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Do you enjoy Latin music? Would you like to get more involved in this genre and share your passion for Salsa, Bachata, Kizomba, Merengue and more. Why not joint our Global Team of volunteers as a correspondent?
You can ask for more details with no obligation and we’ll be happy to talk to you about the benefits that come with the role
This time, we are very pleased to have been able to talk with a talented Venezuelan who has left the name of his country well off thanks to his talent and professionalism. We are talking about bandleader and singer Eduardo Herrera, who was kind enough to speak exclusively to us and give us details on his personal and professional life so that we can get to know a little more about him.
Eduardo comments that his parents always spent their time singing in a very cheerful way since he was a child, so his best childhood memories are with music.
He grew up in Caracas, so he always had close contact with all kinds of music and listened to a great variety of artists starting with Celia Cruz, La Sonora Matancera, La Billo Caracas Boys, Los Melódicos, Benny Moré, Oscar D’ León, Daniel Santos, Los Adolescentes La Dimensión Latina, La Fania, among others. These artists strongly encouraged him to lean towards salsa in the 1970s.
In his hometown, he began playing with the Teresa Carreño Chamber Choir, which was his first professional contact with music and, in his own words, was a great school for him during his time there.
In 1987, being already in the state of California, United States, there was an orchestra called Radiante that played Puerto Rican salsa. Eduardo worked with them for a year until he joined Orquesta Sensual, whose strength was romantic salsa that was fashionable at the time.
After that, he also worked with Orquesta Charanzón, which at that time was led by Anthony Blea, a famous violinist from the Bay Area. It was with this band that he began to fully discover Cuban music and develop a great passion for it, which would lead him to continue along this path in the following years.
In those years, he played with an unlimited number of orchestras with which he gained a lot of experience and learned to perform properly on stage. However, his big break came with the Orquesta La Moderna Tradición in 2021, when he was offered to participate with the group in some projects.
Even so, the latter did not prevent him from working with other groups of this style throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, as he has no problem with playing with anyone who wants to invite him.
Like any other immigrant, Eduardo’s primary reason for leaving his country was the search for new opportunities. Eduardo goes on to explain that he was awarded a scholarship by the famous Gran Mariscal de Ayacucho fellowship programme and managed to obtain his degree in biology in the United States, but unfortunately with the change of government, the things that were promised to him and other fellows such as jobs and revalidations were not kept. As a result, the young man was left in a limbo that made it nearly impossible for him to practice biology.
With his options reduced to almost zero in Venezuela, Eduardo had no choice but to return to the United States, where he started working as a high school teacher until 2023, when he finally retired from his basic profession. In total, he taught for more than 40 years at the secondary level. During most of this time, he combined his school activities with his second profession, which was music.
The singer explained to us that his voice has always been his most important instrument when he gets on stage, but he also confesses to having experimented with hand percussion instruments such as the maracas and the güiro. He pointed out that both are very easy to learn at first glance, but they have their level of complexity once you try them.
At present, he only uses his voice in the orchestras in which he currently plays.
”La Moderna Tradición reached out to me at the beginning to record one of their CDs and I started singing backup and the harmonies, which is how you should always get you started in any group. When you master those areas and have the talent, you may think about being a soloist and that’s exactly what happened with me” Eduardo started saying about the issue.
La Moderna Tradición’s music was mostly instrumental at that time and they wanted Eduardo for their second album, which would include choirs for the first time, but the group had no singer at that time. In view of the good results offered by the vocalist, he found himself in frequent demand to give voice to other old numbers, but now with a singer.
Years later, he finally received the proposal to be part of the orchestra as such, together with Ramón ”Monchi” Estévez on vocal. Already for the third album, all the songs had a singer, who was Eduardo most of the time.
From then on, the artist has continued to be part of La Moderna Tradición with some interruptions because he moved from the Bay Area to the Central Valley in Manteca, which made it more complex for him to play with the orchestra on weekday evenings.
At the same time, he worked with the group Vissión Latina, Carlos Caro’s orchestra or any other that invited him to play on weekends, which were on his days off.
