Search Results for: Tito Rodríguez

On March 19, 1928, in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, Rafael Viera Figueroa was born.

Excellent Music Promoter. Remembered for promoting the LP Siembra by W Colón and R Blades. He founded Viera Discos, “Cathedral of Latin Music”.

He was considered one of the main disseminators of salsa in Puerto Rico, Rafael Viera, also creator of Viera Discos, one of the most important points of the movement until 2016, year in which it was closed.

Viera Figueroa was, from the late sixties to the eighties, Fania’s representative on the island. Why? He was the one who brought the music of the label founded by Pacheco and Masucci to the land of Ismael Rivera, when it was mainly distributed in the United States.

He was the promoter of the first Fania All Stars concert in Puerto Rico in 1973 and was in charge of bringing to Puerto Rico the films ‘Our Latin Thing’ and ‘Salsa’, which packed the local theaters in the seventies. According to Primera Hora, he was the one who inaugurated the Roberto Clemente Coliseum in San Juan.

In 2014 Viera suffered a stroke that kept him in intensive care. On that occasion his son, Richie Viera, gave these words to the aforementioned media: “I am a man of faith, and in God I trust that Dad will recover and will be able to continue with us for many more years, offering us his wisdom, his anecdotes and promoting and collaborating so that new talents will have a place in Latin music”.

Viera was known for the famous Casa del Coleccionista store, which he ran for more than 60 years in Santurce, for Viera Discos and for the Catedral de la Música.

He was also one of the driving forces behind the salsa boom at the time of Fania Records, where he worked as producer and promotion manager of the conglomerate of record labels; Fania Records, Vaya Records, Tico Records, Alegre Records, Cotique Records, Éxito Records, International Records and Música Latina, among others.

He was also involved in the success of the careers of artists such as Willie Colón, Larry Harlow, Cheo Feliciano, Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz, Celia Cruz, Ismael Miranda, Sandro, Sabú, Willie Rosario, Miki Vimari, Sonora Ponceña, Tommy Olivencia, La Lupe, Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri, Ismael Quintana, Justo Betancourt, Héctor Lavoe, Tito Rojas, Frankie Ruiz, Corporación Latina, Junior Toledo, Viti Ruiz, Guillo Rivera, Ray Barreto, Willie Rosario, Orquesta La Terrífica, Roberto Roena y su Apollo Sound, Johnny Pacheco, Pete “El Conde” Rodríguez, Impacto Crea, Ismael Rivera, Raphael, Wilkins, Trio Los Condes, Joan Manuel Serrat and the most important conglomerate of musicians in the history of Latin music known as Fania All Stars, among others. In 1973, he was the promoter of the first Fania All Stars concert in Puerto Rico, which inaugurated the Roberto Clemente Coliseum in San Juan.

In the field of cinema, Viera brought to Puerto Rico the film “Our Latin Thing” and Salsa, films that crowded the local movie theaters.

He passed away on January 13, 2019 in Puerto Rico, may he rest in peace and eternal glory to Rafael Viera!

By Bella Martinez, ISM Correspondents, San Juan, Puerto Rico

On March 19, 1928, in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico, Rafael Viera Figueroa was born.

Excellent Music Promoter. Remembered for promoting the LP Siembra by W Colón and R Blades. He founded Viera Discos, “Cathedral of Latin Music”.

Viera was known for the famous Casa del Coleccionista store, which he ran for more than 60 years in Santurce, for Viera Discos and for the Catedral de la Música.

In the field of cinema, Viera brought to Puerto Rico the film “Our Latin Thing” and Salsa, films that crowded the local movie theaters.

He passed away on January 13, 2019 in Puerto Rico, may he rest in peace and eternal glory to Rafael Viera!

Ramón “Mongo” Santamaría “I wanted to do something that sounded like home”.

April 7, 1917, Mongo Santamaría was born in the Jesús María neighborhood of Havana, Cuba.

Exceptional percussionist of Latin Jazz and related rhythms, whose first name was Ramón Santamaría.

Mongo left to continue playing his Congas hard in the sky on February 1st, 2003.

