.” With respect to “Bruca Manigua”, within two years of the song’s recording by Casino de la Playa it was recorded again by Xavier Cugat in the United States; Cugat’s all-white orchestra played the song – about a bush doctor putting a curse on the white man – to all-white audiences at the Waldorf Astoria. But then, as Ned Sublette astutely points out, this was the age of Surrealism.

Casino de la Playa embarked on their first tour of the Caribbean in 1937, and by 1938 “Cachita”, “Dolor Cobarde”, “Bruca Manigua” and new hits like “Rumba Rumbero” were getting daily play on the radio and were in constant rotation at youthful social gatherings throughout the region. The Orquesta recorded nearly 200 78rpm sides for RCA Victor between 1937 and 1940, among them yet more massive hits like “Babalú” and “Blen Blen Blen”. The 1939 recording of the Margarita Lecuona composition “Babalú (Ayé), would be forever associated with Miguelito Valdés throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, where he was soon – and is still – known as “Mr. Babalú.”

Babalu-Ayé is the Yoruba Orisha of the afflicted, and is associated with Saint Lazarus. He appears depicted as a old man with open sores which are licked by dogs that follow him. In form, “Bruca Maniguá” and “Babalú” are both Afros, a slow, dramatic but bouncy rumba lament. In Miguelito Valdés’ Afros, he sang in character as an Afro-Cuban “Negro de Nación”, using Yoruba or Congo terms in the dialect of the first generation brought from Africa. Like the Son clave (“The Bo Diddley Beat”) and Cha Cha Cha figures in early rock and roll (See Sublette), the Afro also entered and remained part of the popular music world, forming the basis for international hits such as Carlos Santana’s “Black Magic Woman”.

Miguelito is a fascinating figure who was able to present the Afro Cuban themes and rhythms he had grown up with in an authentic manner to audiences that would not have been thought to be open to such content. He had the ability to be passionate and heartfelt, while at times clowning just to the edge of what could be called “tomming”. But he never crossed that line. Many black musicians of the era – most of them close friends of his, some since childhood –  have commented on this special role of his, and for the dignity with which he executed it, presenting their music to white people “while dressed in a tuxedo.”

Valdés told interviewer Leo Rosa that “Back in ’38 we were working in Havana, and every time Xavier Cugat came to Havana, he always asked me: “When are you going to join me? I want you in New York… So after four years with the Casino de la Playa Orchestra, I wanted to to make it big. I wanted to go to the big country, to the country of opportunity, which is this one.” Miguelito and pianist Anselmo Sacasas did just that, moving to New York City in 1940. Valdés was an immediate sensation with Cugat, with whom he recorded a new version of “Babalú.”

The upshot is that Miguelito Valdés’ performance on “Babalú” and indeed even his name as “Mr. Babalu” was appropriated wholesale by Desi Arnaz Jr. Arnaz was intimately familiar with Miguelito’s performance, and the two worked together with Xavier Cugat beginning in 1940. Within a few years, Arnaz was singing “Babalú” on the “I Love Lucy” television show, and was universally known as “Mr. Babalú” among the English-speaking public. But from Mexico south, Miguelito Valdes is still – to this day – known as “Mr. Babalú”.

This, however, is not your typical “inauthentic opportunist rips off authentic musician, and authentic musician dies poor” story. Miguelito Valdés enjoyed a rich career as the probably the single most popular Afro-Latin singer (in the spanish speaking world) well into the mid-1950s.  He appeared in at least twelve Spanish language movies made in Mexico’s “Frijolywood” and was feted in Cuba,  New York City, Panama and Mexico City. Max Salazar, the great journalist and documentor of Latin Music in New York, put Miguelito’s picture on the front cover of his book “Mambo Kingdom: Latin Music in New York.” Miguelito Valdés died in Bogotá, Colombia in 1978 while performing “Babalú” at the hotel Tequendama. When the full story of Afro-Latin music is told, his critical role will be recognized.

Recommended Reading:

John Charles Chasteen “National Rhythms, African Roots: the Deep History of Latin American Popular Dance”

Timothy Brennan “Secular Devotion: Afro-Latin Music and Imperial Jazz”

Alejo Carpentier “Music in Cuba” With an introduction by Professor Timothy Brennan

Max Salazar “Mambo Kingdom: Latin Music in New York”

Ned Sublette “Cuba and its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo”

Ned Sublette “The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square”

If you already have seen these, you know. If you haven’t, you’ll be happy you took a look. These videos of Willie’s monster outfit were recorded on Panama’s TV2 in 1969-74 (I think the first two were from 1969). The first starts with a Jose Mangual Jr. Bongo intro with sticks (!!!) and is soon owned by a young Hector Lavoe. This is a 6 minute distillation of what AfroAntillean dancefloor dreams are made of:

Next is “Te Conozco”. C’mon man. Can you imagine the joy of dancing to these guys live in this time period?