The most important things Eduardo says he has learned from the great artists he has played with are the study, humility, knowing your limits and the development of the love of music. He says the latter is fundamental, because if you do not love music, you will not do the job right.
”With music, you sacrifice your time and the pay you receive in return does not always go according to what you do, but it is something you’re supposed to do for the love you have for the craft. If you do not love what you do, you will hardly do it well and use your skills in it” said Eduardo. He added that ”you are an eternal student and you never know everything about everything. There is always something to learn from other singers and seeing any of them on stage is an opportunity to emulate what they do as long as it is useful for your career.
He also said that ”the ego of many artists is a really depressing thing because it prevents them from moving forward and takes their focus away from what is really important, which is the love of the genre and the opportunity to learn as much as you can”.
Eduardo mentioned to us that one of the hardest moments for him personally and professionally was his move outside of the Bay Area, which we had already talked about. Being so far away from the area where he did most of his performances was a blow to him, as he had to be near his wife and children.
Eduardo was very late from work and his wife had a job which made her to leave home for several days, so it was up to him to stay with the children during all that time. For the artist, his family comes first every time and no job or hobby goes above that.
His responsibilities with his children let him to distance himself from music little by little, since not being always available to play, orchestras would look for other singers to replace him. This made his opportunities to sing to be reduced, but Eduardo assures that the sacrifice has been worth it, as quality time with his children is the most main thing for him.
Eduardo was able to conduct an orchestra for a few months, which allowed him to see what the work of a director would be like and the truth is that he did not like it. ”During the time that I was conducting an orchestra, I could see I don’t have the right personality for it. I’m not good for working with adults who are irresponsible and many musicians tend to be late for the engagements and not to take this profession very seriously. I’m a very perfectionist person who has very high standards and I don’t expect anyone to work less than me, so I know it would be torturous for me to have a responsibility of that magnitude,” Eduardo said.
He says that being a bandleader is far beyond what he wants to do with music and that he wanted to keep developing as a singer. In addition to this, going back to the family issue, such a position would have forced him to be away from his family again and that was something he was not willing to do.
He also took into account the little stability offered by music as a profession. His work as a biology teacher was much more stable and allowed him to have secure income without having to worry about the bad times of orchestras. He loves music to a fault, but does not like uncertainty and insecurity.
In addition to playing with La Moderna Tradición, he also works with a Cuban group called Pellejo Seco, with which he recorded an album that is currently being remastered in Cuba. The material was recorded just before September in California, but will soon be released to the public.
Eduardo works directly with Ivan Camblor, director of the orchestra and professional tres player. In this part of the conversation, the artist was very complimentary about Camblor and highlighted his great potential as a bandleader and musician.
Something he likes about Pellejo Seco is that his main genre is Cuban son and it focuses a lot on very rural and traditional Cuban rhythms, so he can explore other elements different from what he does with La Moderna Tradición. They are very different groups with different genres and different characteristics.
Read also: Nicaraguan singer and guitarist Yelba Heaton in an exclusive interview
Musician, Pianist, Arranger, Composer. He began his artistic career in the early 30’s, working with singer and composer Joseito Fernandez, in the orchestra of Raimundo Pla.
Later he became part of the Fantasía Orchestra.
At the end of the decade he worked with the Septeto Carabina de Ases.
Some time later he joined Arsenio Rodríguez’s Conjunto Todos Estrellas in September 1940, remaining in it until November 1943, leaving his place to Adolfo Oreilly Panacea, to join the Sonora Matancera in 1944, until 1976, where he contributed in an important way both in the composition and musical arrangements, imposing his particular piano solos.
In 1974 he helped found with Armando Sánchez the Conjunto Son de la Loma.
In his independent years Lino worked with Johnny Pacheco and Carlos “Caito” Diaz.
He accompanied great artists in recordings, in that period in New York, such as La Lupe, Olga Guillot, Daniel Santos, Carmen Delia Dipini, Bobby Capo, among others.
