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: