North America / USA / New York

Louie Ramírez.

Music often requires characters who are always behind the scenes and support the work of singers and performers with their talent, who are ultimately the ones who “put on their face” and become popular. Sometimes, however, these anonymous characters rise to fame in order to perform their own work and even become more popular than any popular singer.

In the case of Pop, this character is called Quincy Jones, of whom it is enough to say that he has been an arranger for Frank Sinatra and a producer for Michael Jackson. A nobody”. In the case of Salsa, these characters have been symbolized by Jones’ emulator, a guy named Louie Ramírez who has done everything with everyone.

One afternoon in 1994, Ramírez was driving his car down the highway that would take him to Variety Studios in New York. It was going to be a quick session since he only needed one song to complete his 20th album as conductor. Perhaps that was why he was nervous and that filled him with anxiety. Minutes later he couldn’t resist the feeling and had to pull over to the side of the car. He had not finished doing it when a cardiac arrest ended his life.

Louie Ramirez was a genius. The classic man to whom everyone turns for advice and solutions to their problems. It didn’t matter if they were young or old musicians. The fact was, Louie had the answer, and visiting him was like rubbing Aladdin’s lamp. That was a characteristic that always accompanied him, from that first recording “Conozca a Louie Ramírez” in 1963.

He was 20 years old at the time and had already stood out for composing some pachangas and arranging for Pete and Tito Rodríguez’s orchestras. The commentator Dick Sugar then presented it like this: Ramírez breaks the image of the director of a group that uses the talent of other composers and becomes a follower of a rhythm. No, Louie Ramírez is a creator in his genre.

That talent did not go unnoticed by the new Czar of Latin music in New York, Jerry Masucci, who hired him as a star for Fania Records and at the same time, as an arranger for the orchestras and ensembles that belonged to the record company. Ramírez was soon involved in work and was only able to record two albums during the sixties, “Good news” and “Alí Babá”.

On that last album appeared the hit that allowed him to be a famous artist, El Títere, a true Salsa classic. The theme was sung by Rudy Calzado, the third of the soneros that Louie had used without finding the ideal. That was a burden that accompanied him as a director during the seventies, when he used singers of the stature of Pete Bonet, Tito Allen, Jimmy Sabater, “Azuquita” Rodríguez, Adalberto Santiago, and even Rubén Blades.

It was with Blades, precisely, that he made an anthological album, “Louie Ramírez and his friends”, in which the song Paula C was included, with an arrangement of those that deserve -hats off-. By then, Ramírez was considered in New York as the most progressive arranger that Salsa had, thanks to the brilliant work done for the Fania All Stars. An excellent job had been the instrumental arrangement of Juan Pachanga, to be sung by Blades, of Canta Canta for a performance by Cheo Feliciano, and of the entire album “Algo nuevo” that Tito Rodríguez sang with Louie’s orchestra.

But the high point of Ramírez’s career came in 1980 when Joni Figueras, representative of the K-Tel International label, hired him to arrange the ballads Todo se derrumbó and Estar Enamorado de Manuel Alejandro. The album, which included these and other tracks, was released two years later under the title “Hot Night” and was recorded by Louie’s own orchestra.

This is how the Salsa-ballad or Salsa-romántica was born in a job that Ramírez continued until his death, making attempts at Latin Jazz from time to time, which he loved. That is why he recorded an album in tribute to Cal Tjader, where Louie was director, producer, composer and arranger, in addition to playing the timpani and his favorite instrument: the vibraphone.

Louie Ramírez was a genius in arranging, in a career where those of Guantanamera and Isadora stand out for Celia Cruz, El Guiro de Macorina for Johnny Pacheco and El Caminante for Roberto Torres. Apart from this, there are his works for the Alegre and the Cesta All Stars. Regarding this profile of Ramírez, the critic Eleazar López defined it very well:

It is not easy to arrange for a dance band, especially when it comes to a group that cultivates the hot tropical genre. Many musicians feel influenced by Jazz and the result of their orchestrations leaves a void in the dancer. Others arrange simple, but so simple that they repeat and copy themselves, and the result is tiresome music, without any degree of creativity: music that says nothing, that leaves nothing. Louie Ramírez has found the perfect balance… that’s why he always stays current.