He died on May 22, 1983 in New York, USA.
Lino Frías, who for twenty-two years was the pianist of the Sonora Matancera, composed the very popular Mata Siguaraya in 1951.
One of the most popular photos of the Sonora Matancera.
In it we can see Lino Frías from his piano looking at Celia Cruz, great interpreter of Mata Siguaraya, together with Benny Moré and Oscar D’León.
Ezequiel Lino Frías Gómez was born in Havana and died in New York in 1983.
Lino studied piano at the Havana Conservatory. For a time, in the 1930s, he played in the Raimundo Pia y Rivero Orchestra, whose singer was Joseito Fernandez. He would later play in the Orquesta Fantasía.
In 1944, Lino joined the Sonora Matancera as a pianist, where he remained until 1976.
In the 1960s, Frías joined the movement that created the so-called salsa music, alongside Fania All Stars, Johny Pacheco, Bobby Rodríguez, Carlos Patato Valdés y Caíto, Carlos Manuel Díaz (Matanzas 1905-New York 1990), among others.
Don Adolfo, a Puerto Rican timbalero, worked with Lino Frías in a group that included some of the most renowned musicians and singers of the 1950s and 60s: Olga Guillot, Daniel Santos, Lucecita Benítez, Bobby Capó, Marco Antonio Múñiz, Carmen Delia Depiní, Chucho Avellaneda, Sergio González Siaba and La Lupe, among others.
Due to arthritis, in 1976 Lino left the Sonora. His place is taken by Javier Vázquez, (Matanzas 1936), son of the double bass player Pablo Vázquez.
It is said that the death of Lino Frías, in 1983, was a hard blow for his great and faithful friend Celia Cruz (Havana 1925-New Jersey 2003).
In addition to Mata Siguaraya, Lino Frías composed Pan de piquito, Óyela, gózala, Vamos todos de panchanga, Cañonazo, Vive la vida hoy, Suena mi bajo, Convencida, Afecto y cariño, Has vuelto a mí, Baila Yemayá.
Remembered man of the Cuban rumba to which he imprinted his own styles.
He accompanied for a long time with his percussion the Las D’Aida Quartet and the Canadian artist Jane Bunnett.
Considered as one of the great rumberos of Cuba by introducing new styles in the Cuban rumba whose artistic baptism was given in the famous comparsa of Los Dandys.
He performed in several groups such as Los Componentes de Batea, Los Guaracheros de Regla and other groups whose banner was the tambor bata, he had a brief stint with the Sonora Matancera and played in the orchestra that accompanied the Cuarteto Las D’Aida at the Tropicana Club.
Later he founded the Guaguancó Marítimo Portuario, a group that became the popular Yoruba group Andaba, which performed with the Canadian artist Jane Bunnett, with whom Pancho Quinto collaborated in other productions, and in the twilight of his career he had three productions as a soloist. This rumbero percussionist lived 71 years.
He was preceded by the sonorous echo of Pablo Roche’s bata lucumí juramentados. Such was the heritage that little Pancho gathered when he arrived in this world in the arms of his great-grandmother Camila, with no other identity than his African blood and his diagonal marks on his face, as was the ancestral custom of his family Ilé in the Gold Coast.
That night the conch shells spoke, and from that moment the child was consecrated to the deity of Shangó, god of music and drums.
He received on his right wrist a leather strap with fine bells, which, according to custom, would protect him and his drums from the bad influences of destiny.
Perhaps that is the reason why Pancho Kinto, when he played, knew that his music reached his ancestors in Oyó, beyond time, light and the Atlantic.
This man, a port man for most of his life, inherited the natural wisdom of those princes who came as slaves to Cuba.
Both built and endowed with religious foundations the first set of bata drum that was born in the island, and from that remote time the sacred song of the orchestra consecrated to the lucumí altar was heard.
It could be said that they were the survivors of the total of slaves that arrived to America, there is an estimate of fifteen million according to data that I heard the Cuban investigator Leovigildo Lopez say when the first Yoruba congress, celebrated in the Palace of the Conventions in Havana.
