For the 98th Birth Anniversary of Bass Maestro Israel “Cachao” Lopez, A 2005 interview with Cachao and Bebo Valdès, an Essay About Cachao From 2012, and a 3-Hour 1991 WKCR Program About Cachao with Andy Gonzalez

Today is the 98th birth  anniversary of Israel “Cachao” Lopez, the maestro bassist and inventor of the mambo.  His genius is amply demonstrated in this clip from a concert at the Village Gate, Oct. 10,1989, where he joined Manny Oquendo and Libre. I had an opportunity to interview Cachao and Bebo Valdes in 2005, and am posting that interview below, along with an essay that I wrote for the program notes at Carlos Henriquez’ 2012 concert, The Music of Cachao, with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Appended in 2020 at the bottom is the transcript of a three-hour program on WKCR at which Andy Gonzalez presented his account of Cachao’s career.

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This interview was conducted before Paquito D’Rivera’s 50th anniversary in music concert at Carnegie Hall in 2005, which is why he is the subject at the beginning of the conversation.

BEBO VALDÈS & CACHAO (ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ, TRANSLATOR):

TP: Gentlemen, what I want to ask you is less about your lives and more about your relationship to Paquito, and why you’re here. I know that’s a life-long relationship for Paquito, that you’ve known him since he was a baby because of your friendship with his father. What do you first remember about Paquito?

CACHAO: The first experience I had with Paquito is when he was 12 years old, at a concert we did with the Philharmonic of Havana, a clarinet and piano piece by Weber.

TP: But you knew him before that, no, from going to his father’s store? He said you used to buy bass strings at his father’s store.

CACHAO: Yes. I worked with his father with the Martinez Brothers, the Hermanos Martinez. When I was working with Hermanos Martinez, I was just as a sub. I wasn’t working with them for too long. I think Tito was at the time still single. 1934.

TP: So you first played with Tito in 1934.

CACHAO: Yes. At that time, the bass had to play on time, because the way the beat went. [SING STRAIGHT UP INSTEAD OF SYNCOPATED BEAT]

TP: What was Tito like?

CACHAO: He was an incredible person. With the son, he was really correct. He imposed a lot of discipline on him.

TP: What sort of musician was he?

BEBO: [Very good.]

CACHAO: He played all the styles. He also went into the… He was in a military band also called Columbia.

TP: In Cuba in those days, was it important to play all the styles correctly?

CACHAO: Of course. When you were in the band, you played everything. When you played for the dancers, the dancers danced everything. They danced jazz, they danced pasodoble, foxtrot, everything. Then also, the other problem was the racial problem then. The blacks didn’t dance any of those other dances, like pasodoble.

TP: What did the blacks dance?

CACHAO: They danced really tasty, danzons, things like that. Then there was a thing called danza that they would dance also. When the danza would begin, most of the people would take their hats and go home, because they knew something else was going to start happening. I saw one of the dancers, and they took my hat when they left! I had to hang it there, and when they took it, I said, “Hey, wait a second; that’s my hat!”

TP: Did you play for whites and blacks?

CACHAO: Of course. Both of us.

TP: Where for whites and where for blacks?

CACHAO: The regional centers that were for the Spanish. For the Spanish, they had the Centro Studiano(?), Centra Gallego. For the Spaniards, the whites. Then the regular whites had their own places, like Lyceo and Casino, those kind of clubs. The blacks also had their particular societies.

TP: But the musicians weren’t segregated, or were they?

CACHAO: There was a time when there was a separation, but that was way before the ‘30s and ‘40s.

TP: Do you remember playing with Paquito that first time?

CACHAO: Yes. He debuted on clarinet with that symphony, the Weber symphony. Of course I remember that.

TP: Apart from being 12 and able to play like that, a prodigy, what was his musicianship like at 12?

CACHAO: He was complete. He was more dedicated to jazz than anything else, even at that time. He could play anything at that time.

TP: Paquito said his father taught himself clarinet so he could teach Paquito to play clarinet.

CACHAO: Yes, of course.

TP: Bebo, what is your earliest memory of Paquito?

BEBO: [I knew Paquito’s father.] There’s a place called Rivoli. That was at the entrance of Hidao(?). It was a place for blacks-and-whites at the end of the ‘30s. I played there a lot in the ‘30s, and one of the tenor saxophonists who was there a lot was his father. I had another relationship with him, because when I started working with the Tropicana, he used to sell instruments to the musicians who worked there. He was a great person, because when somebody said they didn’t have enough to pay the weekly fee for the instruments, he’d say, “Another week will come; don’t worry about it.”

Another thing between me and him: He was a boyfriend of this beautiful mulata named Silvia, and I was a boyfriend of her sister, so the four of us would go out together all the time. This was way before Paquito was born! Before they got married… She was so beautiful that… Before they got married, she married this Japanese journalist, Kochi-Lan his name was. He was a great Japanese print journalist. And Paquito was born in 1948. The same thing that Tito did with Paquito… I did the same thing with Chucho.

TP: Chucho told me that you told him to learn all the styles, and to start from stride piano and work his way methodically through all the modern styles.

BEBO: [Si, senor.] Yes, sir.

CACHAO: I have an anecdote about his son. I went to Bebo’s house one time, and Bebo said, “I want you to meet this jazz pianist.” He said, “I don’t want you to look at him before you hear him play, so just turn around. Put your back to him.” Chucho was 4 or 5 years old at the time. I heard him, he was 4 years old, and there was genius! I said, “Who the hell is this pianist?” and I turned around and it was his little boy!

TP: When did you both start listening to jazz?

BEBO: The thing is, the first pianists I liked… I was living in the countryside. I wasn’t in Havana like Cachao. The first guy I liked was Eddy Duchin, and after that was Duke Ellington. Then came my favorite, Art Tatum. I have two favorite pianists, Art Tatum and Bill Evans. Those are my gods.

TP: Cachao, you were in Havana. You must have been listening to jazz all along.

CACHAO: I started listening to jazz when I was really small. I was born in ‘18, and in ‘22 I already was listening to jazz.

TP: But the bass didn’t become prominent in jazz until ‘28 or ‘29.

CACHAO: Yes, from that time on, jazz took a different turn.

TP: Who were some of the first bass players who impressed you? Jimmy Blanton?

CACHAO: When I first started listening to jazz, the bassists weren’t soloists yet. The thing is, it didn’t start happening with Duke Ellington until 1930 onwards. There was this one bassist who had that way of playing. He had a bad temper, but I can’t remember his name. He was American. He was a really great bass player? He was a composer, too.

TP: In the ‘30s?

CACHAO: No.

TP: Oh, Mingus.

CACHAO: [Charlie Mingus.]

TP: When did each of you first come to New York?

CACHAO: In 1948. I just came to visit. I remember this really funny thing. I went to the White House. At that time, Truman was President, and Truman was a pianist. He had a great piano in there. At that time, they let the tourists and excursions go into the White House, because there wasn’t terrorism at that time. Then I went and they let me in with the excursion, with the tourists, and they heard me playing Truman’s piano. They let the people play. It didn’t matter if you were a tourist or not. They didn’t let you play. The pianos were protected by 5,000 people. At the time we’re talking about, jazz was really strong. All the guys who are important, like Ron Carter, were of that generation, and all of them were inspired by Charles Mingus. That’s the first guy I think started doing extraordinary things with the bass. Of the guys who are playing now, I think Charles Mingus was the main influence.

BEBO: Ray Brown.

TP: Paul Chambers, too, and Scott LaFaro.

CACHAO: Milt Hinton. He played with me in Cuba. We did a concert together. It wasn’t a formal thing. It was in a home. It was like a jam session. He was there with the Cab Calloway Orchestra at the time, and I was with Orquesta Arcano at the time. So he liked what he heard, and between the two of us, we started playing melodies together. We played the melodies of Duke Ellington. I would do the melody, he would do the bass, then we’d do it the other way, where he would do the melody and I would do the bass. “Sophisticated Lady.”

TP: Bebo, when did you first come to New York?

BEBO: In 1962. I came to New York and then to L.A. I left Cuba in 1960. The 26th of October, 1960. I went to Mexico.

CACHAO: I went in ‘62 to Spain. I went there for a contract for 3 months that was renewable, so I went, and then I could be renewed, so I stayed. And I’m extending it up to now! 42 years. I never went back to Cuba.

TP: You’ve been gone 45 years and not gone back. How does that make you feel?

CACHAO: What do you think? Bad. We’re Cubans. Imagine.

BEBO: But we can’t accept that government. Impossible. [No.]

CACHAO: In Cuba, musicians were never politicians. Because musicians were musicians for necessity, so you wouldn’t die of hunger. The musicians are musicians for the love and for the work. Since we’re not revolutionaries… I went to Buenos Aires with the Tito Rodriguez Orchestra from here, and the Consulate from Argentina asked me, “Are you Cuban?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “You’re not going to go there and form a revolution, are you?” He thought I was going to go with this musical group to shoot up the place and overturn the presidency. That’s the kind of terror that was happening with the government we have there. We were simply musicians, pacifists. We have nothing to do with any of that. When musicians get together with musicians, all we talk about is music!

TP: So even though you’re both a full generation older than Paquito, you share the same experience of exile.

BEBO: [Si.] Of course.

CACHAO: Look at the way he had to leave. Paquito couldn’t live there again. To escape, he had to go up the down escalator, the wrong way. In Spain. Because if he went down, he wouldn’t have been able to come. He had to go up to escape.

TP: He took advantage of his position to record you. He produced an album by Bebo on Messidor, Bebo Rides Again.

BEBO: [Si.]

TP: And also you and Chucho a year or two later, and he produced the album 40 Years of Cuban Jam Sessions as well.

CACHAO: Of course. In Miami.

TP: Apart from your warm personal relationship, talk about Paquito as a musician. What dynamics enable him to pull off a concert of this scope?

CACHAO: Imagine the admiration we both have for him. Especially with his father. Bebo especially, because Bebo was all the time with Tito.

BEBO: My opinion about Paquito is that he plays divinely the saxophone. He has a really high range; he can go really high on the saxophone. As a soloist… In any kind of genre or style, he’s a great soloist. But now comes the best that he has. The thing is, the clarinet is a thousand times more difficult than the saxophone, and I consider Paquito as one of the best in the world in all the genres, in all the styles. There’s jazz players like Benny Goodman, but I consider Paquito extraordinary; his execution on the clarinet is one of the best I’ve ever seen in my whole life.

TP: What about his conceptual range? That’s a very Cuban quality, the ability to play all the styles on their own terms in an immaculate way.

BEBO: He knows all the genres, all the styles. Also, he knows very, very old traditional music from Cuba. I heard something from him of danzas and contradanzes from the 1800s. So his range is formidable.

TP: He did an album called A Hundred Years of Love Songs.

BEBO: He’s really concerned and focusing a lot on the music of South America, it seems to me. He’s really involved with things that are happening in Brazil and Argentina now.

TP: He calls it the music of the New World.

CACHAO: It’s his opinion as well as ours that the musician doesn’t have any borders. Nationalities are not important. We’re in agreement… There’s a saying from Spain that says [something like “the distance brings you closer.”

TP: It brings you to your roots. You share your common cultural roots.

CACHAO: Let’s put it this way. He’s in Sweden and I’m in Miami. It’s like if I’d be living next to him in Sweden and he lives next to me in Miami, that distance makes us close.

TP: And Paquito is in New Jersey…

CACHAO: The thing is that he may be in New Jersey and I’m in Miami, but I feel like I’m (?). The distance that separates us makes us feel even closer. We’re brothers.

TP: What do you think was the essence of the culture in Cuba, in Havana, that gave you the breadth of interest… What’s the essence of that cultural root that gives you the artistic expansiveness? I’ve heard both of you play every type of music. I’ve heard Cachao at the Village Gate with Tito Puente and with Libre, and you solo like Mingus times two! I’ve heard you play exquisite danzons. It seems the culture imparted to you a true artistic freedom in your musical expression.

CACHAO: You’re asking how is it possible that such a small island could give such an expansiveness…

TP: Something like that. We can go with that.

CACHAO: I don’t know. The thing is, it’s the tropics. The cold climate is not the same as in the tropics. It’s cold out there, and at 50 years old you’re dying already! The heat is so much that all you’re thinking of is hot things, and it keeps you hot. It makes you move from the hips to the top of your head! That’s a problem there.

TP: You were both playing dance music, all sorts of dance music. You were playing art music. You were playing jazz.

CACHAO: We have a facility in general in the Cuban mind. The example of that is the clave. [CLAPS IT] The thing is, Bebo and myself can’t stand a clave that’s crossed. We can hear a melody, and somebody is counting against the clave—we can’t accept that at all. You’ve got to shoot the guy! If that would happen, even the dancers would stop. You can’t dance if you cross the clave like that.

TP: A lot of the younger musicians I speak to say that the most difficult thing is to learn to play in 4/4 swing as opposed to clave. Was that ever an issue for you 50-60 years ago?

BEBO: First of all, I can’t say anything about the musicians in Cuba now. I haven’t been there, I haven’t heard them, so I don’t know what would be their particular problem.

TP: They just say it’s a difficult mental adjustment.

BEBO: It wasn’t a problem at all for us. Since the swing was close and the rhythm was so precise, as our music, we didn’t have a problem with swing.

CACHAO: You’re going to laugh now. The thing was, we had the music with the clave. A lot of our composers, because of the clave, they suspended the clave, so then they would change the songs, and then anybody could compose then and now. There are compositions now that they write where they suspend the clave. Even the singers don’t know where they have to be. This is a bass player, and they’re playing a 6/8 melody. The singer takes note that the bass player is lost and doesn’t know where he is. So she goes professionally, getting close to the bass player… She took advantage, that when the bridge was coming, she went discreetly over to where the bass player was on the bridge, because she was not singing it… She said, “Hey, man, what’s happening? Where are you?” He says, “What’s up?” She says to him, “6/8. We’re playing in 6/8.” But the bass player doesn’t understand what she means by 6/8. She says, “Don’t you know what’s 6/8?” He says, “Yeah, 48.” They don’t understand anything. Because we don’t say 6/8; we say, “6 by 8.” So he was thinking it was a mathematical problem, so he answered 48. So he really didn’t understand anything that was happening.

TP: You said you don’t hear the musicians in Cuba, but you know the younger musicians who left Cuba.

BEBO: Of course. Look at my son. There are some things that I am not in agreement with, but I can’t really blame the musicians over there for that. The musicians are really great instrumentalists and have a great technique, but the government forces them to study so many hours and practice so much that… When it comes to playing a montuno, there’s what the difference is. Most people anywhere can play a montuno, but that’s a characteristic of the music, and it’s been lost a lot. For example, there was a pianist who played with Cachao. He was a mambo player, and he played that montuno style that nobody else could play, and it was really typical. That part is what I’m talking about.

There are some virtuoso musicians who have come out, but when it comes to the traditional folkloric music, they’re not up to the job, not up to the standard. The thing is that those things are not shown in the schools. They can read anything you put in front of them, but those things, the personal inspiration of the folkloric, they don’t have that any more. If you go down to the countryside, maybe you can still find that. In Oriente, in the eastern part of the country.

CACHAO: In Oriente they say there was a bird who invented the clave, because the bird couldn’t sing. The bird couldn’t sing like the rest of the birds, so he sang the clave! The birds are singing da-da-da-da, and duh-de-duh-de, singing this beautiful melody, and then there’s a bird in the background going BATT-BUTT, BATT-BUTT-BATT. That’s why they don’t know where the clave really comes from. The biggest thing about it is that the bird this guy was talking about is extinct now. The bird is gone, but there are still eggs from that bird around. The egg is in Greece, in the mountains of Greece. So now they’ve got to go to the mountains of Greece to find the egg and incubate it to find out if it’s true about the clave bird. Because how could something like that happen? It’s possible. For example, somebody takes a train. A train has a rhythm, too. For example, if you stand between the two wagons on the train you hear that rhythm. If you listen, you hear what the engine is doing and what the wheels are doing, and when you least expect it, there’s a great rumba happening there!

BEBO: There’s a story that Beethoven was an abacua, and the story is he passed through Cuba. Have you heard the Fifth of Beethoven? It’s a rumba!

CACHAO: But it’s true about the train. I’ve stood outside the train, and you listen what’s happening with the wheels. And when you hear it coming out, it sounds like there’s a quinto and there’s a tumba—there’s a rumba happening.

TP: Duke Ellington also listened to the train. In the U.S. all the blues and jazz musicians listened to the train.

CACHAO: “Night Train,” for example. [CACHAO’S DAUGHTER ARRIVES]

BEBO: Everything that happened between 1910 and 1920… There’s a person I admired, he was my idol, and he was an idol of many people even at that time. That’s the person sitting next to me, and that man is Cachao.

There’s a story that Beethoven was an abakua, and the story is he passed through Cuba. Have you heard the Fifth of Beethoven? It’s a rumba!

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The Music of Cachao
By Ted Panken ©2012

His name was Israel “Cachao” López, he came from Havana, Cuba and during his 90 years on the planet he played the contrabass with the imperial authority of Koussevitzky, the Russian-born, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1924-1949), the kinetic precision of a Yoruba drummer, and the unbridled creativity of Charles Mingus. His old friend Bebo Valdés, a fellow 1918 baby, called him “the king of rhythm.”

As a child, Cachao played bass for a theater orchestra that accompanied silent movies. At 13, he began a 30-year run with the Havana Philharmonic. He moonlighted in dance bands, including one called Arcaño y Sus Maravillas that included his older brother, the pianist-cellist Orestes López, with whom, in 1938, he composed “Mambo,” introducing a swinging groove (nuevo ritmo) for the final section of danzón, an elegant, ritualized form—and Cuba’s national dance from the latter 19th century through the 1950s—that involves composing four separate episodes, each in a different tempo. Bandleader Damaso “Perez” Prado popularized the rhythmic weave, and it exploded onto the international stage, including the dance floors of New York City, where it evolved into the lingua franca beat of Latin Jazz.

Cachao’s mambo also propelled a series of recorded jam sessions (billed as descargas, after the Spanish verb meaning, among other things, to discharge electricity and speak one’s mind) with the best-and-brightest—and jazz-aware—Cuban dance musicians employed by the nightclubs and casinos of Batista’s Havana. They directly influenced the evolution of salsa as articulated by Tito Puente (Cachao composed “Oye Como Va”), Tito Rodriguez, and Eddie Palmieri, all of whom hired Cachao after he migrated permanently to the United States in 1964.

The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, directed by JLCO bassist Carlos Henriquez, will address both the danzón and descarga on this evening’s celebration of Cachao’s legacy. Now 32, Henriquez is a thoroughly 21st century musician, able to navigate the multiplicity of idioms that fall under the jazz umbrella, among them the clave and swing dialects, “without an accent.”

That this is no small task was made clear by the great jazz bassist Ron Carter himself. Speaking on WKCR in 2001, he analogized the jazz feel to “four beats straight up and down, like a picket fence,” while describing clave as that “picket fence leaning over to one side so all the beats move at 45 degree angles from the straight line.” Carter continued: “Jazz isn’t so filled with counter-rhythms, but Latin music has four or five rhythms going all at once in one tune, enough rhythms to last you for a week, held together by the clave beat. All the choices can overwhelm you. I’m amazed that they always pick the right ones.”

Cachao himself was no stranger to jazz. “When I first started listening to jazz, bassists weren’t soloists yet,” he told me during a 2005 encounter. He recalled an informal encounter with bass pioneer Milt Hinton, in Havana with Cab Calloway, perhaps in the late 1940s, at which they “played the songs of Duke Ellington together, one doing the melody and the other doing the bass.” Still, he “spoke jazz” in an accent infused with the infinite permutations of clave.

For Henriquez, the son of a trombone player and a dancer—both of whom were connoisseurs of swing and salsa—the “accent-less” approach is his birthright as a product of the South Bronx “melting pot.” It didn’t hurt to receive hands-on mentoring from the likes of clave wizard Andy Gonzalez and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra predecessors Reginald Veal and Rodney Whitaker, as well as such distinguished prior employers as Danilo Perez, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Tito Puente, and Eddie Palmieri.