North America / USA / New York

Felipe Pirela:

En mi barrio el empedrao
Parroquia Santa Lucia
Había una barbería
Que era muy populachera
Te lavaban en ponchera
La silla se reclinaba
Y Luis el perro pelaba
Al son de una periquera

This is the sound of the tasty gaita performed by the group Sabor Gaitero and Los Gaiteros de Pillopo. It refers to a barbershop in a picturesque neighbourhood of Maracaibo in the Venezuelan state of Zulia. It was in this popular neighbourhood of Maracaibo, El Empedrao, that Felipe Antonio Pirela Morón was born in 1941. It was probably in this popular barbershop that he got his first haircut, and it was certainly in some corner of the neighbourhood that he took his first steps as a singer, perhaps interpreting gaitas or some other popular genre. The young Felipe was far from imagining that he would become “El Bolerista de América” (The Bolero of America).

The son of a bricklayer, Felipe Pirela Monsalve, and a housewife – an artist at heart – Lucia Morón de Pirela, the boy began his musical career as a child, supported by his mother, in small radio singing competitions. Incredibly, at the age of 13, together with some boys from the neighbourhood and his two brothers, he founded the group Los Happy Boys, which performed in various venues in Maracaibo, without even imagining that he would later become the main star of Billo’s Caracas Boys, a group that, upon arriving in Venezuela, debuted under the same name, Billo’s Happy Boys, directed by the Dominican maestro Billo Frometa.

At the beginning of his singing career, Felipe specialized as a bolerista, performing songs by prominent singers such as the Chilean Lucho Gatica, the Cuban bolerista Olga Gillot and Venezuela’s favorite tenor Alfredo Sadel.

Radio Caracas Television had the honor of making Felipe’s image public for the first time in 1957, through an amateur program in which Felipe placed third. Unfortunately, there were no video recording systems in those days, so there is no record of this historic achievement. Later, the now defunct and legendary Venezuelan regional television station from Maracaibo, Ondas del Lago, served as a springboard for Felipe, who was one of its founding artists.

These performances allowed him to sign a contract with the station in 1958, after which he moved to Caracas, where he performed on Radio Caracas and in various nightclubs.

Shortly thereafter, he returned to Maracaibo to join the orchestra Los Peniques, with whom he recorded his first album in 1960 and began his professional career.

Like most of the artists, baseball players and boxers from Maracaibo, Felipe was a man of humble origins, pobre del pobre, with limited economic resources, who for a time missed opportunities to be noticed despite his immense talent.

Fortune smiled on him when Maestro Billo Frometa heard him sing, at a time when the arranger, director and musician from Quisqueyano was preparing to restructure his band, Billo’s Caracas Boys, and at the same time hired another singer from Maracaibo, the remarkable José “Cheo” García. This hiring gave an enormous boost to the already famous Billo’s Caracas Boys; the band acquired great international prestige, performing throughout America and Europe, popularizing the immortal mosaics that for many years enlivened the parties and were the favorites of the Venezuelan public.

Not for nothing, Billo’s Caracas Boys Orchestra has been called the most popular in Venezuela, the Caracas and Venezuelan clubs, Latin American countries and even the European continent (Tenerife, Spain) showed full houses during the band’s performances. In these performances, the acclaim for Felipe Pirela was total. Huge demonstrations of support, full houses and legions of fans followed the “crooner” on his tours.

When Venezuela’s favorite tenor, Alfredo Sadel, left the popular genre and his country to devote himself to opera, Pirela almost immediately replaced him in the favorite place of Venezuelans.

In 1961, “El Bolerista de América” recorded with a string orchestra conducted by Billo, the long playing Canciones de Ayer, including old songs and songs of that time, a recording that marked his resignation and departure to Mexico, where he also had memorable successes.

In 1964 he married Mariela Montiel, a marriage that resulted in the birth of a daughter, Lennys, and in which La Retirada was quickly marked by the fact that Amor se Escribe con Llanto (Love is Written with Crying) and that it probably does not last a lifetime.

Canada and Mexico witnessed his successes in ’67 and his return to Venezuela. Successful performances in Miami that same year motivated him to reside in the United States, where he tried to structure his own record company, a project that came to nothing and he was deeply disillusioned and returned to Venezuela, later residing in Puerto Rico, where he was taking La Última Copa when he was tragically assassinated in 1972.

For some, his career was marked by Sombras Nada Más, but for the vast majority, “El Bolerista de America” remains in the memory as one of the most unique stars of Latin American music of all time.

For Mario Cabrera Bello