Finally, here is “Timbalero”, from 1971 or maybe later. You can tell Hector owns Panama by now, check out how the studio crowd screams during the breakdown/call and response that starts around 4:50. This song is still an anthem in Panama, young people still know the lyrics and the sing the coro. The Timbalero in question is Louie Romero, who I am so grateful moved to the SF Bay Area many years ago – Louie still plays with his excellent band Mazacote (the best in the Bay, and it’s not close) monthly in Sausalito.

No, not the epic Joe Cuba boogaloo. “El Tiroteo” was composed by Pete Ortiz and George Rodriguez of El Barrio’s mighty (and still playing as of this writing!) New Swing Sextet for their 1970 LP Revolucionando. Quick lyrical translation: the song basically says “I heard you’ve been messing with my girlfriend. Do it again and I’ll shoot you in the head.” I believe this is the new version recorded in 2005:

Pointing out how closely young Colombian (and Peruvian and Panamanian and Venezuelan) cats were listening to the creations of the NY scene in the late ’60s and early ’70s, this is Fruko’s take on the song, which only appears on a Discos Fuentes 45.

A couple notes – if you aren’t knowing, Fruko is the genius (along with producer Mario Rincon and label boss Antonio Fuentes) responsible for Fruko y sus Tesos, The Latin Brothers, Wganda Kenya and Afrosound. His recordings on Discos Fuentes are perfectly recorded and are absolute thunder on a good dancefloor soundsystem.

While Fruko’s singers included both Joe Arroyo and Piper Pimienta – Colombia’s #1 and #2 of all time, period – this song is sung by the unknown (to me) Huango, whose voice lends a more simple, working class tough tone. Fruko kept the New Swing Sextet’s vibes, added the wicked distorted echo on coro (which sounds incredible on the dancefloor hella loud) and the boogaloo handclaps colombians love.

Finally, we get to this delicious little stripped down version by Peru’s Jimmy y Sus Perlas, led by the great Tres player Oswaldo “Mita” Barreto. I’ll do another post on the fantastic Peruvian tres-led sound of this period (Mita, Los Kintos, Los Magos del Swing etc.) in the future.

Everybody knows Celia Cruz. La Lupe is currently having a moment. But despite male domination of the music industry and most of the singing jobs, there were a good number of excellent Soneras and Guaracheras during the classic decades of AfroCuban Jazz and Dance music, in Cuba and outside of it.

1. Solinka ( de Panamá) – Solinka is a Panamanian Guarachera who found herself crowded out of the live music scene in late 1960s Panama by an abundance of Male singers. Per her documentarist (and reknowned Panamanian Film Scholar) Edgar Soberón Torchia, “Her agent decided to send her abroad, to Ecuador and Perú in South America to try her luck. It was in Perú where she became a sensation as a salsa entertainer. An enthusiastic journalist wrote that her performance was as bright as a “sol inca” (Inca sun), a moniker that she adopted as her artistic name.”

Here is Solinka singing “Arroyo Traicionero” ca. 1975 backed by Bush y Su Nuevo Sonido (Bush was co-owner of the Epoca label):

Note that the song was written by Graciela Arango de Tobón, a Colombian composer who got her start in a National Songwriting contest sponsored by the Philips label in 1965. Arango, who also composed hot Cumbias and Guarachas like “Por Las Buenas” and “Don Goyo (Este Muerto No Lo Cargo Yo)”, went on to win first prize at the Festival de Viña del Mar in 1973, and was later (1976) named “Compositora de las Américas.”

2. Canelita Medina – In addition to sharing cultural similarities, Venezuela has always been close to Cuba, both geographically and sympathetically. In 1958 when Batista fell, the streets of Caracas were packed with joyous revelry. Venezuela has been fertile soil for the AfroCuban music complex since at least the 1920s.

One of the points that I am struck by regarding the history of AfroCuban musics is the interconnectedness of the Urban Caribbean (which includes NYC) – brilliant musicians like the Boricua Rafael Hernandez and Cuban Machito in NYC, Jamaicans in Eastern Cuba, Panama and NYC, Cubans in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Panama and Peru, etc.