“I use Cachao’s concepts all the time,” Henriquez states, noting that the maestro, who learned the bongos even before the bass, extrapolated the rhythms of each component of the Afro-Cuban bata drums, but most notably those associated with the low-range tumbador, and incorporated them into his bass playing. “He learned the instrument with finesse and style, with accuracy and technique. But he also incorporated his life into the music. There’s a side that’s very street-oriented, ferocious, strong, dark, and powerful, which I love, but there was a sweet, beautiful side, too.

“The concept of tumbao [a syncopated, repetitive rhythmic pattern], of playing a fundamental part that becomes a leading part, is widely misunderstood. In African music, the bass is actually the moving line—focusing on the root rhythm and creating that as a solo. That attracts the whole band to you. Cachao was a magnetic force; he was the core of everything.”

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Andy Gonzales-Ted Panken, WKCR, March 13, 1991 (on Cachao):

[MUSIC: Descarga, “Criolla Carabali”; “Tunas Se Quemo”; “Bailando Entre Espuma”]

TP: You’ve done this before. You know the deal.

ANDY: I know the deal. I was up here last time for the Machito Festival with Manny Oquendo, and we did a pretty good show. Here, my partner in crime is Joe Santiago, who is another one of the bass players of my generation. We’re the ones who always… I guess we’re always giving credit where credit is due, and the cat that we picked up a lot from and learned a lot from, not so much by, say, going to his house for lessons or anything, just by listening to what he was playing… We really learned a lot from Cachao. To this day, there’s things to learn from listening to the kind of bass playing that he was doing, no matter what period, because he has such an extensive career, going back to the late 1930s. It’s an incredible body of music that he put together, and he sort of defined bass playing. Afro-Cuban bass playing was brought to a high art.

TP: It wasn’t just Afro-Cuban bass playing. Cachao is a world-class improviser.

ANDY: Oh, of course. Not only that. See, he comes from a family of musicians, and many of them were bass players. I heard there’s, at recent count, 40 bass players in his family, including his mother and father. So we’re talking about somebody that really knows the instrument. Not only that. When Cachao was young and just growing up, he was playing percussion instruments, too. He started out playing bongos. But naturally, he was playing the bass around the same time period, and bass playing in Cuba at that time was mostly in the danzon bands, the charanga bands, the tipica bands of the period. That was sort of the national dance music of Cuba, was the danzon. He has a rich tradition in that idiom, and it calls for a lot of classical style playing, such as bowing the bass instead of, say, plucking it. The plucking part was more percussive. That’s more the Afro-Cuban side of things. But the bowing of the instrument, as in any symphony, or any classical situation… He has the same kind of technique as the best of classical music.

So I guess Cachao to me is probably the most well-rounded, all-around bass player that I’ve ever heard. Because he can do all. He can play with a symphony, he can play with a tango band, he can play with any salsa ensemble, any Afro-Cuban ensemble. His knowledge of rhythm is so extensive, and he can just fit a part to something, either drum-wise or bass-wise.

TP: Another aspect of Cachao we’ll focus on is his compositions, which number in the hundreds.

ANDY: Yes, because he used to write a lot of danzones for the Arcaño band. That’s the band he used to work for — Arcaño Y Sus Maravillas. Jose Antonio Arcaño. He was a master flute player. And the leader of this band, Y Sus Maravillas, were the “marvels” of the age. At the beginning, they were called Los Maravillas, or de Las Maravillas del Siglo, which means “the marvels of the century.” This band really… In that band a lot of innovations took place. The creation of new forms of dance music, and new ways of playing it, and new combinations of rhythms and combinations of sounds in the rhythm section, including… You can hear Cachao bow the bass, slap the bass, play all over the instrument. It’s incredible; incredible to listen to this.

This is a whole part of the history of music, and I am surprised that jazz scholars who really studied the 30s and 40s and have a lot to say about the 30s and 40s, or even, say, the early New Orleans days…that they are not really hip to what was going on in Cuba. They mention it barely. It’s mentioned, like, “Yeah, this was going on, too.” But they really didn’t dig deep into that side of the African diaspora, or whatever you could call it, the African side of things. And they should have been more attentive to this.

TP: Certainly, musicians from Cuba and from the Caribbean made their mark on jazz music, but they were not particularly identified as that – they were identified as jazz.

ANDY: It’s also some cultural conditioning involved. Because I imagine for any jazz fan of that time to hear a danzon with the violins and whatnot, it would sound a little like hokey to them. It would sound like something else. But they were missing the point. And the point is the rhythm. And that’s the total point. To this day, still jazz cats have trouble getting behind the rhythm and how Afro-Cuban music works. But this is the master, one of the masters of any era.

TP: We’ll be having 2 hours and 43 more minutes of elaborations on this theme, with Andy Gonzalez on Cachao. Let’s talk about the three tracks we heard at the top of the show.

ANDY: This album is one of these strange records that came out in the early 60s, after the Revolution, of tapes of Cachao’s jam sessions, which he had done quite a few recording sessions. The personnel on some of these tracks, like, Yeyo Iglesias on bongos, Tata Güines. Papin also played on some of this stuff. The pianist wasn’t Jesus Lopez, who used to play with Arcaño’s band, so it probably was Orestes Lopez, Cachao’s brother, who along with Cachao were the musical directors and were responsible for the majority of arrangements in the Arcaño band. In the Arcaño band, Orestes played the cello. The instrumentation is 3 violins, flute, cello, bass, piano, and timbales — no congas at the beginning. The bass sort of held up the bottom and with the timbal and made it sound full, like the conga wasn’t really needed. He would slap the bass sort of like a conga, too. All those things are incredible.

I’ve been for more than a year now trying to hook up a way to get Cachao in concert together with Milt Hinton. We’re talking about some serious slap bass technique in jazz — in American Jazz and in Afro-Cuban music. Now, one of these days I’ll have my dream come true. But I’ve been waiting for that. I’ve been mentioning it to promoters, and they all say it’s a great idea, but so far nobody has acted on it. But that’s one of them I want to try to do.

The tunes on this album… It’s on the Maype label. It’s funny, Cachao… I’m glad that these records exist. But the companies that put these out were like bootleg companies. They used to rip off the musicians, and never pay them a penny for their stuff. So as much as I like the presence of having the record around, it’s a drag that Cachao never really makes any bread off these records. And they’ve been in print for 25 years, so it must be somebody’s making money.

Anyway, the tunes that we heard are “Criollo Carabali.” That’s an old Afro-Cuban chant of the abakua sect, or what would you call it… That’s sort of the Afro-Cuban version of the Masons. It’s an all-male society dedicated to preserving and sort of keeping each other cool. In fact, in the early years, they used to buy each other’s freedom from slavery. So that’s a chant of that style of music, abakua.

“Tunas Se Quemo” is sort of a descarga montuno, very simple. The tres player on this record is Niño Rivera, who is probably the most modern of the tres players and the most influential, besides Arsenio Rodriguez, who is probably THE influence on the tres. All these names I’m mentioning are just giants. Giants in Cuban music. Cachao was in there, too, as the giant of giants.

TP: We have cued up a collaboration between Cachao and Eddie Palmieri.

ANDY: This is not my favorite tune from the record, but Cachao gets a little solo in it, and I like the way he plays here. He’s a driving force in any band he plays in, but the collaboration with Eddie Palmieri was… I got to see that band live, in person, quite a few times, and I was thrilled by that. Joe, when was the first time you saw Cachao play live.

JOE SANTIAGO: Tito Rodriguez Orchestra.

ANDY: Same with me. I saw him with Tito Rodriguez Orchestra. I saw Tito Rodriguez’ Orchestra at the Embassy Ballroom on a Sunday afternoon in 1964. I was playing my first big-time gig. It was Federico Pagani, he was like the daddy of promoters in… He brought the Latin dance downtown to the Palladium and all this stuff. He’s like a legendary figure. Well, he was throwing these Sunday afternoon, all day,10 bands on the bill, and he hired our little Latin Jazz group. I was about 13 at the time. We were the tenth band on the bill. So we played, a little quintet, we made 50 bucks. But at the top of the bill was the Tito Rodriguez Orchestra, Eddie Palmieri La Perfecta, Joe Cuba Sextet — the hot bands at the moment. So I got to see them for the first time. I saw Cachao play for the first time. I saw Manny Oquendo playing with Eddie Palmieri’s band for the first time. All that was great. The Colgate Gardens in the Bronx. Neither one of these two places I mentioned exists any more.

Anyway, this is the Eddie Palmieri band with Cachao. This was recorded around 1968 or 1969 – “Ay Que Rico.”

[MUSIC: Eddie Palmieri, “Ay Que Rico”; Orquesta De Fajardo, “Fajardo y su Flauta”]

ANDY: That was actually Los Treyas Cubanas, but it’s a tape that ended up in Miami and came out under the title of Fajardo, who was the leader of that band until he left to come to the States. So that tape actually isn’t Fajardo at all playing there, but the tune and composition and everything is Cachao’s. The title on the album is Fajardo Y Su Flauta, but the original title is “Julio Y Su Flauta” — Julio Guerrero, who was the original flute player who played in the Estrella Cubana band. But that’s a really nice, laid-back version of that. There’s another version that Cachao himself recorded of this tune that’s a little faster. But this one, they gave it a nice tempo.

We’re going to hear now a long, 18-minute cut. It takes a whole side of a record. It’s from the Descargas at the Village Gate, Live — the Tico All-Stars. This particular descarga is “Descarga de Contrabajoas,” the jam between the bass players. And the two daddies are here — Bobby Rodriguez and Cachao.

Now, Bobby Rodriguez was a whole other style. I think Bobby and Cachao were probably the two main influences on my playing (and probably Joe’s, too, I guess). They were the cats, man. They were the ones with the best technique, the prettiest way of playing. Bobby was very pretty in his sound especially. There’s a very pronounced difference in their tone quality. Even the way they hit the strings is different. Bobby has more of a bell, clear, ringing kind of note thing, and Cachao is funkier, a little more street when it comes to plucking the strings and slapping the bass and whatnot. They’re playing two Ampeg Baby Basses here. Tone-wise, they still get their tone out, but sometimes the sound can be a little strange. But they do some great stuff here, and they just talk to each other back and forth.

TP: The liner notes attribute this to May 1966.

[MUSIC: Cachao-Bobby Rodriguez, “Descarga de Contrabajos”; “El Fantasma Del Combo”]

ANDY: Israel Lopez, Cachao, the great bass player of Afro-Cuban music. The track we just heard was one of his many descarga, or Cuban jam session recordings. This one is on a strange label called Musicalia. Even the cover is real strange. It says, Cuban Music In Jam Session, Cachao, in big letters, and then there’s a photograph of two dancers, a lady who has on a bikini-like outfit, her arms look like they’re crossed or tied together, and then the guy is leaning down, and it’s shot in the woods somewhere — a very strange photo. Anyway, it’s a great album for the things that are on it.

The tune we heard was called “El Fantasma Del Combo.” All those little effects and all the…that’s right out of Cachao’s ideas about doing things. I was fortunate enough to participate in something that he did years later for the Salsoul label. I’ve been to a few rehearsals where he puts these things together, and he just comes up with these crazy ideas. He sets up the percussion and everything the way he wants them to start off. He orchestrates a jam session.

Which is in contrast to that mish-mosh of a thing at the Village Gate, which I don’t care for that much except for the things that Cachao and Bobby Rodriguez get to play on it. But since it was out of their control, a lot of other things were happening that really had nothing to do with… Just good playing. But I just think that track is valuable for their work together, because it’s very rare when two bass players play together on a record — it’s usually just one bass and that’s it.

Now we’re going to start delving into Cachao’s past, in the real early days. We’ve mostly been listening to 50s and 60s work. We’re going back now to 1938 or 1939, I believe. The original source of this bass solo is a Koussevitzky concerto, Koussevitzky was a Russian composer and a bass player, and he used to write for the bass. They took this piece of music and adapted it for a bass solo in the Cuban danzon tradition. We’re going to hear two versions of this. Cachao recorded it in 1938 and then recorded it again in 1957 or so. We’re going to hear the early version, and then you’ll hear the newer version.

[MUSIC: Cachao, “Canta Contrabajo” (1938 and 1957)]

ANDY: I made a slight error. The first tune that we heard on my tape of real early stuff, I believe it was called “Al de Lante(?),” Cachao as musical director along with his brother of the Arcaño Y Sus Maravillas band of 1938 or so. I’m not positive of the exact date. We’ll now delve into that particular time period, because there are so many innovations going on, not only on the bass itself, but the transforming of the whole rhythm section happened in that band — and Cachao had quite a bit to do with it. In this time period, there was no conga drum in this style of band. The conga drum was sort of a lowly… They weren’t given much attention. They considered it a very street instrument, and it wasn’t accepted in the salon de baile, in polite society dancing, of which danzon was a strong part. But in the Arcaño band, the conga was introduced around 1946-47-48, that time period.

We’ll hear the band before the conga drum was introduced, from the very early Arcaño recordings. These are all done around 1938-39-40. There is no conga drum, so the bottom of the band is in the hands of Cachao, and in the hands of Ulpiano Diaz, who was the timbal player in the band. Listen particularly to the interplay between Cachao playing what they call the tumbao, the bass figure, plus he’ll be slapping the bass. You’ll hear slaps. You’ll hear little things that sound like percussive effects, like from a conga drum, but they’re not. They’re from the bass. That in conjunction with the left hand of the timbales, which plays a beat that’s a very bass kind of sound…those two things are the bottom of the sound of this band. And it’s 3 violins, a cello, flute — the great Arcaño himself on the flute, a tremendous flute player, with a very distinctive, sweet style. And the great Jesus Lopez on piano, who was one of the more, I guess…how would I call it…the chops — Mr. Chops. This guy was sort of the Art Tatum of his day, but in an Afro-Cuban way.

[MUSIC: Arcano Y Sus Maravillas with Cachao, 1938-39]

ANDY: That was a good dose of early Arcaño and then the last tune was “Buena Vista Social Club,” which is from the El Gran Cachao album on Kubaney Records (1958). This is I guess what the Arcaño band would have been like 20 years later, from the period that we were listening to the old 78s. For the recording, Cachao some woodwinds. You heard bass clarinet, you hear a clarinet; it added an extra texture to the sound of the arrangements of the danzon, of the strings and flute sound. So that was a pretty nice thing that he did on that record.

Now, the earlier cuts… I know all the melodies, and I’m a little vague on the titles. I wish Rene Lopez was here to help me out with the titles on some of these songs. But they were all Cachao’s arrangements. Although on the 78, I guess if you really listen closely, you can hear all the things Cachao is doing on the bass to make that bottom happen in the music, because there’s no conga…

[END OF SIDE 2]

[SIDE 3]

ANDY: …that’s where all his musical background really comes from. And then, the other side of Cachao, which is the street musician, who used to play bongos in little street ensembles and whatnot.

We’re going to hear a very historical recording, mainly because of the fact that we have… This is the record entitled Patato y Totico. It was recorded on Verve Records, and Teddy Reig produced it. Patato Valdes is well known to jazz fans. He’s been recording on jazz albums with Art Blakey and Max Roach and all these people since the middle 50s. But he got together his own recording session with Totico singing, and he managed to get Arsenio Rodriguez and Cachao on the same session.

[MUSIC: Patato-Totico-Cachao-Arsenio, “Mas Que Nada”; Descarga, “Rendencion”; Gran Orquesta Tipica, “Mambo Tipico”; Cachao, “Maria Elena”; Eddie Palmieri-Cachao, “Busca Lo Tuyo”–skips]

ANDY: Sorry for the scratchy record, but I couldn’t get a better copy of this. That was Cachao playing with Eddie Palmieri in one of Eddie’s best bands. Manny Oquendo playing bongos, and Luis Miranda on conga, and Barry Rogers taking a tremendous trombone solo…

TP: I guess you play that one a lot, Andy.

ANDY: Yes, this particular copy of the record I found in a budget bin somewhere, and it was used. I didn’t think it would skip on the tune, though. I couldn’t find my other copy. It’s one of those records that I used to play a lot, and my good copy got lost. But you could hear the driving force of Cachao in the Eddie Palmieri band. It was just such a good-sounding rhythm section — Cachao and Manny and Luis Miranda and Eddie on the piano. A driving rhythm section.

Cachao during his career… When he came from Cuba and settled in New York, he worked with quite a few bands. He did a lot of freelance work, did some symphony work. He did spend a good I guess two years or so with the Tito Rodriguez Orchestra, and recorded a few albums, did some touring. They tell me he wrote some charts for the band that they never recorded, which I would have liked to hear. In particular he wrote a danzon that I’d like to have heard, a big band arrangement of one of Cachao’s danzons. But I’ll have to wait until Tito Rodriguez, Jr., digs it up out of his father’s extensive library of arrangements.

During the time that Tito Rodriguez had Cachao in the band, which was a tremendous period for the band… The Tito Rodriguez Orchestra was always a top-notch unit. Other players around that time… He always had the best — the best accompanists in that band. So imagine that Cachao would be playing, and then he managed to steal Rene Hernandez away from the Machito Orchestra, and quite a few other players of note. Like, Mario Rivera used to play the baritone sax in Tito Rodriguez’s orchestra at the time. Also the lead alto was Bobby Porcelli. Just some great musicians.

TP: Before we play the next recording, by Tito Rodriguez, please run down the music we heard before the Eddie Palmieri track.

ANDY: Before the Eddie Palmieri thing, we heard a tune called “Maria Elana,” which Cachao wrote for his daughter on her birthday. That was recorded when Cachao was a member of the Fajardo Orchestra, which he spent some time with Jose Fajardo’s Orchestra. You can see him on the cover of some of the Panart albums.

Before that we heard the Gran Orquesta Tipica, “Mambo Tipico.” This was an album entitled The 64 Professors. What they did was they put together all the great violinists and flute
players and leaders of all the charanga bands in Cuba that were coming up during the 50s. They were very strong. They were the most popular bands. We’re talking about the America Orchestra, Enrique Jorrin, just the great figures of the music. And Cachao, his brother Jesus Lopez on piano; Ulpiano Diaz on timbales — people like that. They just all banded together to record a record of… Imagine. Full strings. It almost sounds like a symphony playing danzones. This tune was titled “Mambo Tipico.” That’s what it was. It wasn’t a danzon; it was a mambo of the genre at that time. It wasn’t the New York style mambo, which is quite a bit more frenetic and a lot faster. But the original Cuban mambo was a nice, slow-to-medium tempo kind of groove. That was a good example of it.

Before that we heard one of the Descarga albums, a tune called “Redencion,” which was written by Orestes Lopez, Cachao’s brother.

Now we’re going to play something Tito Rodriguez recorded, from a CD called Big Band Latino. I’m curious to hear this because I owned the original record when it came out on Musicorp Records, and I’m curious how they remastered it. The people at the Palladium label from Barcelona, Spain, are very meticulous. They put out some Machito records, and the sound is tremendous on them. The track we’ll hear is “Esti Es Mi Orquesta,” “This Is My Orchestra,” which was a direct cop off a Stan Kenton record by the same name — This is An Orchestra. Tito Rodriguez narrates a whole thing about having a band, and the musicians in the band — he names all the musicians and has them all play something. The arrangement itself is… Well, they adapted just the words Stan Kenton said about having a big band, and they translated that into Spanish, but then the rest of the arrangement is an original arrangement. Cachao gets a nice little taste here, and so do all the other members, some of whom are quite prominent today on the scene. This cut lasts a good 12 minutes.

[Tito Rodriguez, “Esti Es Mi Orquesta”]

ANDY: That was the Tito Rodriguez Orchestra with Cachao on the bass and all the other great musicians in that band at the time period — that was around 1964 or 1965. Tito Rodriguez gave up his big band around 1965 and moved to Puerto Rico.