“I wanted to do something that sounded like home”. With these simple words, Ramón Santamaría Rodríguez “Mongo Santamaría” spoke of his essence.

The purpose of his music pursued a sonority and a memory, possibly located in Cuba, in Jesús María, a marginal neighborhood where he grew up and enjoyed a tradition attached to the drum, to religion, to the street and from where this great Cuban percussionist drank infinitely.

But surely those drums also came to him from far away, from the Congo, where his grandfather came from to be a slave on the island and who also filled his head with sounds full of meanings and colors, which he later masterfully spread around the world.

The name of Mongo Santamaría (Havana, April 7/1917 – Miami, Feb. 1/2003) is, for the glory of all music, an inevitable reference of Cuban percussion.

Since he was a child he knew that his thing was to play the drum and he was lucky enough to belong to a family of empirical musicians, singers and drummers who supported him in the learning and mastery of these instruments.

During his time in Cuba, already a professional musician, he participated in numerous groups that little by little gave him a place among the most outstanding percussionists of the time. Some names of these groups are El Conjunto Boloña, Lecuona Cuban Boys, with whom he was able to participate in the recording of his first album, Conjunto Matamoros, Segundo Grupo de Arsenio Rodríguez, among others.

Each group had its own style and stamp, but in each of them Santamaría put his personal “touch”.

At the prestigious Tropicana cabaret he played with Chano Pozo as a member of Armando Romeu’s orchestra.

From that moment on, his career would not stop. Conjuntos, Septetos de Son were the perfect selection to complete the sap from which he would draw all his style and technique.

Later, from carnival to carnival, he would gather with other percussionists to play in the comparsas and experience the festive musical atmosphere par excellence of those years.

Alongside him played other friends who soon became a Cuban reference in the United States: Patato Valdés and Armando Peraza.

As part of the Tropicana orchestra and located in a show in Mexico, he decided to settle there as did many musicians of his time and came to play with Pérez Prado and Benny Moré.

It was precisely in the latter orchestra where he met Clemente Piquero “Chicho”, another Cuban percussionist whose style made him rethink the role of percussion in Cuban popular orchestras.

Mongo Santamaría belongs to the second wave of Cuban percussionists who arrived in New York in 1950.

His new idea of restructuring and designing his own style in the use of Cuban percussion was perfectly in tune with the reality that a few years earlier was being experienced in the music produced and sold in New York, after the arrival of the Cuban rumbero Chano Pozo.

“The rhythm produced by the conga organizes all the percussion of a band, from which melodies and counter-melodies can be experimented with.”

“I think percussion is the base from which things come out.”

Already in the United States, Mongo plays with Gilberto Valdés, again he is part of Pérez Prado’s orchestra and finally with Tito Puente’s, where he stayed for 7 years. Once in the line of Afro-Cuban jazz, so popular at the time, he joined George Shearing’s group and later the vibraphonist Cal Tjader.

With his own orchestra, he accompanied La Lupe, one of his favorite singers, and undertook projects of novel formats for the time, such as small formations of brass trio, piano, bass, percussion and drums, at a time when jazz bands predominated.

Mongo Santamaría, perhaps without the theatricality to which Chano had accustomed the New York public, focused all his strength on achieving his own sonority, with a fusion of Cuban styles and genres, perfected and deepened in the introduction of Afro-Cuban rhythms with a naturalness and using colorful timbre elements by using several tumbadoras in his set.

His creativity is highly demonstrated in the great amount of music that is part of his catalog of works and the quality becomes indisputable when seeing the amount of outstanding jazz interpreters that version and recreate his work.

In 1959 he recorded Tambores y cantos, which contains the song Afro blue, which over the years became “a jazz anthem of all times”, according to Nat Chediak, author of the Latin Jazz Dictionary.

His long recording career (50 albums), testifies to the musical activity that this great percussionist carried out throughout his professional career. He worked with American jazz legends such as Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, flutist Hubert Maws, Dizzy Gillespie, trumpeter Marty Seller, among other musicians who today still pay tribute to this Cuban conguero who was the architect of the fusion of rhythm & blues rhythms and Afro-Cuban music, recognized the connection of Cuban music to African roots and placed the congas in an indispensable instrument for the determination of Latin jazz.

