Chapter 1 Looking Back: Carlos Santana & Mario Bauza

Chapter 1 – Looking Back: Carlos Santana & Mario Bauza

(Jimmy Smits): In the United States, this is Latin Music. And this is Latin Music. This is Latin Music. And this is Latin Music. Its roots are sometimes obvious and sometimes not. It has accordions…. and it doesn’t. It’s in Spanish ……except when it’s not. It’s a fusion with Jazz …or Reggae. New hybrids with Country ….or Rock. It’s as diverse as the Latino experience, as American as it gets. Latin music, USA.

Bridges

(Carlos Santana): All the freeways were blocked like a science fiction movie. The people just abandoned their cars on the freeway. 550,000. You know, half a million or more strong. All I could see was an ocean of flesh and hair and teeth. The biggest door I ever walked through.

(Jimmy Smits): ON August 16, 1969, a little-known band from San Francisco, Santana, performed at Woodstock. It became one of the most successful international debuts in popular music history.

(Santana): And when I saw the movie, I remember that I was under the influence of drugs. You know, and I… then it all came back to me, like, “Darn! Why did I take drugs?”

(Jimmy Smits): Santana’s music was a fusion of rock, blues and Afro-Cuban percussion – a fresh hybrid, bar far from the first. In fact, the story of how Santana’s sound came to be stretches back decades, to before these musicians and their audience were born.

In 1930, a 19-year-old Cuban named Mario Bauzá arrived in New York. A classically trained clarinetist, he had visited the city four years earlier and fallen in love with jazz. Now he was back, intent on making it in the burgeoning Big Band scene. In Cuba, prejudice against his dark skin had held him back. New York had race barriers as well. But in Havana, there was no Harlem.

(MariouBauzá): All the big clubs with all those terrific shows in Harlem then. At 3 o’clock in the morning it was like 12 o’clock in the day in Times Square.

(Chris Washburne, Trombonist & Ethnomusicologist): In his own words, well, he found that it was a place where he could walk down the street and not experience the same kind of racism that he was experiencing in Havana at the time; that he could feel free as a black man walking down the street and not feel that oppression in the same way.

(Jimmy Smits): Just a few years later, after a switch to trumpet, Bauzá was playing at the Savoy Ballroom for Harlem’s King of Swing, Chick Webb. Bauzá became the orchestra’s music director and lead trumpet player. Taken with Bauzá’s musicianship, Webb had personally rehearsed him in what he called the vocabulary of jazz, helping him adapt to the feel of swing.

(Ray Santos, arranger): Getting more of da-ba-do, ba-da, ba-do, ba-da, ba-do, ba-da, ba-do, ba-da. Whereas Latin is …it tends to be strictly bac-um, bac-um, bac-um, bac-um, bac-um, bac-um, bac-um, bac-um.

(Jimmy Smits): Even as Bauzá made inroads into American jazz, Cuban music was entering the American mainstream. In 1931, an orchestra from Havana released “El Manisero” –“The Peanut Vendor.” It became a surprise smash hit. The million-seller launched the rumba dance craze of the ‘30s, and so-called “Latin” bands became a standard ballroom attraction. The stage was set for a musical revolution led by Mario Bauzá. It started with an insult.

Chapter 2 – Only in New York: Machito & His Afro-Cubans

(Bobby Sanabria, Musician & Historian): Mario was insulted by some comments by a musician in the Cab Calloway orchestra when he played him some of the music of Cuba. He said, “Hey, that sounds like hillbilly music, country music.” He goes, “Yeah, it’s the music of my country, Cuba. But one day there’ll be a band, just like this band, The Cab Calloway Band, real classy, elegant, with modern harmonies, etcetera.” He said, “It’s going to have an Afro-Cuban rhythm section. And I’m going to tell you, it’s going to sound better than this band.”

(MariouBauzá): You ever hear of lemon meringue pie? This is exactly what it is. Jazz in the top … Afro-Cuban rhythm in the bottom.

(Jimmy Smits): Bauzá’s first step was to recruit his brother-in-law, bringing him up from Cuba. To the world, he’d become known as Machito.