A case in point is the great Puerto Rican (bandleader, composer, pianist) Noro Morales, who was a Mambo King in NYC, before the Big 3 of Machito and the two Titos ruled in the ’50s. Max Salazar said of Noro “…after 1945, Morales’s main rival as a bandleader was Machito. During this period, Noro’s band was paid the highest compliment an orchestra can get: where Morales and his group appeared, musicians from other bands would come just to watch the performance. That was what Tito Puente, Tito Rodriguez, Charlie Palmieri, Hector Rivera, Lou Perez, Pete Terrace, Frankie Colon, and Ken Rosa did on many occasions.”

Noro moved with his musical family (every child played an instrument, his father directed) to Venezuela in 1924 to serve as dictator Juan Gomez’s house band. He lived and played there until 1930, when the family moved back to PR, and even after moving to NYC in 1935 used to have people bringing him arepas and cachapas back from Caracas via plane in the ’40s and ’50s.

Canelita got her start in the late 1950s with the Sonora Caracas in what was a bubbling nightclub scene, later singing with Victor Pinero’s Caribes and Los Megatones de Lucho.

While she would go on to sing with Federico y Su Combo and her own group as well as the internationally known Sonero Clasico del Caribe, the following song (“No Le Digas Na”) has her singing with Cheo Palmar’s group Las Estrellas Latinas which band also featured singers such as Calaven, and underappreciated Venezuelan Sonero Joe (Joe-eh) Ruiz (look up his work with Grupo Mango, you won’t be disappointed).

(if you end up listening to this song millions of times, I understand. I have listened to it 59.7 billion times.)

Here she is doing a stunning version of Willie Colon’s “Guajira Ven” from her 1979 LP Sones Y Guajiras:

That is the original. Frankly, nothing touches it. 9 and a half minutes of AfroCuba meets New York City Jazz distillled by the hippest genius Nuyoricans. It always seemed to me that the “angry elephant” trombones (Brazilian Jose Rodrigues and Israelite Barry Rogers) brought the roar of modern, urban life – Semi trucks and cars, work whistles and machinery, the endless noise of NYC – into AfroCuban dance music.

Next is Eddie versioning himself! Here his “La Perfecta” backs Cuban flutist and bandleader José Fajardo, minus the trombones (sounds like a trumpet and sax in there, but the action is all in Fajardo’s flute). Fajardo was a pillar of the Cuban Charanga since the 1940s – he filled in for Antonio Arcaño for 3 years, led his own Charanga and recorded a Latin Jam Session (descarga) for LP Panart, among other distinctions.

Last is a really lovely version by Chico Orefiche, from the Latin Underground LP on Gema (Greatest ever LP cover alert). Orefiche was a bongocero and Sax player with the Lecuona Cuban Boys Orchestra, an early (1930s-40s) traveling “Rhumba” review led by famed composer Ernesto Lecuona, and later by Chico’s brother, pianist, composer and arranger Armando Orefiche.

The whole LP is really interesting, with a number of great songs, and it’s always struck me that a musician who began in the ’30s pops up three decades later with a fully formed musical expression like this, then disappears from the record again.

Now that the stage has been set, please enjoy these brilliant pieces of Panamanian Dancefloor

1. La Ofensiva – “Me La Tienes Que Dar”

Per the liner notes of La Ofensiva’s first LP, the band was formed by the brilliant multi-instrumentalist and Tipico Accordonist Colaquito Cortez. Tille Valderrama (see earlier post “3 favorites: Salsa Dura”) contributed arrangements, and I’m assuming he did so on this hot one as well.

2. Alexis y Su Bonche – “Meñique”

Can’t tell you how many times I pulled out this LP and just listened to Bush y Su Nuevo Sonido’s majestic Ruben Blades-penned beast “9 de Enero”. But once I dropped the needle on this song, I tend to come back to it every time and listen to it LOUD.

Alexis is “Profesór” Alexis Castillo, trumpet player and one of Panama’s great arrangers, who went on to direct the Banda de Música del Benemérito Cuerpo de Bomberos de Panamá (the Firemen’s Big Band) and the Banda Republicana. Vocal is by El Conde Licas, kind of a tier-two singer but really fun, with that very typical bounciness that the great Panamanian Salseros of the ’70s have.