And Cachao? Well, Cachao always was in demand as a player. He could fit in any situation, and got to play with all the bands really. I saw Cachao play with Machito’s orchestra. That was tremendous! I saw him play with Orchestra Broadway, most of the bands. But I guess the bands that he most impressed me with from what I saw in person was the Tito Rodriguez Orchestra, which you just heard, and the Eddie Palmieri band. To me, those were where he really got a chance to shine as a section player, as part of the rhythm section.

We’re missing quite a few records that I wish we would have had a chance to play tonight. I guess we’re going to have to do Cachao, part 2, and bring in all the stuff that we’ve been missing. There’s a bunch of live tapes also of Cachao with Manny Oquendo and Libre, with two basses. I had the honor of playing along with Cachao last year, doing the two-bass thing at SOB’s, at the Village Gate, and most recently at the Atlanta Jazz Festival. Unfortunately, I misplaced my tape from Atlanta. I was tearing the house apart looking for it to bring it here so you could hear it. But I’ll have to wait until Cachao, part 2, to play it.

Also, the records Cachao recorded in the middle 70s for the Salsoul label, which he got to play some of his early danzon arrangements, newly recorded in the studio, and he also got to do new descargas, and he brought together people like El Negro Vivar on trumpet… Those were his last record dates before El Negro passed away of a heart attack in Miami. He was one of the great trumpet soloists of Cuban music. Chocolate is on the recording also, the other daddy of the trumpet. Papaito is playing there, and Virgilio Marti — quite a few of the Cuban Mafia in New York played on those records. Unfortunately, right now, they’re not here. But we’ll get to hear them on another occasion.

But that was the first that people had heard about Cachao in quite a few years. Especially the New York scene, of which he was quite popular here. He got to play on some of the Allegre All Stars things, the Tico All Stars. He took part in quite a few recordings with Charlie Palmieri, and quite a number of sideman dates. So his work as a leader didn’t revive until around 77-78, when he recorded the albums for Salsoul under Andy Lopez’ and Andy Kaufman’s production. We’ll get to hear those on I guess our second part. Cachao is so prolific a composer and a musician and a record-maker, although as a leader there are not many recordings.

Also, there’s a few that he recorded recently, in the last couple of years, for a small label in Miami. I think the label is entitled Tania Records…as opposed to Fania records, I guess…I don’t know. But there’s some great, great contemporary Cachao bass solos on those records also. Unfortunately, again, they’re not here.

But we do have quite a bit of Cachao’s early career and we do have quite a bit of his middle career, which… A lot of people consider that some of his best work took place in the middle to late 50s in Cuba with his cohorts and contemporaries, such as Emilio Rivera. Tata Guines, the great conga virtuoso who took the conga farther than it ever had gone as a musical instrument in the 50s — he’s a very strong influence on just anybody who’s playing congas today. He was quite a part of Cachao’s entourage in Cuba during the time when they were recording those Cuban Jam Session records.

We’re going to return to the Cuba Jam Session period now and hear a town called “La Luz.”

[MUSIC: “La Luz”]

[END OF SIDE 3]

[MUSIC: “La Luz” (skip)”; “El Manicero”; “Juan Pescao”; “La Luz”; Cachao Descarga-Nino Rivera, “Potpourri de Congas”;

ANDY: That was the great Niño Rivera on tres with Cachao and his Descarga group. On bongos of course was Yeyito, and on the congas was Tata Guines, on the timbales was Guillermo Barretto, and I imagine that was Cachao’s brother playing the piano. Those are classic recordings, and they are more obscure ones, because the great album that everybody knows is the Descargas In Miniature album, which we don’t have a copy of here, but we’ll get it for part-2.

All these records were originally recorded… The first Descargas in Miniature were done… The reason they called them “In Miniature” is because they were all done for release on 45s, of which I have a few. As a matter of fact, I didn’t realize it until I started hunting through some record bins in Chicago and ran across some Panart 45s of some of the tunes from the first Descarga album. That one to me is the classic of classics. If they ever have Grammys for classic albunms, that should win one, because Cachao really put together a stellar organization, and his ideas and the way he puts little jams together, he really sets them up. They don’t just happen. He sets them up real nice.

Basically, the two great recording feats of Cachao’s career are the whole thing with the danzon and the tradition, and how he sort of was instrumental in new innovations in Cuban music. And then, the whole thing with the descargas, of which I hear that he wasn’t the very first to do a Cuban jam session — there were other albums. But the ones he put together are considered…they’re classics of the genre.

We just heard quite a few of these little Cuban descargas. There was one called “Potpourri of Congas,” which started to skip so we had to take it off. These are old records, man. Some of them I’ve played to death for years and years, and unfortunately as best as we can clean them, they still skip.

TP: We made an adjustment on “La Luz.” Meticulous cleaning job!

ANDY: I’ve been collecting records for so many years, you learn that sometimes you have to put some soap and water to it and scrub out the gunk. And they play! You’d be surprised. Vinyl is very resilient. They spring back to life.

Anyway, we’ll get back to some early Cachao. We’d like to continue this on another occasion and have Cachao Part 2 with more of his great solo work. Unfortunately we weren’t able to bring some of that material with us today. But we’re trying to give you an all-around view of how great a musician he is. Hopefully, to those who have never seen him play in public, make a definite attempt to see him in person. He is one of the most dynamic figures to watch while playing, because he does so many things. He’s an entertainer. He knows you’re watching. He’ll do some stuff to dazzle you. Watching him play whatever he’s playing, his tumbaos or whatever, and then all of a sudden he’ll just surprise you with something and make you go nuts.

We’ll hear some of Cachao’s arrangements from the Arcaño band. He’s playing bass, of course. He doesn’t get much of a chance to do any solo work on these records. But, what he does do in the rhythm section, behind the rhythm section, as an accompanist and as just an all-around player, there’s quite a bit of very interesting stuff going on. All bass players give an extra ear to this.

[MUSIC: Cachao-Arcaño, “El Nono Toca” and more titles from early 40s]

ANDY: That was the music of Arcaño Y Sus Maravillas, and that last track was called “Cubanita,” and that was Los Hermanos Rigual that were singing the front part of the tune. They were pretty well known as a trio singing in harmony. They did some work with the Machito Orchestra, particularly with Graciela on “Contigo En la Distancia.”

That’s it. We’re wrapping it up. We haven’t really, except for a couple of instances, shown Cachao in the light of being the great soloist that he is, and that’s what I think the 2nd part of our Cachao special should focus on.

For Jerry Gonzalez’ 65th Birthday, a “Directors Cut” Jazz Times Article From 2009 and an Uncut Downbeat Blindfold Test From 2003

In acknowledgement of master conguero-trumpeter-conceptualist Jerry Gonzalez’s 65th birthday, here’s a “Director’s Cut” of a feature piece I wrote for Jazz Times in 2012 about Jerry and bassist Andy Gonzalez, his brother, and an uncut, animated 2003 Blindfold Test with Jerry. (Here’s a link to my post last year of an uncut Blindfold Test  that I conducted with Andy in 2001.)

 

The Gonzalez Brothers: The Apache Way (Jazz Times) – 2012:

 

In control central of Andy Gonzalez’ compact apartment on 209th Street in the Bronx on the third Friday of October, the 60-year-old bassist and his brother, Jerry, 62, had some catching up to do.

In town from Madrid, his home since 2000, Jerry removed one CDR after another from his bag, presenting each offering with an enthusiastic “check this out.” A Symphony Space-produced DVD of an homage to the brothers by the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra the previous weekend ran on a large monitor, which shared a wall obscured by stacks of electronic gear. A narrow corridor separated these holdings from less accessible piles of vintage audio equipment; boxes filled with 8-track tapes, printed matter, and bric-a-brac; several shaky metal shelving units piled with ancient LPs and ‘78s; and a couple of chairs.

As Andy burned duplicate disks, the brothers assessed the concert. It comprised 13 numbers, programmed by ALJO Artistic Director Arturo O’Farrill to convey the scope of their complementary careers, spanning close to half-a-century. O’Farrill commissioned fresh arrangements from the book of Jerry’s Fort Apache band, whose cusp-of-the ‘90s recordings Rumba Para Monk, Earth Dance, and Moliendo Café, set a paradigm for coalescing the vocabularies of swing-based hardcore jazz and clave-centric Afro-Cuban idioms. Two charts (the Pedro Flores standard “Obsesión” and Larry Willis’ “Nightfall’) and two original compositions illuminating the trumpeter-conguero’s current activity in Spain’s gypsy flamenco scene came from Spaniard Miguel Blanco, the guiding force behind Jerry’s well-wrought 2006 CD, Music for Big Band, who was on site to conduct.

The orchestra played impeccably, and the concluding section—kinetic, 13-horn performances of three staples from the book of Conjunto Libre, the salsa unit co-founded by Andy and the late timbalero Manny Oquendo in 1974, shortly after both left the employ of Eddie Palmieri—had the patrons dancing in the aisles. But Jerry and Andy Gonzalez are tough customers, and neither was entirely satisfied with this representation of their musical production.

“If it had been the Fort Apache band together, with ALJO surrounding us, it would have come out better,” Jerry said, before acknowledging that contractual issues (Fort Apache had an imminent booking at Newark’s NJPAC, which wanted metropolitan area exclusivity) forestalled this circumstance. “The band was like in the air. We touched upon some things, but it didn’t have the ferocity. That bugged me, but I went through it.”

“It was nice to be honored,” Andy said gently. But he noted the omission of the mid-‘70s records Concepts in Unity and Lo Dicen Todo by Grupo Folklorico y Experimental Nuevayorquino, a rumba ensemble that addressed historic Cuban and Puerto Rican repertoire with idiomatic authenticity and a funky South Bronx attitude.

“We’re talking about forty years of playing all kinds of different music in different bands,” Andy said gently. “We’ve done so much, it’s hard to make a representation of everything we got to do.”

“Andy and Jerry changed the face of Latin Jazz—in fact, they defined that hybrid,” said O’Farrill, who recalled 1970s listening sessions “at Andy’s house to Arsenio Rodriguez recordings that nobody had, or Bill Evans recordings that nobody had.” He added: “They’ve investigated, immersed themselves in, and appropriated each style.”

In a separate conversation, Jeff Watts—who met the brothers via pianist Kenny Kirkland at the cusp of the ‘90s, and has subbed several Apache gigs—cosigned that assessment. “Their music is definitely a reflection of their experience,” said the drummer. “There’s always something on Jerry’s hot list, which might tie into his perspective at the moment. He’ll play some old Cuban stuff, and show you how he’s incorporated a portion of that theme into an arrangement he’s working on.”

Then Watts offered this encomium: “What makes their thing special is that the jazz side is so well-informed. Listening to the Apaches over the years, you can hear the swagger and vibe of the Jazz Messengers at moments, the resonant spiritual side of Coltrane’s music, the heavy drama of Miles’ quintet, and of course what they do with Monk and Wayne. They have an intimate knowledge of how to achieve the moods associated with jazz. They’ve been successful with their hybrid without being blatant about it, just from trying to render the song with a certain dance feel. The Apache way is a template that you can use for combining a lot of different musics, by paying respect to all the music you’re trying to mix. They could get more credit for that. I think a lot of musicians refer to them as an example, whether they know it or not. But I don’t see a lot of people saying it.”

[BREAK]

“It’s Nuyorican,” Jerry said, pinpointing the sensibility that Watts described. “I listen to Trane, and I hear Muñequitos de Matanzas simultaneously in my head. It interfaces naturally. I heard how Monk would sound on the record before we did it.” He elaborated. “Our version of ‘Evidence’ is a combination of Frank Emilio and Muñequitos and Monk, together.”

This “bilingual” aesthetic stance gestated when the Gonzalez brothers were kids in the Edenwald Projects on 225th Street, home base until their teens. Their father was a gigging sonero and hi-fi buff, who passed down his old equipment to the boys when he upgraded, enabling them to listen closely to Tito Rodríguez, Arsenio Rodríguez, Tito Puente, Machito, Cortijo with Ismael Rivera and with his own combo. On Symphony Sid’s Latin-focused radio show, they heard Cal Tjader and Mongo Santamaría. In elementary school, Andy learned bass and Jerry learned trumpet; in eighth grade, home-bound with a broken leg, Jerry taught himself the beats by practicing to those recordings on a borrowed conga. Soon, the listening got up-close-and-personal—downtown at the Village Vanguard, Bill Evans, Sonny Rollins, and the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra; crosstown at Slugs, Sun Ra, Freddie Hubbard, Tony Williams, Chick Corea, and Lee Morgan (Jerry was playing in a teen band with Rene McLean, whose father, Jackie, helped him get past the gatekeeper). Uptown and downtown, they checked out Mongo and Carlos ‘Patato’ Valdéz, and heard Machito at a low-ceilinged boite on Westchester Avenue in the Bronx called Eva’s Intimate Lounge. By high school—Manhattan’s High School of Music and Art—they were entering the fray, first in Latin Jazz, later in típico contexts.

“If you look at the back page of Music and Art’s 1967 yearbook, there’s a photograph of a school desk on which somebody carved the words ‘Latin Jazz’,” Andy said.

“That was me,” Jerry interjected with a raspy, protracted laugh. “I graffitied ‘Latin Jazz’ every place I sat.”

“But that represents what we thought about the music,” Andy continued. “I didn’t start playing more dance-hall music until I got with Ray Barretto.” This transition occurred when Andy was about 17, not long after the brothers met ethnomusicologist and collector René López, who gave them access to his treasure trove of mid-century Afro-Cuban recordings, initiating them to the codes of rumba and helping them, as Andy puts it, “filter into that circuit little by little.”

“We refined our technique for that circuit,” Jerry said. “Before you even can sit down, there’s a certain way to do things. You need to know what the tumbao is, and what the quinto does, and how it matches in with the clave, where to phrase and where not to phrase. Now, the rumba shit wasn’t open publicly. Religion was one thing that separated it, but also family—if you didn’t know someone close to that circle, you couldn’t get pulled in. We got enough from the outside, listening to records. But playing in the real deal present, you find out how what you do is wrong or right. Do something wrong, they’ll tell you right there, man. They’ll give you a little bop on the head.”

As Andy “understood more about the role of the bass in the dance band form,” he coalesced an approach grounded in the earthy sound and fluid tumbaos of bassist Bobby Rodríguez with Tito Puente—and, subsequently, Cuban maestro Israel “Cachao” López—that blends, as Watts puts it, “bass player logic with heavy hand drum knowledge—he’s kind of the Ron Carter of this music.”

Jerry’s development of parallel tonal personalities on trumpet (“more intellectual”) and congas (“more physical and intuitive”) was a somewhat more complex process. “It was a shared experience,” Jerry said. “Congas is what I first played professionally, but I soon caught up to that level on trumpet, because I knew what I had to practice to get it together. On congas, my goal was to try to play like Los Muñequitos by myself—which isn’t easy. I was trying to figure the shit out—it was constant practice, constant focus, constant listening. And enjoying—it made me feel good all the time. I listened to a broad taste of drummers—Philly Joe, Roy, Elvin, Bu, Tony Williams, Jimmy Cobb. But I couldn’t play jazz congas. I like to superimpose my stuff on top of the swing. If it’s real, it just fits right in. If it’s corny, it don’t make it.”

The brothers made further refinements during a year with Dizzy Gillespie, who recruited Jerry in 1970, and hired Andy soon thereafter. The no-trapset quintet’s single recording, Perception, on which Gillespie plays at a peak of melodic inspiration over a melange of understated diasporic beats, does not hint at the “burning rhythms” the unit attained in live performance. “We were laying down our open Latin Jazz kind of playing,” Andy recalls of their 18-month run. “Dizzy came over to me a few times and whispered, ‘Where’s one?’ Maybe the rhythms were a little too intricate.”

Three years with Eddie Palmieri sealed the postgraduate education. “We played for the best dancers,” Andy said. “They need a good beat, and those who hold the best beat get the most respect. Your beat communicates to the dancers, they dance better, and that’s communicated to you. We were both coming from the Cuban school, so it was a perfect fit. Eddie was still wearing three-piece suits, but we were stretching, and he started hippieing out, doing long piano interludes between tunes.”

“I was playing a lot with Rashied Ali then, breaking all the clave rules on conga,” Jerry relates. “So one night with Eddie after a típico, I decided to do some crazy shit when it was time to solo. He started shaking his head, going ‘No. No! No!!’ ‘What the fuck—it’s my solo; I can do whatever I want.’ At the end of the night, when they were paying everybody, he wouldn’t talk to me. He told someone, ‘I never want that motherfucker to play in my band again.’ I was hurt real bad. It made me go home and study my tumbador playing so I could try to come up to the level he wanted. When I got the gig again, he made me use just one drum for a whole year. I just played tumbao and wouldn’t riff at all. That discipline illuminated how powerful it is to just play time when it grooves.”

By now, the Gildersleeve Avenue house to which the Gonzalez family had moved-on-up midway through the ‘60s was a destination for a Pan-American cohort of the famous—Gillespie, Machito, Dorham, McLean, Patato, Ali, Larry Young, and Rubén Blades—and obscure, attracted by the brothers’ global perspective. Devoid of ethnic chauvinism, they treated the idioms not as separate entities but as extensions of each other. “Even people who never went there, say they were,” Andy jokes. “We’ve always been able to surround ourselves with people who played well and wanted to involve themselves in the things that we were doing.”

These informal sessions begat Grupo Folklórico, which followed a process analogous to the Kansas City era Basie band’s practice of spontaneously generating riffs for dancers out of shared experience with vernacular materials.“We created a lot of music without a sheet of paper,” Andy said. “We weren’t just playing folklore. We were experimenting with it.”

Further workshopping ensued at New Rican Village, a multidisciplinary venue at 7th Street and Avenue A, which named Andy musical director in 1977. Proximity to the vibrant East Village culture mix—the space was within striking distance of contemporaneous “loft jazz” presenters like the Tin Palace and Studio Rivbea, as well as The Kitchen in Soho— brought wider visibility and caché from outsiders.“Nobody was playing this kind of shit downtown,” Jerry says. “When jazz people would come up to play, they didn’t know how to deal with it.”

On these sessions, as well as shows at Soundscape, a loft at 10th Avenue and 52nd Street, Jerry worked out the repertoire documented that year on Ya Yo Me Curé, on which the first, 12-piece edition of Fort Apache—trumpet (Jerry), saxophone (Mario Rivera), two trombones (Papo Vazquez and Steve Turre), electric guitar (Edgardo Miranda), piano (Hilton Ruiz), bass (Andy), a lead vocalist (Frankie Rodriguez), and four percussionists— navigated Monk, Ellington, Shorter, and three rumbas of various flavors. Although he continued to gig and tour with this configuration throughout the ‘80s, as documented on The River Is Wide and Obatalá [Enja], Jerry—whose gigging circle was expanding to include such varied jazz voices as McCoy Tyner, Kirk Lightsey, Jaco Pastorius, Kirkland, and Charles Fambrough, and was beginning to make his presence felt at mainstream jazz rooms like Bradley’s and Sweet Basil—gradually developed a smaller, more jazz-centric, booking-friendly iteration. Joining the brothers on Rumba Para Monk, from 1988, were tenor saxophonist Carter Jefferson (formerly with Woody Shaw), pianist Larry Willis (who was sharing Jerry’s large Walton Avenue apartment), and trapsetter Steve Berrios, who could articulate a jazz-to-clave rhythmic lexicon as encyclopedic as Jerry’s—their turn-on-a-dime breaks from clave to swing feels, executed with grace and slickness, remain a key signature of the Fort Apache sound.

[BREAK]

Since Jerry’s relocation to Madrid, the Apaches have convened only sporadically. Still, at an August one-off at the Blue Note, and October concerts in Hartford and Philadelphia (a freak snowstorm wiped out the Newark show), with MacArthur Grant awardee Dafnis Prieto at the drum chair, the forceful precision and head-spinning rhythmic flow were intact. Nor did the leaders’ intensity seem at all diminished by the travails of aging—the toes on Andy’s left foot were amputated in 2004 due to complications from undiagnosed diabetes, his health is intermittent, and he is often in a wheelchair; Jerry, who walks with a pronounced stoop, has recently had surgeries for a hernia and fused vertebrae, and his fingers are gnarled and swollen from years of striking the drums.