In 1977 Mongo Santamaría received the American Grammy Award for “Best Latin Recording” for the work Dawn.

In 1999, Rhyno Record Company, based in Los Angeles, California, recognizing his contribution to Latin Jazz, released the “box set” (CD) Skin On Skin: The Mongo Santamaría Anthology (1958-1995), which includes 34 of his most successful pieces (from his rumba albums, his LP with La Lupe and his projects in the fusion of Jazz and Latin) and an extraordinary literature about his career written by actor Andy García, musician Poncho Sánchez and other connoisseurs of the Latin Jazz genre such as José Rizo, Luis Tamargo, Joel Dorn and Miles Pelich.

The legendary musician was extremely honored and grateful for the distinction Rhyno gave him by introducing this historic anthology to the world. As stated in the conversation with Jaime Torres, Mongo said:

“This is the fruit of many years of work, music made with taste and love.”

May he rest in peace and eternal glory to him.

Johnny Andreu “Almendra”. Bandleader, percussionist and founder of Los Jóvenes del Barrio

Growing up and listening to music, he played with various objects around the house. Taking things seriously at the age of 16, he started with bongos, then congas and then timbales, which is the instrument he is best known for.

Andreu y Los Jovenes Del Barrio, the band was led by his ex-wife, the American born singer JILLIAN (1962-2009) able to charm you in two languages, a great loss at a young age, another victim of the scourge of our time, cancer. Blending elements of Charanga, Jazz, Typical Latin, the group dominated radio stations for a decade.

Brooklyn-born composer Johnny Andreu, who from an early age was introduced to and kept in touch with Latin rhythm through family influences, received his musical training at U.C.L.A., the “University on the Corner of Lexington Avenue. When he was 18, Mario Lebran, a musician with Ricardo Ray and author of ‘Mambo Jazz’, helped him get into the music business. He has learned a lot by listening to his records and playing his instruments.

Lebran Andreu also encouraged him to audition for his first job as a percussionist working for “Mike y Su Rítmico”. From there he moved on to the Bobby Matos orchestra whose pianist Paquito Pastor said one day he named him Andrews after Andreu. You are Latin, you are an ‘Almendra'”. That’s how Johnny Andreu became Johnny Almendra.

In the late 1960s he teamed up with Johnny Colon, they performed at the Corso and the legendary Cheetah, and after a year, Almendra and Louie Bauzo left to form their own band, Tambo.

This group lasted about four years and later worked with Almendra Charanga ’76, Orquesta Broadway, and the Típica Novel. Playing with Típica Ideal, he met Milton Cardona, who became a lifelong friend.

Band director, percussionist and founder of Los Jóvenes del Barrio. — Johnny Andreu “Almendra”

One day Cardona invited Almendra to see Willie Colón at Casa Borinquén, and as it turned out, they were in need of a timbalero. They invited Almendra who stayed for eight years.

During 1977 and 1978, Willie Colón Rubén Blades recorded history-making albums. A large number of the best musicians of the time were brought together, including Héctor Lavoe, percussionist José Cándido Rodríguez, bassist Víctor Venegas and many others. This material was released in 1998 for the RMM label.

For International Salsa Magazine through www.SalsaGoogle.com it is a great pleasure to review an artist of the stature of Jhonny Almendra, catalogued as one of the greatest percussionists in the city of New York for his ability and skill still in the forefront of Latin Music.