(Speaking of which, If you like this kind of thing, google up Skorpio’s “Te Toca Tocar La Tumba”, with vocal by the great Ricardo “Babaila” de Rosario (Roberto y su Zafra, and later with Bobby Rodriguez Y La Compania in NYC). His vocals are ’70s Panamanian Dancefloor Soneo in its purest form. The song appears on Vol.2 of the Panama! series in Soundway Records, but I’m trying to highlight music that did not appear on those comps on this blog)

3. Manito Johnson y Los Diferentes – “Corre Camino”

Maaaaaan. Manito, who had such an illustrious career beginning in the early ’50s with Armando Boza’s famous big band “La Perfecta”, and famously with the thunderous Maximo Rodriguez and his Estrellas Panameñas in the ’60s, absolutely brought it with his own band “Los Diferentes” in the early ’70s.

Manito’s vocals are among the strongest, most manly in the AfroCuban Canon – the only comparable singers who come to mind are Venezuela’s great Joe Ruiz, El Gran Combo’s Andy Montañez and Charlie Aponte, and Cheo Feliciano. Those that have listened to the breadth of this music’s recordings across the region and across the decades agree – though underappreciated outside of Panama (and Peru) in his heyday, Manito is among the all-time greats of the Genre.

Panama’s central location between North and South Americas, status as an international trading crossroads for 500 years – and as a sort of US Colony for the entire 20th century – have all informed its connection to AfroCuban musics.

A key outpost of the Colonial Spanish Empire, Panama is a sister nation to Cuba, and to be reductive, shares a similar African + Mestizo + European + Chinese social base (with more Native people and cultures, and a huge chunk of AfroAntillean English Speaking Protestants as cultural leavening agent). Panama’s Colon Coast sits directly on the Caribbean Sea.

By the 1940s, as Panamanian society and culture began to consolidate after the waves of immigration from the construction of the Canal, the great majority of the music consumed on the radio, in cabarets, theaters and via 78 and soon 45 and 33rpm records was Cuban music. Per the writer Plinio Cogley, probably 70% of the music consumed in Panama was Cuban music.

Cogley’s book “Asi Era Beny Moré” ferrets out details of the 7 (!) times the AfroCuban musical giant (and Pan-Latin American idol) played the Carnavales in Panama. The first time was in 1947, barely 2 years after El Beny had landed in Mexico with Conjunto Matamoros. This was after he had started to make a name for himself on the airwaves, but before he recorded his famous sides with Perez Prado, and while he was still an unknown in his native Cuba. Panamanians were onto him early.

By the same time, Panama boasted a number of Cuban-style big bands, including Armando Boza’s La Perfecta, which contemporaries have told me was one of the absolute best in Latin America generally in the late ’40s/early ’50s. The ’60s and ’70s saw a veritable explosion of AfroCuban music (and Orquestas, Combos, etc.) in Panama, as the Guarachas, Montunos, Guaguancos and Guajiras played and danced locally (see following post on “Hot Panamanian Dancefloor Salsa Pt.1”) reverberated with those being created in the barrios of NYC by the Cuban and especially Boricua/Nuyorican musicians that graced the cultural capital of North America.

By the late ’60s and very early ’70s – as Cuban Guarachas were rechristened “Salsa” in NYC, in the barrios of Puerto Rico, Caracas, Cali and Panama City (Barranquilla, Guayaquil, Lima) – Fania sent their young duo of Willie Colón and Hector Lavoe to tour Panama, reasoning that if the exigente Panamanian public accepted them, they would be a hit in Pan-Latin America. These giants, destined together (and a few years later with Panamanian Ruben Blades) to write the New Testament of the Canon of AfroCuban music, were a smash hit.

Colón and Lavoe brought Panama front and center with their “Panameña” on the La Gran Fuga LP (1971) and their anthemic hit “La Murga de Panama” on Asalto Navideño, released the same year. And you can still hear Hector’s voice on Panama’s airwaves any day of the week, 50 years later.

Finally, here is a picture of record store owner Dora de Angeles (4th from the right), a fixture in the Panama Salsa scene, with NY Salsa legends Roberto Roena (3rd from left), Cheo Feliciano (middle) and Hector Rivera (third from right) in Panama City in 1972 or ’73. Note Roena’s “Our Latin Thing” T-shirt, promoting the epic documentary by Leon Gast. To Dora’s right is her partner Marcela, who was shouted out in various songs of the era, including by El Gran Combo, and who died tragically in a car accident a few years later. On the far left is Freddy Anglin, long time bassist for Bush y sus Magnificos and leader of Freddy y sus Afro Latinos, whose eponymous LP is a an absolute grail among collectors.