(Bobby Sanabria, Musician & Historian): Machito’s real name was Francisco Raúl Gutiérrez Grill de Ayala. His nickname when he was a kid was Macho. And then the story goes that a promoter in New York City told him, “That sounds, like, too harsh. Is there any way to make that a little bit softer? Like how would you say ‘Little Macho’?” So he goes, “Oh, Machito.” So that’s how basically he got his moniker.

(Aurora Flores, Journalist & Bandleader): He was the kind of man that was the salt of the earth, really, the salt of the earth. And what a pair of mara… nobody could play maracas like him. And the way he sang was just completely endearing.

(Jimmy Smits): Bauzá’s fusion of an African-American big band with traditional Cuban rhythms was groundbreaking, right down to its name.

(Chris Washburne, Trombonist & Ethnomusicologist): Just the fact that the name that they chose for that band was Machito and his Afro Cubans says a lot

(MariouBauzá): “Machito and his Afro Cubans” A whole lot of people objected to that “Afro” thing there.

(Chris Washburne, Trombonist & Ethnomusicologist): It’s the first time where we see this kind of public acknowledgement through the naming of the band of something that is African derived.

(MariouBauzá): I’m of African descent. And the rhythm that produces the music we play…is African.

(Bobby Sanabria, Musician & Historian): Nobody was acknowledging Africa. All of a sudden this band comes out and right in your face it says Machito and the Afro Cubans.

(Jimmy Smits): Bauzá and Machito had a strong base to work from. Granted U.S. citizenship in 1917, over 30,000 Puerto Ricans had migrated to New York, many settling in East Harlem, which came to be known as El Barrio, or Spanish Harlem.

(Jimmy Smits): The mix of jazz and traditional rhythms spoke directly to this new generation of New York Latinos. They provided both an audience and musicians for the band.

(Frank Colon): I stood in front of that bandstand. It changed my whole life. It changed my whole life – everything changed! I changed! You know, when I heard that band in person, in the flesh, and I heard those drums and going…. And how they start, and I was looking around, you know I felt like that feeling you get in your nose when you’re gonna cry or something, and you try to… It just… it just destroyed me. Wow! And I’m looking around… Ooh, man… and I look at the people and the people were dancing and, “Vaya, vayaPapi!” And I’m saying, “This is impossible, this is impossible.” You know, man, it changed my whole life. That was one of the experiences that stay with me till I’m in the tomb.

(Jimmy Smits): An immediate success, in El Barrio, Machito and his Afro Cubans became a bridge between worlds when they also found success with white audiences in midtown Manhattan, becoming the house band at the La Conga Club for three years. Though the Afro Cubans succeeded with varied audiences, that didn’t mean everyone heard the music the same way.

(Chris Washburne, Trombonist & Ethnomusicologist): It’s almost like a double performance, performing a piece that was translating to a general audience as a swinging, killing dance piece, but at the same time, there would be messages, coded messages for those people in the know.

“Boruboya”… You know, it goes by so fast, that you hardly recognize it. But anybody who was a practitioner of Santeríawould look up ‘cause it’s a traditional greeting.

(Jimmy Smits): During the 1940s, the Afro Cubans developed what became a landmark composition and the band’s theme song, “Tanga.”

(Chris Washburne, Trombonist & Ethnomusicologist): There is a nice balance there. It’s what Mario Bauzá and Machito were really pushing for: jazz improvisation over really, um, you know, intense Afro-Cuban grooves.

(Bobby Sanabria, Musician & Historian): And you get this wall of sound happening with the horns. It’s like a tidal wave of sound coming at you. It just stays on one chord. Boom. And it just gets more intense, and more intense, and more intense, and more intense. It was the harbinger of the experiments that Miles Davis would eventually start doing much, much later.

(Jimmy Smits): With music like “Tanga,” the Afro Cubans quickly drew the attention of the most innovative jazz artists, including an old friend and bandmate of Mario Bauzá’s.

(Frank Colon): And who comes in at the very end? Dizzy Gillespie. He trumpets were here, sax over there, the rhythm… he’s sitting right there. He wanted to hear that thing coming right through him. And so Mario, seeing that Dizzy’s there, he said, “All right, let’s take out the heavy stuff.” Diz looked around, told Mario, “Hey, baby, knock me out! Play some more of that stuff.” And I know when Dizzy left that night, man, he didn’t where to put his brains in.