Johnny Almendra, Los Jóvenes Del Barrio Reconfirmando “1997”

Tracks

Todo el Mundo Necesita

Pasión Sin Freno

Hechicera

Everybody Plays the Fool

Borincuba

Zapato Apartao

Cumbiaranga

Compassion

Rent

Cold and Darkness, The

Hechicera Reprise/A-Files

Musicians

Regina Carter – trombone

Ozzie Meléndez – trombone

Ronnie Bar – backing vocals

David O’Quendo – flute

Karen Joseph – flute

Kimson Plaut – accordion, piano, synthesizer

Oriente Lopez – flute, synthesizer, backing vocals

Ray Sepulveda – vocals

Tito Nieves – vocal

Robert Thomas – violin

Sam Bardfeld – violin

Al Bello – percussion

Andreu Johnny Almendra – percussion

Frank Seguinot – vocal

Miles Peña – vocal

Sources:

https://lasalsaesmivida.com/johnny-almendra-y-los-jovenes-del-barrio-reconfirmando/https://www.pinterest.com/bobbymartell/johnny-almendra/

Article of Interest: What Ángel Meléndez has to say about his brilliant musical career

From Zurich-Switzerland MERCADONEGRO Orchestra presents its latest song titled “Que Ironia”

Since Friday, January 21, 2022, is available on Youtube the new video clip from the Mercadonegro.

Mercadonegro was Created at the end of 2000 with influences from Salsa Dura thanks to their experiences working with artists such as Celia Cruz, Alfredo de la Fe, Cheo Feliciano, Tito Nieves, and many more.

Orquesta Mercadonegro titled “Que Ironia” song that is part of the production SOMOS DEL BARRIO, returning to the radio waves and digital platforms, a song that had been on hold, but now takes off from this group of Latinos based in Europe.

Mercadonegro Created at the end of 2000 with influences from Salsa Dura thanks to their experiences working with artists such as Celia Cruz, Alfredo de la Fe, Cheo Feliciano, Tito Nieves, and many more — Orquesta Mercadonegro de Suiza

SOMOS DEL BARRIO is the 4th production, of which stand out songs like: Triste y Solo, Quien a Hierro Mata, Rumba Negrito and also this current song “Que Ironía”, as always the boys of Mercadonegro highlight their work by the mixture of different cultures and Latin roots that enrich their musical style.

“Que Ironía” was born from the inspiration and ideas of Rodrigo Rodriguez Puerta & Eddie Villanueva Chininin, which relates the daily experiences of human beings, in their day to day nonconformity, and as the same lyrics say

“Nobody knows what he has until he loses it”.

This time it is Oscar “Chucky” Cordero who is in charge of the musical arrangements and even participates in the trumpet solo.

Mercadonegro, based in Switzerland, was founded on November 15, 2002, since then they have participated in the biggest Latin/Salsa and Jazz Festivals in Europe, and they have toured China (Asia), Colombia and Mexico (Latin America).

Its Directors : Armando Miranda ” El Moro ” was born in Havana – Cuba, with studies in the conservatory and participation with different Cuban artists. He is the lead singer of the orchestra and composer of some songs.

Rodrigo Rodriguez Puerta, born in Cartagena, Colombia, since he was a child he awakened his interest in music, percussionist, chorister, singer, composer and music producer.

In this most recent title “Que Ironía” participate the following musicians: Authors: Rodrigo Rodriguez Puerta / Eddie Villanueva Chininin

Arranger: Oscar ” Chucky ” Cordero

Piano: Oscar Ivan Lozano ((Oilo)) Bass: Dimitris Christopoulos

Full Percussion: Rodrigo Rodriguez Trombones: Johan Escalante Trumpets: Oscar ” Chucky ” Cordero Baritone Sax : Gills Grivola

Backing Vocals : Roberto Marcano ” El Chamo ” & Rodrigo Rodríguez Vocals : Rodrigo Rodríguez Puerta

Sound and Mix Engineer : Jose Mendoza

Pasterization : Fernando Álvarez at 440 Mastering, Madrid-Spain Recorded at GO STUDIO Zurich-Switzerland.

Site: Mercadonegro

Article of Interest: Mercadonegro Orchestra of Switzerland

“International Salsa Magazine is SalsaGoogle.com“.

We are an organization that from the hand of its Founder, Director and Editor Eduardo Guillarte, in force since 2007 that has been working non-profit helping to promote: Orchestras, Singers, DJs, Clubs, Plastic Artists in North America, Europe and Latin America and Asia and with the contribution of volunteers in various parts of the world, which at the same time invite and recommend all lovers, dancers of our Latin music to follow La Orquesta MercadoNegro from Zurich-Switzerland.