For more on Armando Boza’s Big Band, see: https://thesilverpeopleheritage.wordpress.com/culture/our-cultural-legends-in-profile/armando-boza-panamas-big-band-legend/

Here is the song that gave the record label it’s name – “Fania” by Estrellas de Chocolate. Estrellas de Chocolate are one of the three great Son Montuno Conjuntos that spun off the master Arsenio Rodriguez’s Conjunto when he left Cuba in 1952, which list in my mind also includes Conjunto Modelo and Chappottín’s Conjunto.

The song speaks for itself. I must have heard it a thousand times now and it’s still fascinating every time. I have never been able to find a translation of what the lyrics mean or what language they represent (Palo language (Kongo/Angolan), Yoruba, Dahomeyan, or possibly Abakua?). It may be that, as Alexander Abreu says, “El que sabe esta callao.” Love if anyone can share insight here.

Not only did Johnny Pacheco name his label “Fania”, but he also covered the song on the label’s debut LP Cañonazo (1964). I won’t embed that here, because I find that version pretty boring, even with the great (young) Pete “El Conde” Rodriguez singing – it’s like 3rd graders playing compared to the maestria of Estrellas de Chocolate. Just my opinion.

Fania (the label) did however release an interesting version in 1979 on Chamaco Ramirez’s only solo LP “Alive and Kicking”

The notes for the LP on the Fania site are excellent (but could use punctuation?) and summarize Chamaco’s place well: ” If Ramírez had never done anything else, his recordings in the 1960s and 70s with Tommy Olivencia alone should have been enough to cause him to be held in the highest esteem. They are some of the best salsa tunes ever put to wax. Yet his tragically short solo career, occasional stints in jail, penchant for crime to support his drug habit, and momentary disappearances from the scene (ending in his untimely death in 1983), have contributed to his remaining largely unrecognized in the pantheon of salsa greats. “

A documentary about Chamaco appears to be stuck in post production due to the new owners of the Fania catalog having unrealistic financial goals from the doc (google aguzate chamaco and find their fb to learn more & see how you can help if interested). Shame because what a fascinating artist, and story. He was definitely one of the most interesting soneros of the period, as the Fania site has it “Like Ismael Rivera, Chamaco had a way with improvising lyrics, word play, and rhythmic delivery.” This version is arranged by the great Javier Vasquez (son of La Sonora Matancera’s original bassist Bubu Vasquez) in between assignments for Ismael Rivera’s Cachimbos:

If you like Chamaco, check him out live with Tommy Olivencia’s band doing “San Agustín Puerta de Tierra” in 1981. It’s the first song on this awesome footage that the investigators from Aguzate apparently found while researching the project:

Ray Perez, who they called “El Loco Ray”, is a genius composer, arranger and pianist who graced Venezuela with his innovations starting in the early ’60s. As a pianist, he is a naturally smoky, bluesy montuno monster – google his original recording of “El Trigueño Cintura” and check him out (there is a great later live version online as well). In the ’50s he worked at the Remington company in Caracas, where he would set adding machines playing polyrhythms together with different calculations.

In 1967 his group “Los Dementes” ( a shocking, totally punkrock name for a band in VZ of the sixties) released the Ray composed/arranged LP La Salsa Llego con Los Dementes on Velvet, a masterpiece of Salsa Dura and one of the first LPs to call out Salsa as a genre. The whole “who used Salsa first” discussion is long and involved and I won’t go into it here. Suffice to say Ray P and Los Dementes and Caracas were right in the middle of it in ’67. Here is the title track, “Mi Salsa Llego”:

The whole album – actually every Los Dementes LP of the era, are incredible, if you like trombone-led Salsa Dura. Vocals were by the excellent Perucho Torcat, Ray’s accomplice who died tragically in his early 30s from a freak monoxide inhalation accident in Justo Betancourt’s garage in the US. The trombones and the percussion players (Nene Quintero, Carlos Padilla, Albondiga etc.) all went on to be key parts of the much better known Venezuelan Salsa groups of the ’70s and ’80s.