Chapter 3 – Dizzy Gillespie & ChanoPozo: Champions of Latin Jazz

(Jimmy Smits): In the late 1940s, a handful of Cuban conga players arrived in New York and began transforming popular music almost immediately. One was CandidoCamero. Along with his peers – congueros like Mongo Santamaria and Armando Peraza – Candido would introduce the U.S. to an entirely new level of conga mastery. The instrument itself would be at the heart of a new fusion in jazz, created by one of the Afro Cubans’ greatest fans, Dizzy Gillespie.

As a founder of bebop, Gillespie had already revolutionized jazz, but he saw one aspect of it as stubbornly resistant to change.

(Chris Washburne, Trombonist & Ethnomusicologist): In his autobiography he said, you know, the rhythm o fjazz was boring in the sense that it was ding-dinga-ding, dinga-ding for the most part.

(Jimmy Smits): With an upcoming concert with his big band at Carnegie Hall late in 1947, Gillespie asked Bauzá to suggest someone to play, in Gillespie’s words, “one of those tom-toms.”Bauzá introduced him to ChanoPozo, who had recently arrived in New York from Cuba, where he was a successful songwriter, showman, and conga player. He had risen out of one of the roughest tenements in Havana.

(Bobby Sanabria, Musician & Historian): Chano’s a street dude, man. He’ll cut you, he’ll slap you. Chano was so famous for getting into fights, etcetera. He had, like, a bullet lodged near his spine; they couldn’t get the bullet out. You got this guy who’s like pure street, but he’s got all of this incredible folkloric knowledge and mystical knowledge and rhythmic knowledge.

(Jimmy Smits): At Carnegie Hall, ChanoPozo performed in a two-part number written to feature his playing, “Cubana Be, Cubana Bop.”

(Ray Santos, arranger): Chano’s appearance went over very big.

(Chris Washburne, Trombonist & Ethnomusicologist): People went absolutely nuts.

(Frank Colon): So, the band that did the most way-out Afro-Cuban jazz was Dizzy’s!

(Jimmy Smits): Afterward, Dizzy asked Chano to stay with the band. Not everyone was pleased.

(Bobby Sanabria, Musician & Historian): Most of the musicians in the band, they were all African-American, did not want him in the band. “Jungle music – we’re beyond that.”

(Jimmy Smits): Communication wasn’t easy – Chano didn’t speak English, no one in the band spoke Spanish. But a bridge between cultures was found in music when Chano approached Dizzy with a tune he’d made up, “Manteca.”

(Dizzy Gillespie): He said, “Dizzy… first the bajo” – the bass. He gave me the bass lick. I wrote that down – bi-di-bi-di-bi-bom-bim-bom. And then he said, “After that goes, um, saxo” – saxophone. Bom-bim, bom-bim.The trombone – bom-pu-bibi-pi-bom. And the trumpets – aaahhhh! And all these were going at the same time and it sure sounded good to me.

(Arturo Sandoval, Bandleader): “Manteca” is probably one of the… the most, you know, distinctive, uh, tune. Really it identified what is… Afro-Cuban jazz all about.

(Bobby Sanabria, Musician & Historian): Dizzy wasn’t the first one to create what we call Afro-Cuban jazz, or Latin jazz. That title goes to the Machito Afro Cubans. But Dizzy was the first person to champion it outside of the realm of… the close-knit society of those musicians that were from the culture.

(Arturo Sandoval, Bandleader): Unfortunately, one year later, somebody killed Chano in a bar in Harlem. But he left such a great impression on Dizzy. Dizzy never stopped talk about Chano.

Chapter 4 – The Mambo Craze: Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez

(Jimmy Smits): In the early 1950s, the mambo burst onto the international stage with hit records by Dámaso Pérez Prado, a Cuban working in Mexico City. Despite Pérez Prado’s popularity, he didn’t invent the mambo. Musicologists still debate who did.