But to that fantasy that leads men to the inspiration of that mysterious and mythical love towards life, to that renewed and novel way of singing, dancing, playing, turning the palpable into spiritual and the intangible into vital, men like Francisco Hernández Mora pay tribute, exponent of those traditions that merged in our continent and whose result is none other than the embrace between blacks and whites, although there are groups or castes that do not assimilate it as it is.
I learned a lot with Pablo,” said Pancho in this interview in 1994, when he was just beginning to play with flutist Janet Brunet, with whom he toured internationally, recorded and filmed in Canada.
Pablo was called Akilakua, powerful arm, he was a big black man, he goes on talking, with all gold teeth, ugly as his mother’s pussy, but with something special in his personality.
Of the historical drums he commented that they passed from the hands of the olú batá Andrés Roche to those of his son, later considered one of the greatest bataleros of these times.
Pablo’s father was called the Sublime, because of the way he played the original African bata, he did whatever he wanted with those hands. he added.
Paradoxically, the life of both has always been an unknown for those who try to unravel it or look for a chronological order, as it has almost always happened with many rumberos and composers, I am thinking now of Tío Tom or Chavalonga, but that is not the subject now, What I want to say is that these musicians have been teachers and inspiration for a pleiad of Cuban artists and of other nationalities that with luck have heard of the touches of those drums that officiated in the sacred ceremonies of the orisha pantheons.
From those drums, he commented, were born all the drum sets of secret foundation, because from one is born another, like children.
Pancho kinto played with those sworn drums when in the town council of Regla they took out the procession of the virgin, although it was Jesus Perez, another of Roche’s students, to whom it corresponded to offer the first public concert with a robe orchestra, a sacrilege for many at that time, and much more if it was an act in the Aula Magna of the University of Havana.
However, five decades after the writer and ethnologist Fernando Ortiz sponsored that concert, Pancho Kinto played the bata in the same university campus to pay homage to the memory of his ancestors with his sonority.
Pancho was a Cuban musician who learned to play quintiar from a very young age and along with this he made his drums and cajones in his own way, his own inventions, as he said, playing the tumbador with a spoon in his left hand, he was just a party of bata and cajon, I saw him do that many times in the fabulous rumbas that were celebrated in a lot in Campanario, where the group Yoruba Andabo used to meet in its beginnings.
There he became known for being a member of the Cayo Hueso group, but Pancho had been playing with them since they were Guaguancó Marítimo Portuario in the port of Havana.
Originally they were Geovani del Pino, Chang, el Chori, Palito, Fariñas, Callava, Marino, Pancho and others, many are gone forever like Pancho, whose unexpected death surprised everyone on February 11, 2005.
From my father I inherited the musical taste for Afro Antillean rhythms, we listened at home to the Sonora Matancera, Benny More, Arsenio, Daniel Santos and many more.
There was always a taste for good music: the tangos and ballads of the 50s and 60s.
When I was a student I participated in several music festivals at school and I was part of several dance and Andean music groups.
I always liked salsa and my favorite artist of the genre will always be Angel Canales.
After the appearance of the program “YO ME LLAMO” in Colombia I was motivated to start the process to achieve the perfect imitation of Angel Canales.
I began my presentations in small salsa bars with a dance floor and I did about 4 songs of Diferente, as I went along the character was being perfected and the public and the owners of the bars were asking for something more.
I then created “the Orchestra SON DE LA 8″ in 2013 with the purpose of making the accompaniment and mount all the music of the different Angel Canales.
The market was opening and the support of the salseros was very large, We have had much acceptance in the salsero environment in Colombia.
Participating in major events locally, nationally and internationally:
Leyendas Vivas De la Salsa in Medellin Colombia,
Salsa al Parque Cali, Salsa al Parque Bogotá, Homenaje a la Salsa, Tributo a los salseros and Noche Blanca.
I have alternated and shared stages with several national and international artists and orchestras.