“Congas is like running a marathon,” Jerry said. “You’ve got to have endurance, and there’s a certain way you have to hit the drums to get the sound crispy, the way you want it. Then after I’ve been beating the drums, I’ve got to come in with the hand and grab the horn real quick, and get my oxygen back, and be in there, automatic, instantly.”

“Sometimes the adrenaline takes over and you forget you’re sick, and just play,” said Andy, who had been in the E.R. with a fever on the morning of the Symphony Space concert.

The brothers’ abiding bilingual stance and mono-focused perfectionism are two reasons why the Apache personnel has remained relatively stable over its quarter century. Another is an ornery, take-no-prisoners attitude to music-making reflecting the wild west ambiance of the South Bronx barrio during formative years.

“The Bronx had a gritty edge in the ‘70s, and Fort Apache was a band of pirates and swashbuckling raconteurs,” O’Farrill says. “If you played in it, it means you understood the clubhouse gang atmosphere. If you could PLAY, Jerry would say, ‘Yeah, you’re an Apache.’”

Some Apaches were on the fence about whether to welcome Prieto to the club. “Everything changes when one person isn’t there,” said Jerry, noting that Prieto, while one of the truly innovative drummers of this period, does not share Berrios’ deep assimilation of the codes of swing as articulated by the likes of Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones, and Arthur Taylor. “Dafnis is coming from somewhere else, and it’s a big difference. Not everybody in the band agrees with it.”

“It will evolve into another flavor of Fort Apache,” said Andy.

A new recording on Sunnyside, Jerry Gonzalez y El Comando de la Clave, documents several parallel flavors that Jerry has developed over his Spanish decade. The “Comandantes of Clave” are a quartet of Madrid-based Cubans—Javier “Caramelo” Masso on piano; Alaín Pérez on electric bass; and Kiki Ferrer on drums. All get ample room to stretch. The group feels looser, more contemporary than its American counterpart, discoursing in a manner that sounds like a more refined edition of Grupo Folklórico cojoined with a less hardbop-oriented Fort Apache, playfully transitioning from guaguanco voice-and-drums passages to balls-out blowing and elegant, soulful balladry. Behind Jerry’s on-point solos, Ferrer plays homegrown Afro-Cuban grooves and textures with exemplary force and finesse, while Pérez, a quality sonero who also possesses prodigious bass chops, uncorks a formidable string of solos, which Jerry propels on congas as he did on not-infrequent but undocumented interactions with Jaco Pastorius during the ‘80s.

For the set-closer, Tito Rodríguez’s “Avísale a Mi Contrario,” Jerry brings in vocalist Diego “El Cigala” and Ismael Suárez “Piraña” on cajón, continuing an ongoing dialog with the best-and-brightest of Spain’s gypsy nuevo flamenco community that was first documented on the 2004 date Y Los Piratas del Flamenco [Lola], which also included guitarist Niño Josele. “Jerry gets inside the flamenco rhythms,” says pianist and flamenco-meets-jazz pioneer Chano Domínguez, who did a series of concerts with Gonzalez in 2003. “People in Spain love his music, and love him, and he wants to play with everyone he can. He can play any standard in any style. When I heard Moliendo Café in the early ‘90s, it suggested a way to put together flamenco and jazz, and made me feel that I was on the right path.”

“A lot of people in Spain tell me, ‘Thank God you came and stayed here, because you put a chip on everybody’s ass and made them strive for more,’” Jerry said, evincing no false modesty.

Asked to sum up their achievements, both brothers cited the “strive for more” trope as much as their extraordinary music. “Generations of people have learned from the things that I’ve done, and became better musicians through my mentoring,” Andy said. “You can’t ask for better than that.”

“I’m a nice guy, a sharing person, a serious musician—and I can get evil if you fuck with me,” Jerry concluded. “At Symphony Space, I was brought to tears at moments. I never expected something like that to happen. We’re still alive. We’re lucky they caught us in time.”

* * *

Jerry Gonzalez Blindfold Test:
1. Art Blakey, “Drums In The Rain” (from DRUMS AROUND THE CORNER, Blue Note, 1958/1999) (Art Blakey, Philly Joe Jones: drums, tympani; Roy Haynes: drums; Ray Barretto: congas; Lee Morgan: trumpet; Bobby Timmons: piano; Jymie Merritt: bass) – (3-1/2 stars)

Unh-oh. UNH-oh!! That’s Candido, that’s for sure. I’d recognize Candido anywhere. The man of a thousand fingers! Ha-ha! That’s Candido, that’s for sure. For as old as he is, he still burns. I remember, we played Lincoln Center, man, with Chico O’Farrill, and he walked his drums over from his house to Lincoln Center. He walked them over! Rolled them! He had them on stands. I said, “Lincoln Center, you should ashamed of yourselves for doing that shit. You should have had a limo for his ass, and a roadie to pick his shit up.” [It’s not Candido.] It’s not Candido? That’s Ray Barretto, then. [I’d know Ray Barretto anywhere.] I do, too!! Yeah, I was gonna say that. But he was imitating Candido. That was Ray Barretto. This the Drum Orgy shit. This is Art Blakey. Yeah. With Donald Byrd? [It has a way to go.] Okay, we’ll find out. Now it’s starting to sound like Elvin. That is Elvin, huh? Not A.T. But that one is Bu. There is more than one drummer. Or was it Art Blakey all the time? Yeah, Bu, go ahead! [There are two other drummers, and you know them both well.] Is it the one that played with Dizzy’s Big Band? [It isn’t Charlie Persip.] No? Max? [Max isn’t on this date.] Is it Roy Haynes? I hear some of Roy Haynes. Ha-ha! I hear Art Blakey and Roy Haynes. They’ve just got their language that I know. Now, that sounds like Max, but it ain’t. Who the fuck is that other drummer? I know that’s Bu’s hi-hat! Bu, Roy Haynes… Come on, give that Cozy Cole shit…that “Topsy” shit. That’s the one I don’t know. The third one got me stumped. I can’t figure that. Well, at least I got two out of three. [AFTER] I liked it. I’ll give it 3-1/2 stars. Because this is when they were first starting to do that drum shit, they were first starting to record that stuff. I think the first percussion stuff that was recorded was TP. Tito Puente did the “Top Percussion” record, and I think that was the first time that any Afro-Cuban percussion was recorded on record just solely for the sake of the rhythms. It wasn’t an orchestra or nothin’ like that. I think they were recorded on RCA. And I think it’s the first time that America got a little taste of some drum stuff from the Afro-Caribbean in a real high quality performance and organization. After that, Sabu Martinez hooked up with Art Blakey and was trying to push him to do the drums orgy stuff. So around that time, this was like late ‘50s-early ‘60s, those things were starting to come out. People were starting to do rhythm records, just rhythm… [Art did a ton of them.] Yeah. [“What did you think of the way they organized it?] I think it was cool. It was organized well. There was some good dialogue going on. I’m still stumped on the third drummer, man. [It was Philly Joe Jones.] Oh, goddamn!!! ‘Scuse me. All right. Well, I could have guessed that one, but I just lost the words. DRUMS AROUND THE CORNER? I haven’t heard it.

2. Conrad Herwig, “Impressions” (from THE LATIN SIDE OF JOHN COLTRANE, Astor Place, 1996) (Eddie Palmieri: piano, arranger; Conrad Herwig: trombone, arranger; Ronnie Cuber: baritone saxophone; Brian Lynch, Ray Vega, Mike Ponella: trumpet; John Benitez: bass; Adam Cruz: drums; Jose Clausell: timbales, percussion; Milton Cardona: congas) – (2 stars)

That’s a Conrad Herwig record, Coltrane… Yeah. He’s got Palmieri on this, right? Go ahead, Eddie. Palmieri. I was telling him to do this shit when I was in his band. And this motherfucker said, “No, I don’t want to play that.” I was saying, “You’ve got to do some stuff for the horns, give them some meat to play on. That little montuno vamp…” I was telling him to do “Giant Steps’ back when I was in his band, and he wouldn’t pay no mind to me, man. I was just a little young kid, man, who was coming to play drums. I didn’t know nothin’, supposedly. He didn’t know my head. But after YA, YO ME CURE came out, he found out where my head was at! It surprised him. But I was trying to talk to him, and he was just like, “Get away, young kid, you’re bothering me” kind of shit. I said I had some ideas that could hook this band up in this groove way before this happened. But he wouldn’t listen, so I just had to do it myself. It’s cool, but I don’t hear the rhythm section. Where is the conga on this record? No conga in that mix. You dig? You hear Palmieri, you hear the timbales a little bit, the trap drums you hear a lot, but the conga is gone. Where is he? And who is he? Because if I can’t hear the conga, I can’t hear who it is. The trumpeter is cool. That’s Brian. At least Eddie respected Brian enough to listen to Brian, because Brian was talking to him about that. But I had about ten years on Brian. I told that shit to Eddie ten years before Brian started. Maybe even more, 15 or 20 years before. Because I was 18 when I was playing with fuckin’ Eddie. He was a turkey, though. He burned everybody, man, for their money and shit. He still owes me money, that motherfucker! [LAUGHS] I want Eddie to read this shit so he’ll know that I had some shit for his ass, but he wasn’t ready for it. Too little, too late with your shit. It’s all right for “Impressions,” but I would have taken it and put the drums up front. 2 stars. The piano solo is probably going to get 4 stars. But sorry, he ain’t got no rhythm section in here, man. I’ll give it 2 stars. He left the congas out of it. You got to know how to mix this shit. [Who do you think is playing congas?] I would think Richito is playing it. But I don’t hear it, so I can’t tell. [Milton Cardona.] Okay. Bad rhythm section. I mean, bad like bad, not too good. Adam Cruz is cool. He’s gotten a lot better; he’s kicking ass now. But Clausell and Milton…not a good mix. He’s lucky he got Eddie playing on this record. That’s an old Eddie lick from Azucar Patie(?). That tag is Azucar Patie(?). That’s Eddie’s shit. Conrad, I love you, but I got to tell you to put it down where it’s at! Ha-ha, ha-ha-ha. You jumped on the bandwagon late, Jack! But it was a nice track. It was a good idea. He just didn’t pull it off. Yeah, I got some rumbas for everybody’s ass. Because I do want to do a couple of more Monks, a rumba for Duke, a rumba for Wayne Shorter, a rumba for Coltrane. I got rumbas for everybody’s ass!

3. Ron Miles, “Still Small Voice” (from LAUGHING BARREL, Sterling Circle, 2003) (Ron Miles: trumpet; Brandon Ross: guitar; Anthony Cox: bass; Rudy Royston: drums) – (4 stars)

I like the trumpet. Nice sound. I can’t recognize this right now. It’s probably because I don’t know him. Because I’ve never heard this; I don’t know who it is. I haven’t bought too many new releases of anything. But I like it. So far, I like it. He’s did a little tweety thing in there, man, that sounds just like Wynton does it. I got a little confused. But then the rest of the sound is not like that. He’s got a little Chet Baker kind of sound. He sounds like a little Chet with Wynton and shit! Nice sound. I like it. Just guitar-bass-drums-trumpet. [AFTER] Stumped me with that one, Ted! I liked the sound, I liked the tune, I liked the concept. I like the man on trumpet. I don’t know who he is. Who is he? I’ll give him 4. [AFTER] Never heard him. The tune had that kind of Colorado feeling. Ron Miles. Uh-huh! Anthony! Great bass player. Too bad he left town. New York is hard for some people, you know.

4. Diego Urcola, “Blues For Astor” (from SOUNDANCES, Sunnyside, 2003) (Diego Urcola: trumpet; Juan Dargenton: bandoneon; Guillermo Romero: piano; Hernan Merlo: bass; Oscar Giunta: drums) – (3 stars)

Unh-oh, some TANGO shit!! Ha-ha! The only thing I could think of right now is that this is the cat that plays with Paquito; the trumpet player that plays with Paquito’s band – an Argentinean cat. Diego Urcola. That’s the only cat I know that could be playing tango shit. He’s a good player. So I nailed this. This is Diego Urcola, a tango record. But I couldn’t tell you who the other players are. Oh, not that shit! Everybody’s trying to get that Wynton sound. Go ahead, Diego! [Sings tango lick.] That’s a tango thing. For me, it would work just being straight tango. Playing jazz on top, but the rhythm, instead of trying to do the rhythm a little jazzy – that back and forth. To be committed more to a typical Argentinean folklore tango, and then play the way they play on top of it, I would have dug it better. The drummer is like too crossover, you know. It’s cool if it was combined – for me. [Do you think they’re Argentine or American musicians?] There might be a few Argentine and a few American. They’re all Argentine? Well, they’ve been listening. They’ve got a groove. At this point, most of the musicians in the world are tuned in, and they’ve caught up, or trying real fast to catch up. Now they don’t hire Americans any more! At the international jazz festivals, they’ve got their own people now. They don’t call Americans to play jazz any more. Everybody else is tuned in. I guess once the world found out that the Japanese had it first, they had to catch up! I’ll give them 3 stars. [AFTER] Diego’s cool. Pablo Ziegler. Federico Lechner. A lot of those cats split Germany and went to Argentina, and became Pablos! I liked Ron Miles better. His sound. I liked his sound.

5. Caribbean Jazz Project, “Against The Law” (from BIRDS OF A FEATHER, Concord Picante, 2003) (Ray Vega: trumpet; Dave Samuels: marimba; Dario Eskenazi: piano; Ruben Rodriguez: bass; Dafnis Prieto: drums, timbales, composer; Robert Quintero: congas, percussion) (4-1/2 stars)

The only thing I can think of is the Caribbean Jazz Project. Only because of the marimba. [Which version of the Caribbean Jazz Project?] I don’t know yet. I don’t know the versions. I don’t know which versions they are. I’ve actually never heard them. [DRUM BREAK] Oh. Ha-ha! I’ve never heard any of their records. I just know that they exist. Is Dafnis playing on this? I can tell it’s Dafnis. I know his sound. I like Dafnis. I love him a lot, man. He can swing his ass off, too. I’m trying to figure who the piano player is. The piece is interesting. It sounds like something Dafnis wrote. [Very good.] Ha-ha!! Yeah, Dafnis is a talented young man. I don’t know who the trumpet is. It almost sounds like Diego. I like him. That’s Ray Vega?! Go, Ray! He was a student of mine a long time ago, when I was teaching at the Johnny Colon School of Music. He was in my class. Go ahead, Ray, you got some shit! That’s the best I’ve heard Ray play, man. He sounds good, man. Keep it up, bro. This is Dave Samuels, right? He had something way back before he got into the Latin thing. The Latin thing seems to be the place where, if vibraphonists are going to someplace, they’re going to go there. Because there’s not too much vibraphone happening anywhere else. But it has a natural place in this Latin thing – vibes and rhythm. Who’s the conga player? Robert Quintero? Oh, he’s a Venezuelan cat. I know him. I was going to say it might have been a Venezuelan cat. [Why would you say that?] Just the way he plays. He’s functional. He puts the right shit where he’s supposed to do it. A solid drummer. From Venezuela, he’s one of the only ones there doing the shit like this. I’ll give this one 4-1/2 stars, for my man, Ray Vega, and for Dafnis.

6. Wayne Shorter, “Angola” (from ALEGRIA, Verve, 2003) (Wayne Shorter: tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone; Brad Mehldau: piano; John Patitucci: bass; Teri Lyne Carrington: drums; Alex Acuna: percussion) – (3 stars)

I like this!! Ha-ha! Is that bass clarinet? It’s got a bass clarinet kind of sound. It reminds of Dolphy, when he did “It’s Magic.” That’s the sound. But it’s a tenor, but it’s got another sound to it. It sounds like a tenor-bass clarinet. It doesn’t sound like a bass clarinet, but it’s got that tone. It almost reminds me of Bobby Pinero’s writing. Bobby Pinero was writing like that before anybody – that kind of stuff. [Any idea who the tenor player is?] I don’t know. I can’t recognize the sound. This isn’t Bobby Pinero? It sounds like some of his shit. [Soprano enters] It’s Wayne Shorter. He did some different shit there on the tenor to the sound. I wouldn’t have recognized that tenor sound. I never heard this tune before. But this is Wayne’s shit now. It’s Wayne’s harmony. But that’s definitely Bobby Pinero’s rhythmic shit. He’s from here, man. From Coop City! But I recognized Wayne’s sound, man, quickly. I have no idea who’s playing percussion. Once somebody I knew was playing congas with him, and Wayne said, “We don’t want none of that Fort Apache shit here!!” Thanks a lot, Wayne! Ha-ha! I remember when I first met Wayne, I was playing with Tony, and Tony goes, “Come here, Jerry, I want you to meet Wayne.” And I went, “Oh, yeah, Wayne!” He was one of my heroes. I went, “Wayne, man,” and stuck out my hand to say hello, and the motherfucker just stared at me, like, deadpan, and I’m waiting for him to take my hand and shake my hand. Nothing. I just said, “All right, man, sorry.” He just turned around and walked out. I said, “This motherfucker is out!” But I love you, Wayne, any fuckin’ way. Jive motherfucker. Should have hired me to play with your ass, and not my students. But you got to pay my like a motherfucker! Ha-ha! Been a long time I haven’t heard some new Wayne shit. It’s okay. But it reminds me of Bobby Pinero. The only thing that sounded like Wayne in there was his saxophone, his soprano sound. That’s why I was able to nab your ass. But Bobby was writing this kind of shit way before Wayne. But nice track. I’ll give it 3 stars. [AFTER] I like Bob Sadin a lot. He’s always been an Apache fan and a supporter. Sadin’s a good man. I wish I could get some collaboration with him, because I’ve got this idea for doing… Since I’ve been living in Spain the last three years, I’ve been checking out a lot of flamenco, man, and there’s some shit we’ve got to do that’s beyond SKETCHES OF SPAIN. I’ve got to get this Spanish project out. I’ve been living there, I’ve been paying some dues for this shit now, and now Chano goes and plays at Lincoln Center and Wynton sits in with him, and all of a sudden they’re going to try to do a Sketches of Spain thing, and I’ve been thinking about this before them, and I want to get the first punch out. I want to beat you motherfuckers to the punch with this shit. I’m already talking to people about a collaboration of Fort Apache orchestration and the gypsies and me to do another version of Sketches of Spain, but with another vision. I’d like to collaborate with Larry Willis and Sadin with orchestration, and Javier Limon, the cat that was the engineer on the record I did with the gypsies. He’s a great composer, a great lyricist, and he’s got some great ideas. And he knows all the Spanish rhythmic shit; he’s got that stuff down. So between the three of them – Sadin, Willis and Javier Limon – we could get some shit happening like a motherfucker. And even if they do beat me to the punch, I’m gonna kick their ass. Easy.

[Villa-Lobos piece.] Threnody for the victims of Wally Cleaver! Wally Cleaver seems to be the President now. We got a real Wally Cleaver for President! But he’s deadly, Wally Cleaver. He’s betrayed by his father, Dracula. He’s Nosferatu. No, Nostra-dumb-ass! Ha-ha!!!

7. The Conga Kings, “Descarga De Los Reyes” (from THE CONGA KINGS, Chesky, 1999) (Giovanni Hidalgo, Candido Camero, Carlos “Patato” Valdez: congas; Joe Gonzalez: bongos; Jose Francisco Valdes: clave; Guillermo Edghill: bass) (3 stars)

Yeah, this is Candido. The first hit. That’s him! Is this the Conga Kings? Nailed it!! Giovanni. Patato-Patato-Patato! That’s Candido. Patato and Candido are the most melodic conga players on the planet. They sing with their congas. Giovanni machine-guns. [Do you think that has to do with when they came up and when Giovanni came up?] Well, both of them played melodic instruments. Patato played a bass and he can play a tres, and Candido does, too. Because of that, they sing on their congas. They don’t just play rhythmic slickness. They play melodic slickness. [You play machine guns sometimes.] I don’t think I was ever a machine gunner. I ain’t got the chops for a machine-gun. Ah, that’s Giovanni. That’s an old Tito Puente break, from TOP PERCUSSION. That was cool. I’ll give it a 3. Well, I’ll give it 5 because Patato and Candido and Giovanni are dealing with it, but for musical content I’ll give it 3.