But the first piece to be called a mambo was written in the late 1930s in Cuba, by the pianist Orestes López and his brother bassist, Israel López, better known as Cachao. They were searching for a way to liven up a Cuban form of ballroom dancing called danzón.

(Israel “Cachao” Lopez): The Mambo emerged when we spun the ship around 180 degrees…because we wanted to do something entirely different. So we used a totally syncopated rhythm. (demonstrates rhythm)

(Jimmy Smits): The intriguing López mambo was picked up by other Cuban composers and arrangers, including one who traveled to New York and worked with Mario Bauzá and Machito in the early 1940s.

(Frank Colon): I heard it from Mario, he said, “Hey, miratienenalgonuevo de Cuba y se llama mambo, hay quetocarloasi.” You know, that means, “There’s something new from Cuba, it’s coming up, it’s coming into New York, and you play it this way. They got a new dance for it, you know, and there’s saxes, you know?” That’s when you heard figures like (demonstrates the rhythm). They never had those figures before.

(Jimmy Smits): So while most of the U.S. and the world saw Pérez Prado as the king of the Mambo, New York with its jazzier sounds and decades-old Latin music scene had its own royalty, known as The Big Three. Machtio and his Afro Cubans were the elder statesmen; the two other contenders had grown up in El Barrio.

Tito Rodríguez was born in Puerto Rico and moved to New York as a young boy. By the 1950s, the suave singer led his own band. While his hot numbers burned, Rodríguez was also known for his romantic boleros.

(Larry Harlow, Musician): Tito Rodríguez was a crooner. He used to dance with the women…take his microphone and just look into their eyes and just sing these beautiful ballads, and the girls would just melt on the floor.

(Jimmy Smits): But there was another Tito, too. Tito Puente was born in El Barrio just three years after his parents arrived from Puerto Rico. Always interested in music, as a teenager, he turned away from that of his parents. For Puente, nothing beat swing. At 14, he saw drummer Gene Krupa at the Paramount Theater. “I knew right there what I wanted—to be Gene Krupa,” he later said.

But Puente found immediate work in the local Latin bands and took up timbales. He soon found himself under the wing of Mario Bauzá.

(Tito Puente): He was one of my mentors. He taught me a lot about playing, performing, rehearsing bands. I worked with Machito for quite a few years. Then the war came around and I was drafted.

(Jimmy Smits): A bugler and gunner’s mate in the Navy, Puente saw combat in World War II. He also played saxophone in bands to entertain the crews. By the end of the 1940s, Puente was running his own band and revolutionizing the role of the timbales.

(Bobby Sanabria, Musician & Historian): He starts making the instrument a vibrant force in the orchestra. Very much like Gene Krupa. Before Gene Krupa, drummers were not featured artists or anything like that. All of a sudden Gene Krupa comes out and he’s like a featured soloist. Tito does the same thing.

(Jimmy Smits): Puente was just getting started. His career as a consummate musician, bandleader and arranger lasted over 50 years.

(Bobby Sanabria, Musician & Historian): As Mario Bauzá said many, many times, nobody has done more for Afro-Cuban music than Tito Puente. Nobody.

Chapter 5 – Mambonicks: The Palladium and its Dancers

(Jimmy Smits): The Big Thee battled nightly for supremacy in New York before legions of new fans.

(Larry Harlow, Musician): We were called mambonicks, with an N-I-C-K-S on the end. And we were like guys that liked to mambo and liked to dance and really, the only place to go was the Palladium.

(Jimmy Smits): In midtown Manhattan, the Palladium had once been a dance studio. Now it was the Home of the Mambo.

(Barbara Craddock, Dancer): The first time I was at the Palladium I would say was one of the highlights of my life. I was just a teenager and I was out to dinner with my parents and they took me to the Palladium. And we sat down, and my mother was wearing a mink coat and jewelry, and here was this mixture of people—every race, every color, every creed—all dancing together. The emcee came out and said, “And here they are, the couple you’ve been waiting for, Cuban Pete and Millie.” And the audience went crazy, absolutely crazy. They came out and they did this wild mambo. And you have to remember that he was tan—café con leche…and she was white. And in 1955, to have a mixed couple…dance on the stage, any stage was…had never been done before.