International presentations:
Guayaquil Ecuador and Caracas Venezuela.
Endorsed and supported by the family of ANGEL CANALES and by him I have taken my tribute to the most recognized places and salsa clubs in Colombia.
Apart from accompanying the Diferente Angel Canales with the orchestra Son de la 8 we have made our own music always keeping the line of heavy salsa and with good taste.
Angel Luis Canales “El Diferente”.
There were nine record productions by Angel Canales between 1975 and 1987, twelve productive years.
By 1970 Angel Luis Canales had put his voice on an album by African-American pianist Mark Dimond, and five years later Dimond’s orchestra was renamed “Angel Canales y Sabor”.
The immense musical freedom of Ángel Luis Canales Canales has much to do with the determining influence exerted on him by Rafael Cortijo, Ismael Rivera and the irreverence of the Combo de Cortijo as a whole.
The difference was that those two masons did not have enough money to support their ideas economically (discographically speaking) while Canales had enough because of the money he earned from his profession as a jeweler and diamond cutter.
That’s why he didn’t lower his head to anyone, that’s why he didn’t give in to any advantageous record contracts and made his own record label, that’s why he never paid or bribed radio producers, and he dressed the way he wanted.
That’s why the conservative salseros kept a CIA-like eye on him. And Canales revolutionized everything in his path: from his clothing to his vocal and orchestral arrangements, his presentations and his choice of repertoire.
By 1970 Angel Luis Canales had put his voice on a record by the Afro-American pianist Mark Dimond, and five years later Dimond’s orchestra was renamed “Angel Canales y Sabor”, and with it he would make a mark like few others in the world of salsa, from his total independence, to the freedom for the musicians, his revolutionary shaved head, and a wardrobe that had nothing to do with the salseros, in addition to his voice, repertoire and arrangements. Ángel Canales recorded in 1979 the album “El sentimiento del latino en Nueva York”, and an exquisite version of “Dos Gardenias”, by Cuban composer Isolina Carrillo.
Musical childhood
Ángel Luis Canales was born on June 29, 1950 in Santurce, Puerto Rico, son of Ángel Luis Canales and Ana Ilda Canales.
At the age of 8 he was already in New York with his parents, who liked to listen to romantic music and also to Cortijo y su Combo.
The Puerto Rican country song was also among his favorites; it was the jíbara song of his people. In time Canales would indicate that Cortijo and Ismael were determining influences in his musical and social journey.
Much has been said that his current retirement is due to Parkinson’s disease, but Ángel Luis Canales is there, he attends private invitations of his friends and remains in the battle line of salsa and life. He is currently 73 years old.
In those years and in school he was more inclined to practical workshops than books and that is why he went to work, recommended by one of his teachers in a jewelry store where from being a messenger he would learn all the secrets of the art of cutting, polishing and mounting diamonds. He became a professional, solvent, and with an extraordinary clinical eye that would serve him a lot later.
Vista larga, his new friends did not speak Spanish, his native language, but fortunately Angel Luis had peers of his generation, and Latinos like the Lebron brothers and Willie Colon himself.
He also took a long view of his internship in the U.S. Army and later assimilated the new trends that emerged in the music being made in New York.
He started out firmly, as we have already mentioned, with pianist Mark Dimond (Markolino), who had been linked to Willie Colón. With Mark he added his voice to some of the songs on the album “Brujería” and later, with the departure of the pianist, the orchestra was renamed “Ángel Canales y Sabor”.
With this band he would record “Sabor” in 1975 and other albums until “El Sentimiento del latino en Nueva York” in 1979.
Two years before the recording of this album, in 1977 Angel Canales made his first visit to a Latin American country, Panama, and the reception he received was such that he would later write a song dedicated to that country.
The same happened during his visit to Venezuela on November 13 and 14, 1981, which became a musical commotion of great proportions at the Poliedro de Caracas.
Likewise in Colombia and Peru he felt the devotion of the public of those nations. Perhaps he did not know the scope of his work and the projection he already had.
Source: TeleSurTv