8. Woody Shaw, “Dat Dere” (from IMAGINATION, Muse, 1987) (Woody Shaw: trumpet; Steve Turre: trombone; Kirk Lightsey: piano; Ray Drummond: bass; Carl Allen: drums) – (3-1/2 stars)

Dis-here, dat-dere. Bobby Timmons. Sometimes I get confused between Timmons and Weston because of that “Hi-Fly” thing. It has the same kind of groove. Freddie. He’s got the phrasing. Lee? Oh, that’s Woody! Ha-ha! Go ahead, Woody! See, Woody got all that shit. He got the Lee shit, he got the Freddie shit, and he got his own shit. So I figured it was in there. I loved Woody, man. He’s one of my favorites. In fact, the favorite. Aside from Lee, him and Lee, you know… Before that, it was Booker Little. That’s Steve Turre. Conch-head! So then I imagine this is Victor Lewis… No? Oh, I know. The drummer played with me on AFRICAN VILLAGE with James Williams. Carl Allen. Is the pianist Onaje? It sounds like an older cat. But I don’t know who it is. [It’s someone you know well.] Larry Willis? Ronnie Matthews? Damn! There’s too many cats on the Rolodex. But if I could have listened again, there’s a thing he does… 3-1/2 stars for the music. 5 stars for Woody. Woody showed his Freddie showed his Freddie Hubbard kind of shit, he showed his Lee Morgan shit, and then he came into his own. He did a little graduation of the thing. It was nice. Very hip phrasing. I loved it.

9. Irvin Mayfield, “Latin Tinge” (from Los Hombres Calientes, VODOU DANCE, 2003) (Irvin Mayfield: solo, lead & 2nd trumpet, composer; Horacio “El Negro” Hernandez: drums; Bill Summers: percussion; Ronald Markham: piano; Edwin Livingston: bass; Aaron Fletcher: alto saxophone; Leon Brown: 3rd trumpet; Leon Brown: trombone) – (5 stars)

Is that Wynton? He’s got his Louis Armstrong and Charlie Shavers shit down. I love this! Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead!! Who the hell is this? Is this Nicholas Payton? Go ahead. It ain’t Faddis. [LOUD LAUGH] He’s a bad motherfucker, whoever he is! I can’t get it, though. I’m trying to figure it out. He’s GOT that Louis shit. I should know this guy, huh. [END OF BREAK, BEGINNING OF MONTUNO] Ah, ha-ha, ha-ha!! Ah, what was that?!! That was some funny shit, man! I didn’t expect that to happen. This ain’t Brian? [Do you know who’s playing trap drums?] Horacio. I can tell Horacio’s playing. He’s cool. I like the trumpet playing. He’s showing his history. He’s got trumpet players’ things in there. He’s got the Charlie Shavers, the Louis Armstrong shit, and a little bit of Roy Eldridge in there, too. But damn, I can’t figure this cat out. I don’t know who it is. But this is all trumpet. The rhythm section I don’t like. Nothing happening. Horacio is cool. But the way the piano player is playing, I don’t like it. He could be playing some other shit instead of just the montuno. Sometimes they think because it’s Latin, they’ve got to play a montuno, and it’s not necessary all the time. Because then they get stiff when they just play a montuno. If they were playing themselves, it would be hipper. I don’t know the trumpet player is. Irvin Mayfield? I never heard him. I’ve heard of Los Hombres Caliente, but I’ve never heard the music. He’s a bad motherfucker. New Orleans. That had to be a New Orleans player. Well, New Orleans is hooked up with the Caribbean shit. A lot of the cats in the Preservation Hall Band were from the Caribbean – Perez, Rodriguez. Great trumpet player. I enjoyed that. Irvin Mayfield. Never heard of him before. I liked it. I’ll give him 5. He’s playing some shit. That 5 stars is all the trumpet. The rest of the shit, you know, it’s all right. It’s just too plain. But the trumpet was the special shit on it. I’ll give the 5 stars to my man on trumpet. The music, I’ll give it 2. He’s got to figure out what to do with the piano. They don’t have to play a montuno all the time to identify something Latin. He got to learn the piano styles of the cats of the ‘20s and the ‘30s. They’d be playing a montuno, but it would be all over the place. It doesn’t stay in a corny, locked cell.

10. Kenny Dorham, “My Ideal” (from QUIET KENNY, Prestige, 1959) (Kenny Dorham: trumpet; Tommy Flanagan: piano; Paul Chambers: bass; Art Taylor: drums) – (5 stars)

Ah, Kenny Dorham, I love you, man! I hung for many years with Kenny Dorham. [SINGS SOLO] Is this with Charles Davis and… Oh, it’s another record. He had such a sweet sound. Ha-ha. Lyrical as a champ, too. Go ahead. Hit like a motherfucker. Underdog like a motherfucker, K.D.! I love him. God bless him. His sound brings tears to my eyes. Yeah. I’m not bullshitting either. I’m wiping them, jack. That’s Flanagan on piano. I’ll give that 10 stars. I was very fortunate to hang out with K.D. for three years. We went to New York College of Music together. In fact, that’s how I met him. I was doing an audition for New York College of Music, and K.D. was there. So I’m practicing in the room, and K.D. walked in the room. I didn’t know what he looked like then. He had these big sunglasses on. He looked at me and said, “you sound nice, man.” So I said, “I’m Jerry Gonzalez, how are you?” He says, “Well, I’m Kenny Dorham.” I hit the floor. I said, “Oh, no shit! What are you doing here?” He said, “Well, I’m taking an audition, just like you.” I said, “What? You should be teaching here. You should be a professor already. What do you mean, coming here as a student, auditioning?” I went with him to the Newport Festival in 1969, and that’s when I first saw Count Basie, Duke Ellington, everybody, with the original members. I was hanging with K.D. all the time, man, and I was very fortunate to have been around that wonderful trumpet player. God bless him.

11. Steve Coleman, “Ascending Numeration” (from ALTERNATE DIMENSION SERIES 1, MBASE, 2002) (Steve Coleman, alto saxophone; Jonathan Finlayson, trumpet; Pedro Martinez, percussion; Sean Rickman, drums; Yosvany Terry, clave; Anthony Tidd, electric bass; Regg Washington, acoustic bass).

Steve Coleman. I’ve been into this shit a long time, and he never acknowledged anything. When he went to Cuba, he got his head turned around. I was telling him about this shit long before that, but he was still in another space. The communication wasn’t that open between us. What can I tell you? He’s a late bloomer on this. But this is cool. Got a little scientology shit in there. It got that vibe in it. [You mean mathematical?] Yeah. Is that Anga on conga? Is the trumpeter Graham Haynes? I like the trumpet player. I’m glad Steve discovered the drum thing. Trumpet players I don’t know personally, I haven’t heard them, so I’ve got to figure them out. It’s a good trumpet player, he’s playing some interesting shit. He’s actually looser than Steve. It’s not Richie Flores. It’s not Giovanni. I don’t know who it is. Oh, Pedro! He plays with Puntilla. I’ve played with him. Pedrito’s a bad motherfucker. Sings his ass off, too. I’ll give it 2-1/2 stars. It’s interesting. But it stays in that Frankenstein mode. I like to feel some happy shit every now and then. When you get some rhythm shit, you’ve got to be happy. You can’t be too dark. When you get dark, Frankenstein comes out.

12. Dizzy Gillespie, “Con Alma” (from AFRO, Verve, 1954/2003) (Dizzy Gillespie: trumpet, composer; Alejandro Hernandez: piano; Robert Rodriguez: bass; Jose Mangual: bongo; Candido Camero: conga; Ubaldo Nieto: timbales; Rafael Miranda: percussion) – (5 stars)

Dizzy Gillespie. My papa! “Con Alma.” This is with Candido and the Machito rhythm section. That was some futuristic shit. The Machito band was a futuristic band. Even in its beginnings. Stan Kenton even acknowledged that, said that they were playing some super advanced music. Rhythmically it influenced him. Yeah, drum thing! The drum is so important. This ain’t the ’49 one. This is later. The ’49 one was Mongo and… He did the “Manteca” with Mongo. Alvaro Vega, Peraza, Mongo and Patato, they all came at the same time, and then they stayed. Dizzy first was Roy Eldridge. That was his model. Then he broke into his own voice from there. Dizzy was a drummer and dancer at heart. I remember him showing me the shim-sham-shimmy when I was with his band. One time we played with Dizzy… I was 18 when I played with Dizzy. That was before I even played with Palmieri. A lot of people forgot I played with Dizzy, because we didn’t record anything significant with that band. I wish that we had, because when they have those tributes to Dizzy and all that, nobody ever calls me to come down and play. They call all the new cats who were in the band, David Sanchez and Danilo and Giovanni, but I was in way before those cats. And they never give me any light on that. It pisses me off a little bit. I learned a lot from Dizzy. But when he found out I played trumpet, he used to try to put me out to play then, and I was scared because I didn’t have it together then. I said, “No-no, I’ll sit down and play my conga and take my trumpet lessons from you, and when I’m ready I’ll let you know.” So maybe 10-15 years passed, and I had the Fort Apache band, and we had Dizzy as a guest with us once at the Village Gate. I have that recorded. This was like ’84. It was Machito’s band with Fort Apache and then Dizzy playing with both bands. That was a great night. Jaco Pastorius was there hanging with us, and he wanted to play, and I didn’t want to let him play because he was a little…not-cool, you know. So he ran out and he bumped into Herbie Hancock that night, and brought him down to check us out, and Herbie sat through the whole set. At the end of the set, Jaco tells me, “Hey, man, I want to introduce you to Herbie.” So he introduced me to Herbie, and then I sat there and said, “wow…” Before I met Herbie, the plan was for the second set we were going to open up with “Nefertiti,” and Herbie goes, “Could I sit in with the band?” And I went, “Goddamn, yeah! Sure.” Dalto was playing piano with the band at the time. So I said, “Well, guess what. We’re going to play ‘Nefertiti’ for the first set. You were on the original, man. You’re gonna have FUN with us.” And sure enough, Dalto was playing the first solo on “Nefertiti,” and then he announces Herbie Hancock, and then Herbie takes the whole thing out and then plays the whole night with us. I have that recorded, man. It was deep. “Caravan” time! 10 stars.

13. Arsenio Rodriguez, “Kila, Quique y Chocolate” (from ARSENIO RODRIGUEZ Y SU CONJUNTO: 1946-1950, Tumbao, 1950/1993) (Arsenio Rodriguez: tres, composer; Chocolate Armenteros, Felix Chappotin, Carmelo Alvarez: trumpet; Luis Martinez: piano; Lazaro Prieto: bass; Felix Alfonso: conga; Antolin Suarez [Papa Kilo]: bongo)_

Arsenio Rodriguez. This is “Kila, Quique y Chocolate.” Ay tumbao bongo! Arsenio Rodriguez with Papa Kilo on bongo, La Chocolate on conga… Bad motherfucker. This is still fresh as today. In fact, it’s hipper than some of the shit from today. The professors know this, that our rhythm lacks something. Tin-GOR! So when you got the bongo of Papa Kilo and Chocolate, you know, here’s what they say. Yeah, “the people are always asking to dance to tumba bongo”! This was a prophetic tune. It was telling you what’s coming for the future, what the people want. Tumba bongo! And this was 1950, man, so they were sounding the alarm way ahead of time. It took Steve Coleman a long time to catch up! This was like really early. I was fortunately born into this. This was like first conga lessons! This is not machine gun conga. This is playing tumbao with some grace and slickness. It’s deep, man. A lot of young cats miss that essence. A lot of young cats miss this era. They’ve got the Giovanni era, and the speed machine guns, but they didn’t get to this. This is before that, and this is slicker. It has more essence than the machine gun era. This is definitely classic. 10 million stars! Ha-ha, ha-ha! Yes.

Yes, sir. Thank you, Ted. That was a great one. Yeah, you had some goodies for me, man. I enjoyed that Blindfold Test.

For Andy Gonzalez’ 63rd Birthday, an Unedited Blindfold Test from 2000, a WKCR Interview From 2006, a Downbeat piece from 2016 about the recording “Entre Colegas”, and Three WKCR Musician Shows from 1990, 1991 and 1993

Best of birthdays to the master bassist Andy Gonzalez, who turns 63 today. A co-founder of the Fort Apache Band with his older brother, Jerry Gonzalez, Gonzalez’ c.v. includes protracted gigs with Dizzy Gillespie, Eddie Palmieri and Manny Oquendo’s Libre. His influence is palpable on such next-generation swing-to-clave bassists as — among many others — Avishai Cohen and Hans Glawischnig. I had the opportunity to interact with and be educated by Andy at least a half-dozen times during my years on WKCR, particularly on such subjects as Cachao and Arsenio Rodriguez, upon whom he would expound with great erudition. I’ll have to transcribe those cassettes one of these days. Meanwhile, here are the proceedings of a DownBeat Blindfold Test that Andy did with me around 2000, and a WKCR interview from 2006, when the Fort Apache Band had just released their excellent CD, Rumba Buhaina. [In 2020 I’ve appended — at the bottom of the post — the transcript of three  WKCR Musician Shows that I did with Andy in 1990, 1991, and 1993.]

Andy Gonzalez Blindfold Test:

1.    Ray Brown, “St. Louis Blues” (feat. Ahmad Jamal, p., Lewis Nash, d), “SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS…ARE THE PIANO PLAYERS” (Telarc, 1995) (5 stars)

Well, it’s somebody like Ray Brown or somebody that LOVES Ray Brown on bass.  I hear a lot of Ray Brownish things. [AFTER] [Why did it take you so long?] I had to hear more of him.  At first I thought it was somebody younger, but then I started listening to what he was playing and I said, “Wait a second.”  This is somebody who has some depth to his musical history just by what he played and how he played it.  It had to be somebody like Ray Brown.  I’m not sure of the piano player, though. [Any guesses?] Mmm… That’s not Benny Green, is it?  It could be Oscar. [It’s the same generation.] Oh yeah?  [AFTER] I didn’t hear much of the trademark Ahmad Jamal things.  That was quite nice.  It gets 5 stars out of me.  Ray Brown is one of my heroes.  Of the bass players from his generation, like Oscar Pettiford and Mingus… I thought he’s the one that… There’s Blanton in his playing, but I think he took Blanton beyond Blanton.  Mingus I thought sort of took it the other way, and he used a lot more physical kinds of things about the bass, like imitating growls and doing wilder things, where I think maybe Ray Brown is more blues-based.  There’s a lot of blues in his playing.  Not that Mingus isn’t, but… And Pettiford was… It’s like three distinct voices to come out of the same era, and to play with a lot of the same people in the Bebop era and stuff like that.  But very distinct voices, all three of them.  But those are the same generation.

2.    Sam Jones, “O.P.” (Israel Crosby, bass; Joe Zawinul, piano; Vernell Fournier, drums), DOWN HOME (Riverside, 1962/1995) (4 stars)

I’m going to take a stab and say it was Doug Watkins playing cello.  No?  He did do a cello record. [This is someone who is a contemporary of Doug Watkins who did…] Sam Jones?  That was the second person I was going to shoot for.  Because I realized he had done a cello record way back, but I can’t remember the circumstances.  I only managed to cop a couple of Sam Jones records, especially on Riverside — those were a little harder to find.  For some reason it made me think of the Doug Watkins record.  I think Yusef Lateef is playing on it.  When I heard the flute I thought maybe it might be him. [Any idea who’s playing bass and drums?] That wasn’t Jimmy Cobb?  Something made me think it was Jimmy Cobb, the way he was riding the cymbal. [AFTER] You know, Israel Crosby is credited with taking one of the first solos on bass on record, “Blues For Israel,” with Gene Krupa.  I mean, an actual bass solo.  It’s a whole thing on the bass.  This is the early ’30s.  The pianist was Zawinul?  Forget it.  I would have never guessed that.  I thought the piece was nice.  It was kind of bouncy and airy.  I thought Sam Jones was very articulate on the cello and very tasty.  As a matter of fact, I never heard him take any bass solos that sounded slick, to tell you the truth! — from what I’ve heard of Sam Jones.  That was excellent cello playing, just so far as getting across the cello.  I’m wondering whether he used the cello the way it’s supposed to be tuned, in fifths, or the way Ray Brown did and some other cello cats did was retune the instrument in fourths to make it like a bass and easier to play.  Now, that might be the case, because he seemed to get around the instrument pretty good.  Playing in fifths takes a little bit more knowledge of how to get around the strings.  So that’s an interesting question to find out.  From what I heard, it sounded like it was tuned in fourths.  Four stars, for Sam Jones especially.

3.    Brian Lynch, “I’ve Grown Accustomed To Her Face,” SPHERES OF INFLUENCE (Sharp-9, 1997) (5 stars) (John Benitez, bass; Jeff Watts, drums; Milton Cardona, congas; David Kikoski, piano; Donald Harrison, alto saxophone)

Wow!  I’ve grown accustomed to her space face.  That was a beautiful arrangement, man.  It was gorgeous.  It sounds like it was a trumpet player’s record, because he’s got the lead — and a big fat tone.  I’m trying to think of who it could be.  The drummer was on it with the Latin stuff.  He was playing the right kind of beat.  It wasn’t clave!  And the conga player was holding his own.  He’s just an adornment more than anything else.  In the seconds where there was Latin rhythm, he played well.  The bass player did okay.  Gee whiz.  Fat tone on a trumpet is what was getting to me.  I was trying to think who has a fat tone on a trumpet.  It doesn’t sound too dated.  So let me see, who has a fat tone on trumpet these days?  Terence Blanchard has a fairly fat sound.  So does Nicholas Payton.  They have kind of fat tones on the trumpet these days. [What trumpet player might think of that type of arrangement?] Now, that’s a good question, because there was a lot of depth to that arrangement.  It stretched the tune out, it stretched out the phrasing of it, and also took it in different places.  It gets five stars from me, because it was an original and unusual treatment of the song.  Because that’s not an easy song to… It’s a pretty song.  Not too many people, except for someone like maybe Sonny Rollins, have attempted to play that tune.  And then I thought it was nice having the tuba in the orchestration.  That was really pretty. [AFTER] That was Brian Lynch?  No kidding!  I didn’t even think about that.  Excellent.  I’m surprised I didn’t recognize… Well, John Benitez didn’t give anything that I could recognize him on.  Milton, well, that I could hear.  It was very nice.  I enjoyed that.

4.    George Mraz, “Star-Crossed Lovers” (Renee Rosnes, piano), DUKE’S PLACE (Milestone, 1999) (5 stars)

I sort of wish that the bass player would have bowed the melody at the end again, because he played it so beautifully at the beginning.  Good bowing technique is like studying a whole other instrument.  And he had superb control of that bow.  I mean, he really sang that melody superbly, man.  Right there that’s five stars for me, because I’m quite a fan of good bowing.  I wish I could bow that well!  But like I said, that’s a whole study in itself.  It’s one thing to pluck strings and use your hands to get tone and sound, but to use the bow and get the vibrations that the bow makes, and use your hands in that sense, it’s a whole different way of playing the instrument.  Whoever that was playing the bass, I really couldn’t tell you, but I thought that he has an excellent bowing technique. [AFTER] I figured as much.  That’s bounce, man.  He’s got beautiful, beautiful bowing technique.  It bounces!  Gorgeous bowing.