But in ’67 Ray was just warming up. The same year, he released the far-out LP Estos son Los Calvos (“here come the baldheads”) on RCA, where he versioned himself. Not, like, here are two takes of the same material. Instead, he got his friend Carlos Yanez, known as Calaven, to remake his “Mi Salsa Llego”, and backed him with a band that included Venezuelan percussion great Frank “El Pavo” Hernandez on a full drum kit. (The following year he created a whole new band, Los Kenya, with folklore master Alberto Naranjo on drums, while also putting out new Dementes and Calvos material.)

But just a bit on Calaven – there is no one like him in this idiom. Not Miguelito Valdés, the indisputable genius to whom he was often compared. Not Fellove or Guapacha (Armando Borcelá), also geniuses and pathbreakers.

This cat was doing his own thing:

I’ll post more on Calaven in the future. Meanwhile here’s his calling card, “El Negrito Calaven,” from the same LP:

Here is an image of a radio station 45 I found in Panama of Miguelito Cuní Y Su Conjunto “Todos Bailan Con Las Guajiras” on Gema. It’s not unusual to for DJs or programming staff to have written directions or reviews on sides, I’m used to seeing exclamation marks, stars, “este” or “OJO” or “Plomo!” to signify a hot side. Sometimes (sadly) someone will have scratched one side grievously in a pattern to make sure the DJ knew to play the other side.

It’s hard to find a clean radio station version of Los Morenos Alegres “Mia/Wash” on Sally Ruth (Panama, late ’60s) for that reason – because although “Mia” was a big hit, a lovely Combos Nacionales Latin Soul tune sung by Marcos Lavayen, “Wash” is a bawdy Calypso with especially transparent double entendre lyrics, and I’ve found more than one copy with the Wash side totally obliterated.

Here someone is telling a DJ (in Panama) not to play this side, as it is “Red”, “Fidelista” and “Propaganda of the INRA” , which was the Cuban Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria. This is certainly because of the content of this lovely, leisurely Son Montuno, which discussed the Agrarian Reform initiative and how happy the Guajiros (farmers/campesinos) will be when it becomes law. A time magazine article from 1960 notes that one could find the INRA’s glossy magazine in the Cuban embassy in Panama City.

It’s a great song, with Cuní – a personal favorite – in top form fronting a band led by Cuban arranger/tresero/musical giant Niño Rivera. The same band plays on the majestic Cuní LP Sones de Ayer, with unsung genius Oscar “Florecita” Velasco on trumpet.

Another interesting forbidden song appeared on Chappottín’s fantastic 1957-58 LP Ritmo en Sepia on Duarte (later re-pressed on Kubaney, and in Venezuela on Regis). “Un Pobre Guajiro” is a smoking hot montuno that talks explicitly of the poverty of the Guajiros and favorably of Agrarian Reform:

The song was pulled from the LP early on and “Nicolas Corrio” was swapped in, but “Un Pobre Guajiro” but still appears on later pressings of the LP cover:

In fact, if you go on Youtube today and type in “Un Pobre Guajiro Chappottin” it will play “Nicolas Corrio”. The original Duarte LP or 45 is very very rare – Gladys Palmera has the LP in her collection online (luckyyyy). “Un Pobre Guajiro” is not listed on the much later Venezuelan Regis pressing at all, “Nicolas Corrio” is.

It’s valuable to remember that this was a very dangerous time in Cuba’s history, there were shootouts in the streets, bombings, and deep uncertainty. It’s also telling of the particularly virulent racism that predominated in Cuba that the label uses the term “sepia” to distinguish Chappottin’s rhythms.

A final related forbidden song from the same era was Rene Touzet’s “Los Barbudos” (see next image, a french press EP). The classically trained Cuban Touzet was a well regarded big band leader of the ’40s who settled in LA early in the Mambo era, and later married Cuban superstar Olga Guillot. One of his compositions/ arrangements, “El Loco Cha Cha”, provided R&B singer Richard Berry with the riff for his classic garage song “Louie Louie”. “Los Barbudos” which was subtitled “un salut a FIDEL CASTRO” on my pressing, was pulled from the market in the US:

Here’s what the site Hypwax has to say about Touzet: “So, with all these credentials, why aren’t Touzet records taken more seriously? Part of the answer, besides his being on the wrong coast of the U.S., is that he once composed a tribute to Fidel Castro. Despite the fact it was pre-Revolution and pulled quickly from the market (same title & jacket as another LP but different # & tunes), Floridian Cubans of the 1960s never forgave him. Touzet was banned from the airwaves and store shelves in several key places. Many Californians, however, regard him highly, as he deserves.”