If there is something that we have seen in recent times is that Los Angeles, New York and Miami are not the only places Latin music has had great boom due to the huge number of Latinos in those areas, as our culture has permeated many other places in the United States. A great example of that is the Orquesta Afinke, based in the state of Connecticut, and its director Herminio ‘‘Tito’’ Planas, with whom we were able to talk about his career and band.
How Tito fell in love with music
Tito was born in Puerto Rico and raised in the town of Ponce, the home of great luminaries of salsa such as Hector Lavoe, Pete ‘’El Conde’’ Rodriguez, Papo Luca, Jose ‘‘Cheo’’ Feliciano, Ismael Quintana, Yolanda Rivera, among many others. He even attended school with Keila Lucca, the daughter of one of the Luccas of La Sonora Ponceña, and is still in contact with her through social networks.
He studied at the Free School of Music in Ponce where he sang in a children’s choir and they traveled around the town to delight a variety of audiences with his voice. Building on the success of this program run by the school, there were many children from third through eighth grades who began taking lessons of solfeggio or any instrument they wanted.
In Tito’s case, he moved with his parents to the United States at age 13 in the eighth grade of the secondary education. His father had lost his job in Puerto Rico and the economic situation of the family was very precarious, so he made the decision to go first to find work and, in so doing, taking his children and his wife to live there.
In college, he started getting involved with salsa and had Jerry Perez as a trombone teacher, who taught him in this instrument for several years and offered him to form an orchestra together. They eventually did and toured with it in various parts of the United States.
Professional start
After being played the trombone for some time, many other musicians saw him and offered him to play with them in their orchestras. Many of these job opportunities came from New York, which was very close to him, which benefited him greatly because the clubs in that city closed much later, so they could play even till five in the morning. He combined all these activities with university and his private lessons in order to further improve his musical skills.
Orquesta Afinke
After the foundation of the orchestra, Tito and his musicians accompanied many great artists such as Hector Tricoche, El Grupo Guayacán, Viti Ruíz, Van Lester, Frankie Vázquez and many others.
Thanks to all these shows they were doing with other groups, Sammy Diaz, co-director of the orchestra, and Tito decided it was time to create a much more formal project that grouped together all the original members of the band. What brought them closer together was the fact that both Tito and Sammy had teenage children, whom they included in the group to keep them playing and in constant contact with music.
Today, Tito’s youngest son is 18 years old and is about to enter the University of Connecticut to study music in order to follow the same path as his father, with whom he has been working in the orchestra since he was about 11 years old singing backup and playing the saxophone.
They started with about three scores with which they managed to put on a show for as long as half an hour. Today, 16 years later, they have more than 80 scores and about 12 original songs, of which one was recently released and another is being recorded at the time of writing this article.
On the other hand, the core of the orchestra has been the same since its foundation and includes pianist Rafael Rosado, bassist Victor Planas, bongo player Sammy Diaz Jr. (co-director of the orchestra Sammy Diaz’s son), timbalero Sammy Tercero (another son of Sammy Diaz), conguero Luis Carrasquillo, singer Junior Travieso, singer Raquel Ramirez, Peruvian singer Jano Arroyo, trombonist Jerry Perez (the teacher who taught Tito to play the trombone) and Daniel Planas (Tito’s son).
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