5.    Ornette Coleman, “Women Of The Veil,” THREE WOMEN (Harmolodic, 1996) (Charnett Moffett, bass; Geri Allen, piano; Denardo Coleman, drums) (3½ stars)

Oh, shades of Ornette!  I don’t think it was Ornette, but it was quite a bit of Ornettethology!  Even the trumpet player sounded like Ornette!  I don’t know who it was, but it sure sounded like an Ornetteish kind of thing.  I wasn’t that thrilled with it.  It was all right.  The bass player sure didn’t sound like no Charlie Haden, that’s for sure. [AFTER] It was Ornette?  Charnett Moffett was playing the bass?  This was recent?  Who was playing the trumpet? [Ornette.] Ah, so I was right about that.  The piano is what threw me.  I’m not used to Ornette with a piano player.  3½ stars for that.  I’ve heard Ornette play with more… I like Ornette when there’s more emotion in his playing.  Remember the Town Hall concert, “Sadness,” things like that?  That really moves me.  And the original quartet moves me a lot, with Charlie Haden, Blackwell and Don Cherry.  All that moved me quite a bit.  And Ornette over the years, man… I always dug Ornette.  I like him best in smaller situations, not with all the trappings.  I don’t like Ornette with a piano player.  I like him without piano.

6.    Ron Carter, “Samba De Orfeu,” ORFEU (Blue Note, 1999) (5 stars) (Bill Frisell, guitar; Stephen Scott, piano; Payton Crossley, drums; Steve Kroon, percussion)

It was nice to hear a bass guitar “surdo” and “casaba.”  To me I would have dug it if they had added a tambourine.  That would have really put the rhythm section a little stronger Brazilian.  But they left the space open, which is okay.  The guitar player wasn’t Brazilian; that’s for sure.  And the bass player sounded like Ron Carter to me. [AFTER] Of course!  Ron Carter, one thing, he’s got a great sense of humor.  Throughout that solo, he’s a shameless quoter, a quoter of obscure melodies!  I get a kick out of it.  I mean, that’s like… Unless you know these melodies, you just… He quoted really obscure songs, like “Popeye, The Sailor Man” and “I Want To Wash that Rain Right Out of My Hair.”  You have to know a lot of music to be able to quote these things, and he quoted quite a few different little tiny pieces of melodies from all kinds of things in his solo.  It was nice.  Five stars.  Ron Carter is one of my heroes.  I grew up listening to him, and I know him a bit, and he’s quite a nice man.  One thing I’ve got to say is that I’ve learned a lot from listening to Ron Carter over the years, especially when he was with Miles.  His perception of how to play bass in a rhythm section for that band was unique, and it really influenced me a lot.  Even playing Latin Jazz it influenced me a lot, because just the kind of thing that they had going as the quintet with Miles, this kind of ESP thing that they had going, is something that most bands strive for — that kind of empathy and mind-reading between the members of a band.  That’s something that they brought to a high art.  And Ron was very instrumental in making a lot of that happen.  I’ll always love him for that, that’s for sure.  So he gets my five stars.

7.    Dave Holland, “Jugglers Parade,” PRIME DIRECTIVE (ECM, 1999) (3½ stars)

I’m going to take a wild stab?  Is that Avishai?  He likes things that have odd meters.  Is it a bass player’s album?  Is it Santi?  I remember him writing things that sound like this.  Wow.  So far I made two guess, and both of them were wrong.  I’m not that big a fan of odd meter kind of things.  But it was put together pretty nicely, and if the bass player composed this… Most bass players make good composers, just because of the fact that they always provided the bottom of things, the bottom of the harmonies, and sometimes the bottom of just rhythm and melody.  So I am pretty happy when I hear bass players’ compositions and arrangements, because it’s like they have a different perspective on things and they hear things different.  Most bass players who I know who write, it’s usually very interesting.  And this was no exception.  It was interesting.  But like I said, I’m not a big fan of odd meter things.  I don’t know why.  Maybe it’s because I’ve got the clave ingrained in me to the point where it’s like… And also, I grew up in the era of real hardbop-swing kind of things, so anything that has odd meters isn’t… It’s just a preference of mine.  I’m not that particularly fond of them.  I would give it 3½ stars.  So who was it? [AFTER] That was Dave Holland?!  I would have never recognized him.  I would never have thought that it was Dave Holland.  It didn’t sound like the kind of music that he used to play before.  There’s something to be said for bass players that write.  Because like I said, they’re coming from a another perspective.

8.    Richard Bona, “Konda Djanea,” SCENES FROM MY LIFE (Columbia, 1999). (5 stars) (Michael Brecker, tenor sax)

That was very nice, man.  Richard Bona.  I met him a couple of years ago.  I think he was touring with Zawinul.  We just ran into each other on the road.  But that was lovely.  You can hear the influence of the African string instrument called the kora, which is a harp kind of instrument.  I can hear that influence in how he approaches the bass.  He’s playing it almost like a guitar, but playing it like a kora.  Just the figures that he’s playing, it sounds like if he was strumming on a kora.  It’s very pretty.  Five stars.

9.    John Patitucci, “King Kong,” IMPRINT (Concord, 1999) (4 stars) (Danilo Perez, piano; Horacio ‘El Negro’ Hernandez, drums; Giovanni Hidalgo, percussion)

Well, I recognized a couple of people in there.  I think that was El Negro playing the traps, and it could have been Giovanni playing the congas.  It could have been.  Those are my cohorts, man.  I know those guys intimately.  Is this Patitucci?  I had a feeling it was him, because I heard he had done something with the Latin thing.  He was cool.  Was this his tune?  The piano player sounded a little familiar, too, but I wasn’t positive.  I was thinking that it might be Danilo.  What made me think it was Patitucci was when it got into the groove part, he was sticking to a pretty generic kind of groove thing.  Unless you’re really sure of the clave and how to mess with it, I would imagine that’s what you would do just to… Because Negro and Giovanni can get very intricate on you, and if you’re not dead-sure where you are, they can throw you off in a minute.  It’s like the clave thing with them is that they know that so intimately.  I’ve played with them so much that I know what they’re about.  Sometimes it’s better to be safe and stick to what you know you can do within that framework.  So it was cool.  The saxophone player I don’t know.  It sounded like a Michael Brecker or someone like that, but I’m not sure.  Chris Potter?  Okay.  There was something in his tone that reminded me of Michael.  But I guess that got a four out of me.

10.    Eddie Gomez, “Footprints,” DEDICATION (Evidence, 1998). (3½ stars)

Mmm, “Footprints.”  That tune, ever since it came out, it’s been a favorite of all us musicians.  Especially when you’re in school and stuff, everybody… It’s easy to play and easy to jam on.  I was just about going to high school when that came out.  I don’t really have a clue.  3½ stars.  The bass player to me sounded like somebody like Alex Blake or someone like that.  Because Alex Blake has that kind of facility; he likes to do those kind of crazy runs and stuff.  Oh, it’s not?  I figured as much.  I just thought of him because I ran into him the other day and I hadn’t seen him for a while.  [The bass player and you have the same alma mater.] Music and Art?  He must have graduated way after me, though.  Before me?  Really.  Hmm!  I know Eddie Gomez went to Music & Art? [That’s him.] Really?  That doesn’t sound like the Eddie Gomez I remember.  It’s recent, huh?  I’m a lot closer to the Eddie Gomez of Bill Evans days, and he didn’t play like this.  He played different.  Eddie was an amazing, amazing musician, and he got along so well with Bill.  They were really mind-reading each other.  It’s sort of like the same thing that happened when Scott LaFaro was in the trio.  I got hip to Scott LaFaro maybe four or five years after he passed.  He passed in ’61.  I got hip to him early on because when I was 14 I was studying with Steve Swallow.  I was in junior high school.  He was the first one to turn me on to Scotty.  Then I used to go and check out Bill Evans at the Vanguard a lot, and Eddie Gomez was playing the bass there.  So I was just amazed at the facility that Eddie Gomez had at the time.  Because he didn’t quite do what Scotty was doing.  Scotty liked to mess with counterpoint and things like that a lot more.  But Eddie was all over the instrument, which was amazing to me.  I’m surprised I didn’t recognize him.  I would usually recognize Eddie Gomez, because he’s a guy I’ve been following since I was a teenager.  3½ because as many times as I’ve played “Footprints,” there’s a lot more things that you can say with it than was said there.

11.    Roy Haynes, “Trinkle Tinkle,” TE VOU! (Dreyfus, 1994) (feat. Christian McBride) (3½ stars)

It’s nice to hear pretty much the arrangement the way that Monk and the sax used to play the melody.  The only thing, after a while that three note figure at the end -DINH-DUHT-DAH gets annoying.  Other than that I liked it, but I didn’t care for too much, and to hear it through all the solos was a pain in the ass after a while.  I would have preferred leaving it out and just play it, because it doesn’t do anything.  It sounds like it was a novelty effect more than anything else.  The drummer sounded like someone like Tain.  I didn’t think it was, but it sounded like someone who can take it a little out like Tain can.  But I couldn’t tell you who the cats were. [AFTER] It was Roy Haynes’ record?  I’m surprised why he kept that figure, man.  It sounds annoying.  Is the bass player Ed Howard?  Christian?  I thought it was him while he was playing, but I just didn’t think he did anything… And it didn’t sound like Roy Haynes either to me.  Is it a new record?  Unusual.  Like I said, it was pretty much in the Monk tradition.  I would left out that BINH-BAHT-BAM.  I’ll give 3½ because it was well played.  Who was the alto player?  Donald Harrison!  He played well.  I wouldn’t have recognized Roy Haynes.  It didn’t sound like him.  I heard him the last time a couple of years ago, and he’s always been Mister Taste.  And it was tasteful…except for that.  I don’t mind if an effect really adds something to the music, but that didn’t really add anything to Monk.

12.    McCoy Tyner, “I Want To Tell You ‘Bout That,” McCOY TYNER WITH STANLEY CLARKE AND AL FOSTER (Telarc, 2000) (3½ stars)

I knew it was McCoy from the getgo, because it’s unmistakable, just his tone, his touch, and the kind of things that he plays.  Although I felt it was kind of like… It’s like when you’re trying to get like a funk kind of thing going, you know, almost making an attempt to get like some radio play.  The bass player wasn’t Avery?  I don’t know who it was. [Someone you might think on electric.] Stanley Clarke?  Yeah?  He did play a figure that did make me think it was Stanley Clarke.  But I said, “Mmm, let me see…”  Who was the drummer?  Al Foster?  I sort of came up at the same time as Stanley Clarke, and I’ve been watching and listening to him since the early days when he was with Chick.  He’s a fine bass player, man.  He’s been moving around in different worlds and playing a lot of different kinds of music, but I have deep respect for him as a bass player.  He’s a great bass player.  I don’t think this is one of McCoy’s better efforts.  Just for playing sake, I’ll give it 3½ stars.

13.  Avishai Cohen, “The Gift, DEVOTION (Stretch, 1998) (3 stars)

I don’t know if I could tell you who that is.  It wasn’t exactly a toe-tapper.  The soprano had a dark kind of sound.  That’s an unusual duo, the trombone and soprano.  It’s not something you hear often.  I’m at a loss.  3 stars. [AFTER] That was Avishai, huh?

14.    Red Garland Trio w/ Paul Chambers, “This Can’t Be Love,” IT’S A BLUE WORLD (Prestige, 1958/1999) (3 stars)

It sounded like a few people.  The first name that came to me was an odd name, Monty Alexander — which is weird.  But that’s the first name that popped into my head.  I heard flashes of Erroll Garner, I heard flashes of a lot of people in there.  I probably do know who it is.  Who was it? [AFTER] That didn’t sound like Paul Chambers?  You know what?  This must have been towards the end of his life.  That was ’58?  Paul Chambers articulates a lot better than that — for me.  I’ve heard plenty of Paul Chambers.  Maybe it was the rosin.  Because when you put a certain kind of rosin on the bow you get a certain sound, and different rosins give you a different… When you pull the bow across the string, it gives you a different… This was kind of a rough sound for Paul.  Paul usually gets a smoother attack sound on his bowing.  But I do know that it has to do with the kind of rosin that you use.  Some rosin makes the bow across the strings sound a little rough; it grabs the string a certain way so that the sound comes out rough.  There’s another rosin that the sound comes out a little smoother.  This sounded kind of rough to me.  Really.  Because Paul Chambers articulates a lot better on things I’ve heard him on before than on this particular piece.  From hearing Paul on his best records… This wasn’t his best.  It didn’t move me that much.  3 stars.

15.    Cachao, “El Son No A Muerto,” MASTER SESSIONS, VOL. 1 (Epic, 1994) (4 stars)

That was Cachao, and that was Nelson Gonzalez on the très, who learned to play the très in my house.  I brought home a très from Venezuela in 1970, and he was a frequent visitor to my house.  He was self-taught on guitar.  We started studying Arsenio Rodriguez records together, and he learned how to play the très in my house.  I’m the one who got him the gig with Cachao in the middle ’80s when he did his big concert at Hunter College.  I loaned him my bass and I was at most of the rehearsals, and I got Nelson involved in it.  Because they didn’t have a très player originally for the descarga section.  That’s my daddy, Cachao.  This particular tune was kind of subdued, there was not much happening for him.  The best way to catch Cachao sometimes is live.  I wish they would record him live.  This was part of the records that Emilio Estefan put out?  I don’t think he’s the best producer for that genre.  First of all, I didn’t like the balance of the sound.  It could have been a lot better.  I’ll give it 4 stars because I like Nelson’s playing on it.  Was that Paquito d’Rivera on clarinet and Nestor Torres on flute?  What about trumpet?  It wasn’t Chocolate.  It was?  That was a very subdued Chocolate.  It didn’t sound like him.  And his trademark notes that he likes to play aren’t there.  Something tells me there was maybe some weird chemistry going on in the studio.

* * *

Andy Gonzalez (WKCR–Feb. 23, 2006):

[MUSIC: “This Is For Albert” (Rumba Buhaina)]

AG:   We did a couple of albums where we had to find a way for Jerry to play the horn with Joe Ford, and after he’d state the line, he would take a solo and then jump on the drums. Because there was no overdubbing; this was recorded direct to two-track. That was interesting, to say the, to see him manage the jump back and forth.

TP:   It is one of the great sights in jazz to see him jump up from the conga drums after he’s been abusing his hands for 5-6 minutes, and immediately launch into an improvisation. Even more so when it’s a ballad

AG:   I don’t know how he does it. I like to play percussion instruments, too, but I will not play them because it makes my fingers stiff to play the bass. I don’t know how to he gets to manipulate his fingers that well right after playing hard congas, and pick up the phone and play.

TP:   He plays hard. You and your brother have been playing trumpet and bass and congas for close to 50 years…

AG:   A long time.  I’m 55, and I was 13 when we started to play music. A little more than 40 years.

TP: And you’ve often played in the same bands over the years. With Eddie Palmieri for several years, with Dizzy Gillespie briefly in the ‘60s, as well as the Apaches.

AG:   Jerry was also in the first band I ever recorded with, which was Monguito Santamaria, who was Mongo’s son. Rene McLean was in that band, and Jose Mangual, Jr., was in the band. Jerry was part of that band for a minute, too.

TP:   Let’s talk about the history of the Fort Apaches. Ten years ago, you were playing a lot around and New York and touring, but things changed, Jerry moved to Spain, and the opportunities to play are less than they had been.

AG:   Well, we have been playing some. Jerry would come in occasionally to do it, and there would be a tour set up, and some… The band has been working on and off. It’s maybe not as much as we could because of the distance between us. But we still get together enough. And it sounds like we’d never been apart, just because of the chemistry involved in the band.

TP:   It’s one of the innovative bands of late 20th century jazz, influential on two generations of musicians from South America, the Caribbean, Spain, who heard your ability to fuse Afro-Caribbean diasporic rhythms with jazz harmonies. It’s hard to say if anyone was the first to do anything, but recordings like Rumba Para Monk and things before that have had a tremendous influence on the way jazz sounds today. These ideas were exotic in 1988; now it’s the mainstream.

AG:   They were even more exotic in 1979.

TP:   There are a few streams to discuss. One of the history of the Fort Apache; the other is the present. Let’s stay with the present for the moment, and the new recording, Rumba Buhaina.

AG:   A lot of people don’t understand that “Buhaina” was Art Blakey’s Muslim name. In the late ‘40s, quite a few musicians in jazz were either converting to Islam or flirting with it. It’s just like jazz musicians are always the first to move to things that would probably help them get away from the American stereotype of what a musician is supposed or what a spiritual person is supposed to be like. So Art Blakey took the name “Buhaina.” I don’t know what it means, but all Art Blakey’s closest friends and associates would call him “Bu.”

TP:   I believe that the Jazz Messengers name came from that same origin. Unlike your exploration of the music of Thelonious Monk, Rumba Buhaina explores a number of composers, of tunes primarily from their classic period, say ‘58 to ‘65.

AG:   That was the music that influenced us a lot. We used to go hear Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers in person, and that was one of the key groups of those years. Just to hear Art Blakey be as authoritative a drummer… He was an amazing teacher. He didn’t have to tell you anything. He showed you. You just listened to him play, and it was all there to hear. We learned a lot from listening to what he had to offer, and how a drummer is so much the accompanist, and how he sets the pattern, sets the standard for what is to happen in the music. That’s something that really stayed with most musicians who came up around that time. That’s why we always consider Art Blakey one of the true teachers of the music.

TP:   He was also a musician who distilled African musicians within a swing context on the drumkit, with cross-sticking figures and polyrhythmic patterns woven within his arrangements.

AG:   I thought Art Blakey had such a strong force, a force of nature that reminded me a lot of field recordings that I had of tribal music from different parts of Africa. You’d hear, say, a drummer who would be talking on the drum, and not only the pitch, the timbre of the instrument and the way certain instruments…you would communicate a message with that way of playing. I could feel that out of Art Blakey, too. There’s a certain force that’s coming out of that. I immediately identify with it.

TP:   During those years, were you also paying attention to the records Art Blakey was doing with drummers?

AG:   Oh, yeah.

TP:   Orgy In Rhythm, a couple of volumes, and the names are escaping me of a couple of others he did, where he played with the late Ray Barretto…

AG:   I was just going to mention Ray Barretto. He also did a tribute to Art Blakey a few years ago. In fact, I think there’s one tune on the record that we also did. His concept was a little different than ours. First of all, when Ray Barretto first started getting back… He wasn’t playing much salsa any more, and he started to develop a Latin Jazz band. I know he paid quite a bit of attention to Fort Apache and what we were doing, and I think he took part of that as a role model. Which we were quite honored that he would use us as a model for what he was doing.

TP:   But as far as putting the Fort Apache touch on this repertoire, how did the ideas evolve and come to fruition?

AG:   We had the idea years ago. We thought of it as one of the many projects that we had in mind to do. There were other projects, too, that never came about for various reasons. Like, we wanted to record an album with Jose Silva, better known as Chombo, the Cuban saxophonist who was probably like the Ben Webster of Cuban music, and a masterful musician. We were just about setting that up when he had a stroke and he was no longer able to play. We were already starting to pick out the material. When you have a band like the Fort Apache band, you, have a lot of options, and there’s things that pop into your head about what this band could do, what we’re capable of doing. Because everybody in the band is a great musician, and we’re capable of a lot of things.

TP:   But Rumba Buhaina is what we’re addressing.

AG:   Yes. Well, the idea for the Art Blakey tribute… We started thinking about it, and then all of a sudden we had a few days at Sweet Rhythm to play… Before we went into the studio we played and rehearsed for a few days. That’s pretty much the way we did the Monk album, too. We played and we rehearsed different concepts on different tunes until…

TP:   Were they tunes that seemed to lend themselves to dealing with the different rhythmic signatures that you bring to your arrangements.

AG:   We tried to think of ways of approaching the music… Everybody contributed ideas. That’s the way we get it together. It’s pretty simple. From all our experiences, individually and collectively, it was pretty easy for us to put it together.

TP:   Let’s step back to 1991, the album Moliendo Café, and Larry Willis’ tune, “To Wisdom The Prize.”

AG:   I like that album a lot, for a few reasons. One of them was that Miles Davis had just passed away, and we had… We thought about it a lot because he was such a strong influence on us also.

TP:   The album is dedicated to the percussionist Guillermo Barretto. Art Blakey had just passed.  Charlie Palmieri had just passed. Dizzy Gillespie shortly thereafter. George Adams as well. All are mentioned on the inner sleeve…

[“To Wisdom The Prize” & “Along Came Betty”]

TP:   On previous shows, Andy has brought literally a suitcase filled with recordings, primarily obscure and little known, great gems. A lot of this material is now available on CD so it’s a bit easier to track down…once you get the CD. Next week will you be playing primarily this repertoire or digging into the whole book?

AG:   I’ve got a feeling we’ll dig into the whole book, but we are going to feature some of the tunes from the new album.

TP:   Earlier I mentioned that there are two streams to talk about, one the new recording, Rumba Buhaina, but for listeners… As you get older, you come to grips with the notion that younger listeners don’t share core experiences. A lot of hardcore jazz fans may be unfamiliar with how you and Jerry developed your ideas about music, and what in your personal histories led to the formation of the Fort Apache Band.

AG:   Jerry got his first opportunity to record in 1979, and that was an album under his own name called Ya Yo Me Cure, which in English means “I have been cured”—whatever that means. The title track of that album was something that Frankie Rodriguez, who was a percussionist who passed away a few years ago, but was a very talented person and very close to us… He was part of Grupo Folklorico, and he was into culture really deep. I had a record of pygmy chants from Africa, and he heard one chant that was done by kids. It was like some children’s chant. He heard it a few times, and started singing “Ya Yo Me Cure” to it, just putting those Spanish words to the chant itself, and we made a guaguanco out of it. That was a precursor of what Fort Apache became.

TP:   But by then, you’d been professional musicians for more than a decade. Eddie Palmieri, Dizzy Gillespie…

AG:   I played with Ray Barretto while I was in high school, ‘69 to ‘71. In between that time, me and Jerry worked with Dizzy Gillespie. So we were getting arond. I was still in high school, and Jerry was coming out of college.

TP:   Were Eddie Palmieri and Dizzy Gillespie people who helped push you along conceptually?

AG:   It was kind of a mutual thing. We were well aware of Eddie Palmieri; we were big fans. But we brought something new to the table.

TP:   What was that?

AG:   Well, a different sensibility. The sensibility that Eddie Palmieri had before, when Barry Rogers was part of the band, and Barry would bring the harmonic element… When he’s taking a solo, you can feel there’s something that’s really in the jazz world, and it’s very spontaneous and very heartfelt, and there was a lot of feeling to it. That’s one of the things that we learned a lot about, and something about jazz improvisation, that nothing was thought out before time—it was just off the cuff. Whatever came to your mind that you thought was hip enough, that’s what you would play. So we had started to do those kind of things with Eddie. We took Eddie’s band into some new places where he hadn’t ventured before. We all used to hang out at my parents’ house in the basement apartment on Gildersleeve Avenue in the Bronx, and Eddie Palmieri used to come over and Barretto used to come over… If that basement could talk… Dizzy Gillespie used to come over. We used to have jam sessions there all the time. Out of all that stuff, out of a lot of experimentation, came the music we wanted to play.

TP:   Both of you had been deeply into folkloric music for many years. How did you get involved in… Was folkloric music just always there, or did people point you towards recordings and connections?

AG:   Well, there’s different types of folkloric music. There’s folkloric music for dancing, and it was more a commercial music that was provided for dancing, but it still had quite a bit of folklore to it. That was the soundtrack of my childhood. Family parties, things like that. There was always a collection of good 78s that everybody used to dance to, like Machito, Tito Puente, Tito Rodriguez, Cortijo Y Su Combo from Puerto Rico with Ismail Rivera singing, Mon Rivera… This was primarily folklore in the Puerto Rican vein and in the Cuban vein. Sonora Matancera, which was a Cuban band. That’s the stuff we grew up with.

TP:   When did you start breaking that stuff down?

AG:   That came a little bit later, because that’s something we got used to hearing. But we didn’t start breaking it down until we became more schooled in music. Both of us went to High School of Music and Art. They give you theory. They give you how to analyze a piece of music, and what happens in these number of bars, and then this section comes, and things like that. But what happened was, when I was 13, we had already been listening to Cal Tjader records for a while… Jerry was two years older than me, and he was starting to play congas, and he was also playing trumpet, and I was playing the bass, and we put together a Latin Jazz quintet like Cal Tjader’s. We started working with it. We started playing… In that music, we were trying to emulate the Cal Tjader sound and what they were doing, which was quite spontaneous and very jazz-like. They always had good pianists, and Mongo and Willie Bobo were heroes of ours. So that was pretty much how we started and where our taste was as far as playing music.

It wasn’t until I got to play with Ray Barretto’s band that I really started studying what came before, especially Afro-Cuban music. Or Cuban music.  The term “Afro-Cuban” that’s bandied about now as THE term, because everybody wants to point towards Cuba as the birthplace of a lot of the music—but I don’t know. I think it was maybe a little more to do with the Caribbean experience. Not just Cuba. Cuba was dominant, but there was also a lot going on in Puerto Rican and a lot going on in other places, too. And New York was the magnet the drew a lot of elements to it. A lot of great musicians from different parts of the Caribbean were moving to New York and bringing their music with them.

TP:   How long did you play with Dizzy Gillespie?

AG:   Almost a year. 1970.

TP:   what sort of experience was that? Was he playing primarily Cuban-influenced repertoire…

AG:   No, he was mixing it up. We had an interesting version of his band.  At the time, when we joined the band, there was no trap drummer. There was just Jerry playing congas, and I was playing the bass, George Davis was playing guitar, and Mike Longo was playing the piano—and Dizzy. I was playing my Ampeg baby bass. Now, Dizzy insisted upon a bass player who could play Latin rhythms and some jazz comfortably. That’s how I got the gig. I was only 19, and I was thrilled. We traveled a bit. It was amazing.

Dizzy was not one to… If you would sit down with him and you wanted something explained harmonically, he’d sit down at the piano and show you. But as a bandleader, he had this great instinct about talent, and he knew when he put a group of people together that the chemistry was going to work.

TP:   Rhythmically did he have anything to show you, or did…

AG:   We had things to show him.

TP:   What sort of things did you show him?

AG:   I remember working in Harlem with him one night, and we were doing a week at the Club Barron—and we brought Nicky Marrero to sit in on timbales. We played one of his tunes (I forget which one at the moment), and after he took his solo, he went by the bar… The bandstand was near the bar. He went by the bar, and we doubled the time on his tune, and we were smoking, the rhythm section was cooking, man. Then he comes up behind me and whispers in my ear, and he goes, “Where’s one?” In other words, as much as he’d been influenced by and heard quite a bit of Latin rhythms, and he’d been surrounded by good rhythm drummers, sometimes you can know a whole lot and still, if you divert your attention for a minute and come back to it, you go, “Wait a second; my hearing just turned around or something; I’m not quite sure where it is.” So while I’m playing and we’re cooking, I just looked at him and I go, “One.” He goes, “Oh, ok.” Heh-heh. Dizzy was a sweetheart. I loved him.

TP:   So as kids, you’re soaking up the music at home. It’s part of the daily fabric of your lives. You’re listening to all the jazz records as they come out…

AG:   And we were lucky enough as kids to journey out the clubs and hear this music in person. I saw Trane play. I wanted to see the quartet play, but they had already broken up. I saw one of his last performances. I saw everybody play. I was quite a regular in all the clubs. I used to go down to the Vanguard to hear the Bill Evans Trio, and I’d go to the Vanguard on Mondays to hear the Thad Jones-Mel Lewis Orchestra. And Slugs was one of my favorite jazz clubs in the world. That was THE place. That had an atmosphere, and the music was exceptional. Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers used to play there regularly. Lee Morgan, his band used to play there. I saw so many bands. I forgot that we got to play with Kenny Dorham for a year, before Dizzy… Actually, about the time I had started playing with Ray Barretto, I was playing with Kenny Dorham.

TP:   I think Jerry has related that when he was auditioning for New York College of Music, he encountered him…

AG:   Kenny was trying to get his degree so he could teach. New York College of Music started a jazz program, and they were givimg full scholarships to jazz musicians, and all of a sudden, a lot of musicians jumped in that school. They had a great big band. Great musicians there. So Kenny Dorham was studying there, and he was in Jerry’s trumpet class. The trumpet teacher was a classical teacher, and he failed Kenny Dorham. Failed him! I couldn’t believe that. Kenny Dorham could have taught him a few things. But we’ve been blessed, man. We were blessed that we were really accepted by a lot of people, and taught as well. Just by playing together with someone, you give a little bit of your knowledge, and you get knowledge back in return. There was quite a bit of activity going on for musicians in those days.

TP:   It also seems that the cultural politics of the ‘60s would point people in the direction of incorporating folkloric music into the fabric of their everyday activity and professional work.

AG:   Of course. I saw Olatunji. Olatunji had a group of drummers and dancers, and we got to hear that. There was a lot going on. But there wasn’t much Cuban folklore. Because of the Revolution, the radio stations wouldn’t play much of that music. But around 1969, Felipe Luciano, who was part of the Young Lords, he got a position to start a radio program on WRVR. I had met him while I was with Barretto, and I was studying Cuban folklore with Rene Lopez, who was one of the producers of Grupo Folklorico Experimental. We actually programmed the first month of shows. The first bunch of shows were midnight to six in the morning. We got calls from people saying, “what are doing playing this great music, and I’ve got to get up for work in the morning—are you guys nuts?” Then after a few months, finally, we got the ok to do our show in the afternoon. That was the beginning of… We did quite a bit of teaching by playing the music and talking about it, and opening that door that was closed to a lot of people about Cuban music. There was a lot of live performances…

TP:   Then you started doing it yourself, and Grupo Folklorico came into the picture…

AG:   Oh, yeah. Well, that was a given. When you’re exposed to all this knowledge, it becomes part of you, and you want to do it—and especially if you have the skills to do it. It’s like anything. When you’re studying music and you’re listening to records, it’s a communication, and you pick up on the message that’s being sent to you.

I heard this next tune on a videotape of a rehearsal in Matanzas, Cuba, that somebody gave me, of a folkloric group that was doing bata stuff, which is the hourglass shaped drum where there’s three different drums of different sizes, and they have chants going on with certain drum-beats. So there was one that was done in honor of the deity called Elegua. Elegua is the keeper of the crossroads, and is the one that opens and closes all your paths. So most ceremonies begin with Elegua. When you do a ceremony in that genre, you start with Elegua.

So I heard this chant, and it stayed in my head, and I started playing bass to it, and I figured out two sets of changes to the same melody. That’s what we use as our basis for improvisation. The first set of changes is a pedal tone, and it just stays in that pedal. It’s open. It’s kind of what McCoy Tyner or Trane would do. Then the second time we run the melody down, there’s another set of changes to it. So I came up with that, and then we developed it into a composition.

[“Elegua”]

AG:   The reason I played “Anabacoa” is that it’s a tune that had been done by a few Cuban bands, but the one that caught our attention, and that’s why we wanted to play it, was the recording by Arsenio Rodriguez Y Su Conjunto, and their version was slammin’! That’s where we got our inspiration, but then we took it to another place. And then we had the great Manny Oquendo playing one of his really classic timbal solos. It goes back to what we were talking about Art Blakey being the authoritative drummer. Well, Manny shows that he’s in that same league. He’s a very authoritative drummer.

TP:   The primal feel and the sophistication together.

AG:   Together, yeah.

TP:   That quality could describe Fort Apache, which has been doing it for 27 years, on and off…

AG:   Time flies.

TP:   We’ll move to 1988, and a live performance by an expanded edition of the Fort Apache Band, that was documented by Enja, in Zurich, titled Obatala. I’ve treasured this recording for some time; it’s an expanded version of the Apaches… Mad percussion.

AG:   When we started the Fort Apache Band, it had a large percussion section. But it was very difficult to work with that kind of ensemble, because booking it wasn’t easy. It was a lot of people to fly in and put up in hotels and so on. It was a financial decision and an artistic one to break it down to the bare essentials, which was a quintet and a sextet.

TP:   Who did the arrangement of “Justice.”

AG:   Jerry and I heard a riff on a Cuban record by Frank Emilio, who is a great Cuban pianist, and he had a riff on this record that was so intriguing, and we said, “Wow, this sounds like ‘Evidence’—because “Evidence” has such a quirky rhythm-melody to it. I said, “Wow, let’s see about putting these two elements together, and this is what came out.

[END OF CONVERSATION]

***********

It may surprise bass maestro Andy González’s many fans that Entre Colegas (Truth Revolution) is his first leader recording. Now 64, González boasts a vast and distinguished discography that includes ten recordings with the pathbreaking Fort Apache Band, in which he and his older brother, conguero-trumpeter Jerry González, masterminded a singular marriage of the harmonic language of hardcore jazz and the hand-drum rhythms of Afro-Cuban musical. Another nine albums document the pathbreaking four-trombone dance band Conjunto Libre, which he co-founded with iconic timbalero Manny Oquendo in 1974, after both left the employ of Eddie Palmieri, who González joined after two years of steady employment with Dizzy Gillespie.

“Andy is easily most influential Latin Jazz bassist ever,” says Truth Revolution Records co-proprietor Luques Curtis, a bassist whose own burgeoning career embodies González’s multilingual aesthetic. Curtis, 32, and his older brother, pianist Zaccai Curtis, met González twenty years ago after he heard their kid band play charts of such Fort Apache classics as “Moliendo Café” and “Obsesión” at a concert. “Andy came to our house afterward,” Curtis recalled. “He hung with us all night, playing his music and hanging out. After that, Andy would visit for a day or two a month. No money. He explained to us what happens during the coros, and how Afro-Cuban music is shaped.”

González has suffered the travails of aging—in 2004, the toes on his left foot were amputated due to complications from previously undiagnosed diabetes; at the beginning of 2015, he began three-day-a-week dialysis treatments. The Curtises—whose label had built momentum with releases not only by their Curtis Brothers group, but diverse artists like vocalists Sarah Elizabeth Charles and Eva Cortés, trumpeters Ray Vega, Jonathan Powell and Carlos Abadie, and timbalero Ralph Irizarry—responded to the second medical event by generating a project with their mentor.

González decided to present a pan-stylistic, strings-oriented program that he describes as “Django Reinhardt visits Cuba and Puerto Rico,” with long-time partner Nelson Gonzalez on tres, Cleveland-based Orlando “El Mostro” Santiago on cuatro, Brooklynite Ben Lapidus on guitar and tres, and Cuban emigree David Oquendo on guitars and vocals, as well as Abadie, the Curtises, and a host of hand percussionists who render the rhythms with precision and elegance.

“I just maintained the rhythm and kept the styles together,” González said, understating the effect of his enormous ears and harmonic erudition in maintaining quality control. “I was more concerned about sound than the style—when it’s good music, it’s good music, and that’s the name of the game.” He attributes his ability to get through the proceedings to acupuncture treatments that alleviated the stiffness attendant to dialysis; indeed, he plays so impeccably that it’s hard to discern any impairment.

“Andy always has a clear idea how he wants things to be, and gets musicians who can execute but also do their own thing,” said Lapidus, whose erudite program notes offer significant value-added. “He leads, but he’s also unbelievably supportive. He’s played in so many situations and so many styles that he was able to pull off what most people could only dream about doing.”

González compared the session’s ambiance to the atmosphere he and his brother generated at impromptu mid-’60s gatherings in the basement of his family’s house in the South Bronx. It was a destination for a Pan-American cohort of the famous—attendees included Gillespie, Machito, Kenny Dorham, Jackie and Rene McLean, Carlos “Patato” Valdes, Rashied Ali, Larry Young, Ruben Blades—and obscure, attracted by the brothers’ global perspective and predisposition to treat jazz and Afro-Caribbean styles not as separate entities but as extensions of each other.

“There were elements of that spirit—to play with abandon and grab some of the jams,” González said. “I played with as much abandon as I could. If they want me to do another record, I’ll see if I can think of something else to do.”

[—30—]

*******

Andy Gonzalez Musician Shows, WKCR – Feb. 28, 1990; March 13, 1991; Dec. 1, 1993:

[February 28, 1990]

[Fort Apache, “81”–from Obatala, Enja, Zurich concert, 1989]

ANDY: This record came about through our association with Matthias Winckelman. He’s one of the producers for the Enja label out of Germany. The Fort Apache had done a previous recording for them which was another live concert, in Germany, during the Berlin Jazz Festival in which we participating as well as Libre — Libre was participating on a different night in the same festival. The night that Manny Oquendo’s Libre…it was performing on a bill with Alberta Hunter, Bobby McFerrin… Dino Saluzzi, a bandoneon player who is Argentinian, I imagine. Or is he Italian? I’m not sure. He does modern tango, of which I’ve gotten to participate a bit with Astor Piazzolla, who I got to record with. But that’s another thing.

Getting back to Matthias, we were fortunate to be invited to play at the Zurich Jazz Festival, and the performance was recorded and just now released on the Enja label. This is my brother Jerry’s band, and he’s playing trumpet, flugelhorn and congas; John Stubblefield on tenor; Papo Vazquez on trombone; Larry Willis on piano; Edgardo Miranda on guitar; myself on bass; Steve Berrios on trombones and bata, chekere and coro. We had some guest percussionists — Milton Cardona, Hector Flaco Hernandez, and Nicky Marrero.

We’ve pared down the band a bit, but we do occasionally put together a whole ensemble with a huge percussion section. We’ve been trying to function on a smaller scale and trying to keep that energy level up. It seems to be working.

TP: How long has Fort Apache been functioning? What’s the genesis of the Fort Apache Band?

ANDY: Actually, the genesis goes back a long ways. Jerry and myself, we’ve always been… We grew up playing Latin Jazz and also listening to it. One of the earliest records that I remember listening to was a Cal Tjader record. That kind of playing fascinated me. So it was something that we grew up with. All throughout the years we’ve formed different groups, or have been part of groups that were Latin Jazz oriented or in that vein. So we’re part of that music. So this is really a continuation of that process.

TP: But you’re also interpreting Monk’s music. Rumba Para Monk is extremely distinctive.

ANDY: I think anybody’s compositions that we touch will come out with that sensibility to it, just because that’s the kind of music that we do.

TP: How long have you been playing the bass?

ANDY: I started playing the bass in elementary school. I was 11 years old or so. I started playing professionally at 13. It took a couple of years to learn the instrument, and I started working with bands. My father bought me an Ampeg baby bass for Christmas on my 13th birthday or something. And I started gigging right away. That was a gigging axe. If you had an Ampeg baby bass and an Ampeg amp, you were in business. Jerry had his congas, and he was already playing the horn, too. I was 13 when we had our first Latin Jazz group, which was a sort of Cal Tjader band, a quintet.

TP: You played that type of material?

ANDY: Yeah, we did some of Cal Tjader’s material and then some original stuff. The guy who was our mentor, a fellow by the name Llewellyn Matthews, Lew Matthews who right now is the musical director and pianist for Nancy Wilson… We grew up together, and he was really the guy who moved us into real playing of real serious Latin Jazz at a very early age. So we were blessed in that sense.

TP: This is the Bronx in the early 1960s. What sorts of gigs were you and Jerry doing?

ANDY: At the time we were doing small gigs here and there. School dances and occasional church dances. They were mostly dances, that I remember, but we used to play our Latin Jazz, and since it had a danceable beat, that was all people needed.

Coming up is a live performance by Manny Oquendo’s Libre. Manny Oquendo is I guess the Art Blakey of timbales. He’s one of the real greats, with a very distinctive sound and style. We’ve had this band together 15 years; this is our 15th year. It’s very special. It’s hard to put into words how special it is, and it’s a shame that certain people are asleep on it, that shouldn’t be. They should be moving more towards roots and culture instead of trying to get too commercial. But that’s always been the case. That doesn’t mean that we won’t be around. We’ll always be around. This is live in Holland about 18 months ago, when we visited Holland for a little bit. Hopefully we’ll have a chance to put the whole concert out on an album someday, because it was well-recorded, as you’ll soon here. This is “Asia Minor.”

[Libre: “Asia Minor” (Machito) – Steve Turre on shells;

TP: Next up is a live performance by Grupo Folklorico Experimental.

ANDY: That started in our basement as a jam. The Gonzalez household was a 24-hour jam all the time. We had a lot of music going on there, all the time. That was sort of our laboratory to experiment and come up with stuff. We used to invite a lot of great musicians to come and play with us.

TP: Who were some of the people you were coming up with?

ANDY: It was just the musicians we were playing with at the time who were out of the professional bands of the moment. Those were the years when… I had already played with Ray Barretto’s band, Dizzy Gillespie’s band, and I was involved with the Palmieri band at that time, and my brother was also. We were playing with a lot of great musicians, such as Chocolate Armenteros on trumpet and Jose Rodriguez on trombone, and Barry Rogers… A lot of the people who were very strong figures in the 60s period. So we got to learn quite a bit of stuff, and also we contributed a bit to what was the status of Latin Jazz at the time. We were freeing it up more, because we were also into Miles and we were into the free jazz movement of the 60s — we were listening to a lot of that music. We used to apply a lot of the things of that, and try to combine things. Sort of a mixture. It was like a laboratory. We used to experiment.

Grupo Folklorico came out of our deep respect for and our study of the roots of our music, which have their origins in African music, Afro-Cuban music in particular, and the religious music of that particular thing held a big interest for us. Also, the rumba, guaguanco and the son — those elements were all the roots of what our music is today, in one way or another. It’s felt. You can probably say that for all of Latin music. But Latin Jazz has those roots plus the jazz roots. The two musics are fairly…I guess you would call them cousins, because they sort of come out of the same experience of the African diaspora, the slave trade and what happened after that, and their individual developments in whatever country the slaves were in.

Out of all that study came this particular group of people. It began as a jam and it turned into something a little more serious when Rene Lopez managed to get a contract to record us for Salsoul Records. They were big in disco, but they had a Latin label, Salsoul Salsa. They signed Grupo Folklorico, and not too long after that they signed Manny Oquendo and Libre, and we did four albums for that record company. They’re all out of print. I’ve heard of people offering up to $100 for a copy. In fact, the President of the company asked me for a copy! So imagine!

TP: But the masters are still extant. They could be reissued.

ANDY: Oh, sure. At one point the original tapes will be…they’ll make a deal to have that stuff put out again, especially on CD. I’d like to hear that stuff on CD, maybe remixed. I’d like to remix some of it myself, because I know CD you can really get more. We had limitations. When you mix for an album, you have to limit yourself, but a CD lets you loose to really explore the full sonority of the music.

TP: Andy, I think we’ve piqued everyone’s interest, those who remember the albums and those who don’t know about Grupo Folklorico. And you’ve brought a live date.

ANDY: I found this in my collection of tapes, and I’m not too sure where we performed this. I think it was in El Barrio on 110th Street or 109th Street and Third Avenue. There’s a park there where we performed. We didn’t do too many performances, but the ones that we did do were pretty memorable, and we always had a lot… As a matter of fact, I think once we performed here at WKCR. I know people who have those tapes, and one of these days we’ll bring them up and play them.

Anyway, Chocolate is playing, Frankie Rodriguez, Willie Garcia is singing, Henny Alvarez, Virgilio Marti, Jerry, Gene Golden… A whole bunch of people. It’s a tune by Henny Alvarez that we never recorded, by the way. So it’s a real treat for the collectors. It’s called “Ango.”

[Grupo Folklorico, “Ango”]

ANDY: There’s been talk of that band getting back together. It’s been almost 12 years since those records came out and since we’d played. We’re all around. Most of us are around. Hopefully we’ll get to have a reunion and maybe make a new record. Because there’s certainly quite a bit of material, and everybody’s grown in the last ten years, so I’m sure there will probably be a lot of interest for a new record.

TP: We have another tape cued up from the seemingly endless store of tapes that Andy brought up.

ANDY: I thought I’d turn people on to a music that is a favorite music of mine, and that is the Afro-Cuban music of the 1950s, which is a very rich period. The band I have cued up… I’m going to play a couple of cuts of radio transcriptions from… The bands in Cuba all used to broadcast live on the radio. There were a bunch of them that had regular daily programs, and there were a few dancing fanatics from here who’d go down for vacation in the 50s, and bring their tape recorders and record some of this stuff. The first tune we’ll hear is “Buena Vista and Guaguanco,” and this is by Chappotin Y Sus Estrellas. Felix Chappotin was one of the great, great…along with, say, Chocolate and another trumpet player by the name of Florecita… He was one of the great stylists, soloists in Cuban music. He was part of the Arsenio band. When Arsenio decided to move to New York and make this his home base…well, Chappotin stayed with the original band. This is a transcription of that original band — Chappotin Y Sus Estrellas with Miguelito Cuni singing, who is one of the great soneros who ever existed.

[MUSIC: Chappotin-Cuni, “Buena Vista and Guaguanco”; “

ANDY: That style of music, the slow guaguanco, the son montuno, that’s all the creation of Arsenio Rodriguez, and his influence is all over that music. The first cut was a live transcription that Manny Oquendo had in his collection that he’d gotten from the bass player who worked with Arsenio…

TP: Arsenio, given the level of historical memory people have, we need a surname.

ANDY: Arsenio Rodriguez. I take it for granted everybody knows. There’s a whole new generation who doesn’t know these things.

Arsenio Rodriguez was a gentleman who played the tres. The tres is a 9-string instrument that’s similar in sound quality to a 12-string guitar. The strings are in octaves. He was a master of that instrument, and also a master composer of many forms, utiliziing all his roots, his folkloric roots of Afro-Cuban music. He was one of the greatest exponents of the music. He was a very prolific composer. One of his tunes, “Bruca Manigua,” was a big hit, a world-wide hit for Miguelito Valdes when he was with the Casino de la Playa Orchestra, which was a band that made quite a bit of noise. Then what happened was that Xavier Cugat heard a lot of that music and brought Miguelito Valdes to sing with him. Then they recorded it again. Then they recorded quite a few things of Arsenio’s. They even brought in Arsenio for a few recording sessions.

But Arsenio’s style, the conjunto style of three trumpets and bongos, maraccas, claves, singers, rhythm guitar, and a tres and a piano, that whole sound…there’s something very unique about it. It was basically a development historically from what was original a son. A son was an early form of dance music that there was no congas, there was only bongos — bongos, maraccas and claves and guitars and tres and singing. That was it. Then they added one trumpet. Then they added two trumpets. Then Arsenio came and added three trumpets. Then the bands in New York added four trumpets. We’re talking specifically about bands like the Tito Rodriguez conjunto and the Tito Puente conjunto. They added the fourth trumpet.

We’re going to spend this time doing a little dedication to Tito Rodriguez who passed away on this day I think in 1973. I had the good fortune to record with Tito Rodriguez before he passed away. I guess when I write my book about the giants in the industry who I’ve gotten to associate with…

We’ll hear something from Tito Rodriguez Live at the Palladium, the second album, Returns to the Palladium. It’s titled “El Que Se Fue.” This is when Tito had his big band. It’s one of my favorite cuts of his band in action. Manny Oquendo is in the rhythm section playing bongos. Then we’ll hear something of the conjunto with the four trumpets.

[MUSIC: Tito Rodriguez, “El Que Se Fue”; “Chen Charengo Ma’]

ANDY: “Chen Charengo Ma” is a tune written by Giusti Barreto(?), at least he’s taking credit for it, but that’s an old folkloric thing going back to the different tribal things of Afro-Cuban… They had the religious music. Then they had the abakua, which is a sort of secret society, sort of related to the Masons, sort of a self-help group, but very secretive and very ceremonious, and they had their own style of music, which was quite different than the religious music that they call the santo music, the santero music. But that particular thing, they call it palo. That’s a sect of the Congolese tribe. Imagine how far that had come if you traced the development of it. That’s something that goes back… The palo is sort of the Congolese folkloric roots going back to the Congo. So imagine that came all the way up through Cuba, surviving all that way, and then Tito Rodriguez has made a mambo out of it. It got into popular dance music of the 50s. To this day, a lot of the traditions of the folklore, the roots, come back to us.

My roots in Latin music are those of growing up, listening to these records of Tito Rodriguez and of the Machito band and Puente. Those were the three big ones, the ones that made the greatest impact in Latin music in the 50s. They were the Young Turks. I guess we’re the Young Turks of this generation.

I just wanted to play the music that influenced me, music that I like, and that’s pretty much it. We’ll run the gamut, playing stuff from different records that I’ve brought and different tapes of live stuff. I guess that’s the way we’re going to pass the next hour and 45 minutes.

TP: You have Machito cued up next.

ANDY: I wouldn’t go on a radio program with music and leave out the Machito orchestra, which was one of the greatest organizations of any band that ever came out of New York City. It’s really a New York product, but it was Afro-Cuban in nature. All the innovations and everything they’ve done are so countless. This is the Machito band in 1953 or 1954, for the Seeco label, and the tune is “Mambo Sentimental.”

[MUSIC: Machito, “Mambo Sentimental”; “Que Bonito Puerto Rico”]

ANDY: That was “Que Bonito Puerto Rico,” “How Beautiful Is Puerto Rico.” I guess that’s one of the golden periods of the Machito Orchestra, because there were a few. Some people feel that the original Machito and his Afro-Cubans from the early 40s was THE band, and then other people feel that this period, which was 1953-54, was one of the great periods. I like it all. I don’t have any distinctions.

Talking about “Cabonitos Puerto Rico,” I’d like to get into it a bit. I’ve had the good fortune to be associated with and have recorded with quite a few great figures in Puerto Rican music also. I do love my Cuban music, but I will never put Cuban music over another music. I like all musics the same. But the music of the land of my origin…I wasn’t born there… I’m Puerto Rican. I love all the music of Puerto Rico also. So I’ve had the good fortune to record over the years with quite a few of the greats of Puerto Rican music, such as, say, Rafael Cortijo, who along with his singer, Ismail Rivera, were I guess the greatest exponents of the bomba and plena rhythms. Those were the Afro-Puerto Rican rhythms.

The plena specifically…they use the three panderetas, which is sort of like tambourines without the jingles (that’s what they look like anyway), tuned to different notes. The songs are usually about… Well, the plena was a device used at the turn of the century to be the sort of newspaper. They used to make up daily songs having to do with what was going on, either in politics or maybe the latest gossip, things like that.

I had the good fortune to record with a group… This record had just come out on the Shanachie label, and the group was called Los Pleneros De La 21. 21 is a bus stop in Santurce, Puerto Rico. That’s where a lot of great pleneros grew up and sort of plied their trade. So this is Puerto Rican folklore, and we’re going to hear a tune that’s called “Canta El Gallo.” Now, Gallo is a gentleman that is one of the singers of the group, and he just passed away recently, and at his funeral he insisted that they play bomba y plena, and all the pleneros all over the city came. They converged on a funeral home on 116th Street, and they played in front of his coffin. It was the most incredible thing. Your hair stood up. It was quite emotional and quite deep.

Anyway, this is El Gallo. I’m glad that the Center for Ethnic Folk Arts was able to sort of sponsor this recording for Shanachie Records of Los Pleneros de la 21.

[MUSIC: Los Pleneros, “Canta El Gallo”; Quarteto em Cy ; Gil Evans, “Manteca”]

[SIDE 3]

ANDY: I happen to like the way Gil Evans arranged that. What intrigued me the most was the way he set up the chords and the melody for the bridge, and he used that as the intro of the tune. That was beautifully done with the flutes and stuff; it’s one of my favorite moments of Gil Evans’ arranging.

TP: You took us on a long trip on that set.

ANDY: We were in Puerto Rico for a minute. We played Los Pleneros de la 21, the Pleneros of Stop 21, which is a bus stop in Puerto Rico. Then we went to Brazil, about the year 1975, a quartet of female singers called Quarteto em Cy. That group was very influential. They came up around the time of the bossa nova craze, but they always sang in these beautiful harmonies. What they did on this record, it’s an anthology of popular Brazilian music composers. They would do medleys of each of these composers’ tunes. This is a medley of a composer by the name of Antonio Maria, and they did three of his songs. The arrangement sounds like Gil Evans. That’s why I played it, because I wanted to play the Gil Evans cut after that, which was “Manteca”… But to show you that the Brazilians are doing some fantastic things with harmony. They always had a thing for melody and harmony that was quite distinctive and quite different, and it’s always been a favorite music of mine. If you can find that record, snatch it. It’s Antologia de Musica Popular de Brasil.

Before that we heard Peruchin, whose real name is Pedro Justiz. He was the piano player with quite a few big bands in the 40s and 50s. In the 50s he was primarily featured as a solo pianist and as a piano player with a band called Orquestra Riverside. This was a 10″ album that’s very difficult to find, and this was his first solo recording session, just piano and rhythm…

TP: You mentioned, Andy, that this was from 1949, which I couldn’t help but think was the same year that Bud Powell recorded “Un Poco Loco.”

ANDY: Peruchin was one of the greats, one of the true great stylists in Cuban music. He had his antennae out. He was listening to everybody. Especially the older pianists like Art Tatum. You can hear where he was influenced by American jazz pianists.

TP: He does “Over The Rainbow” on the other side of that 10″ album.

ANDY: It would be interesting to compare that with Bud Powell’s or someone’s.

Before we heard Los Munequitos de Matanzas, which at the time when they recorded it were known as Guaguanco Matancero. One of their tunes that they had recorded earlier was a big hit. It was about comic book characters. So they adapted that name and they call themselves Los Munequitos, which means the “cartoon characters.” But this is one of the great… Matanzas is a very rich, fertile area of Cuba for music and culture. Their percussionists are just superb. It’s something extraordinary and quite different than other regions of Cuba. So that was “Guaguanco Matancero.”

TP: Now we’ll shift gears again, and listen to a recent live recording that Andy participated in.

ANDY: I did a duo piano and bass gig with Larry Willis, at the Terrace at the Village Gate, a street-level bar. It’s a nice little gig. We played just jazz standards and stuff like that. We had the good fortune of having Steve Berrios, who plays traps and percussion with the Fort Apache Band. He brought his trapset down and sat in with us. This is a tune that I happened to record, and I was quite surprised at the fidelity.

[MUSIC: Andy-Willis-Steve, “All Of You”]

ANDY: That was the Larry Willis…I guess trio. We were doing a duo, and we had the pleasure of having Steve Berrios sit in with us on traps. (Jan. 1990) That was a nice gig to do. It was a lot of fun to just do bass and piano. It was quite challenging, because you’re just left up to your own wits, and there’s no other rhythm, so you have to provide the rhythm. It worked out pretty well.

TP: Larry Willis has been doing most of the piano playing lately with Fort Apache.

ANDY: Yeah, for the last two years, almost three. The pianist before that was Kenny Kirkland. We’ve been recording with him lately for his first album under his own name. I guess you’ll be seeing that sometime in the future.

I wanted to get back to Libre, which is the band I most often work with. We’re going to be doing quite a bit of stuff coming up in the future. On our agenda is a new recording session. We’ll be doing some traveling; we’re going to California this summer, and the Atlanta Jazz Festival. Hopefully we’ll get to Europe again soon. We haven’t been there in about a year. I want to play another cut from one of our European adventures. This is from the Holland concert also. I think this is “Yevala(?) Pa Rincon”

[MUSIC: Conjunto Libre, “..(?).. Pa Rincon” – Steve Turre, trombone]

ANDY: That was Libre, a very good indication of what we do sound like and the power that we put out when we play. In 99% of salsa in New York today you won’t hear that kind of playing. You won’t hear that kind of power and that kind of swing. It’s a shame that people are asleep on that. Because this was done 18 months or two years ago, and if anything we’ve gotten even stronger. I think the little message to all the people out there listening is if you want bands to… You have to support the bands that you like and that you want to see around so that they keep working. Some of the Latin clubs are tied up. They have these little cliques where they only use certain bands. But the public is really the final arbiter of who they want to hear. So I would put to te public that whenever they hear… If you’re big fans of ours, come out. Come out to our gigs. When you hear announcements that we’re playing places…

Let me clue you in where we’re working this weekend. Manny Oquendo’s Libre is performing Friday at the Tapestry, which is in the Bronx on Westchester Avenue, very near the Parkchester housing complex. It’s easy to get to — the #6 train that goes up Westchester Avenue. Also on Saturday we’re going to be performing at the Circle Theater, which is the newest club in the Bronx. It used to be an old movie house, and they tore out the insides and rebuilt it into a supper club, a very nice supper club where you’d be proud to take your old lady out to dinner and dancing and stuff like that.

This is something that I haven’t heard. I’ve been recording a lot with Kip Hanrahan. He’s the guy who started a record company, and his first release was Jerry’s record, Ya Yo Me Cure. Since then he’s been involved in quite a few… He’s turned into a sort of producer-composer. He came up with a concept based on the world music concept, putting elements together that most people would not have thought of, like, say, a Haitian guitarist, a Latin bass player, a jazz vocalist, and things like that. I did a couple of European tours with Kip, and lately we’re doing quite a bit of recording. I just did a trio recording with John Tchicai, a name from the free jazz past, and Smitty Smith on drums and myself on acoustic bass. That was quite interesting.

We’ll hear something that I’ll be hearing for the first time, a recording I did with Kip’s band – a Duke Ellington composition, “Love Is Like A Cigarette,” with Carmen Lundy doing the vocal. But she doesn’t do the vocal with the band; she does it apart from the band, which is an interesting concept.

[MUSIC: Kip Hanrahan-Carmen Lundy, “Love Is Like A Cigarette”; Astor Piazzolla, “Knife Fight”; [END OF SIDE 3]; Astor Piazzolla, “Leonora’s Song”]

ANDY: Those were tangos by Astor Piazzolla, who is probably the foremost composer of tangos. He was sort of the rebel of Tango, the guy who took Tango specifically away from a certain sensibility that the Argentinians had, and he modernized it, added a different kind of sensibility to the music. Although there’s no improvisation in his music. It’s all written out. Every single note is accounted for. There’s nothing improvised on it. But it was one of the highlights of my career to get to record this record with him. I had never recorded Tango in my life. But I had been aware of Astor Piazzolla, and I had been listening. So when Kip called me to play bass on the session, I was scared, but I was happy to do it. And I was VERY happy that Astor liked my playing. For a Nuyorican bass player… I guess it has to do with all the influences, all the music I’ve gotten to hear here, based in New York, which everything comes here — this is the capital of the world.

TP: I won’t challenge you on that. Kip is also a son of the Bronx as well, so he’d be aware of some of the same things. The album is called The Rough Dancer in the Cyclical Night. It’s on American Clave Records. We heard “Leonard’s Song” and “Knife Fight,” which followed Carmen Lundy’s a cappella “Love Is Like A Cigarette.”

ANDY: Tango came out of the bordellos of Buenos Aires, of Argentina. It’s not supposed to be a very sedate music; it’s kind of a rough music. The best of Afro-Cuban music and the best of jazz was very close to that same element, the element of the nightlife, the bordello life, the pimps, the booze, the drugs — that was all part of it.

TP: It has that edge.

ANDY: Yes. There’s a certain “live life quick” because you don’t know if you’ll drop the next day — that kind of situation. But I was quite happy to get to record this kind of music, which I never thought I’d do.

TP: I think you have cued up, though I’m not sure, is music by Cachao.

ANDY: Not quite. This is Orquesta Aragon from Cuba. This was a live radio broadcast from the late 70s. This tune is called “Sin Clave Y Bongo, No Hay Son” – it means, “without the claves and bongos, there is no Son.” That’s Aragon’s tribute to the son, and the lyrics of the son talks about how it’s been such a strong rhythm and a dance rhythm, and it’s been around for quite a while, and it will never die because it’s such a strong tradition. It’s part of my background, too, and it’s music that I love. I love to play it, love to dance it, love to hear it.

[MUSIC: Orquesta Aragaon, “Sin Clave y Bongo No Hay Son”]

That was Orquesta Aragon, with Richard Egues on the flute and Orestes Varona, who was one of Manny Oquendo’s influences, playing bongos, which was a rarity because he’s a timbal player, and he was one of the greats. He passed away a bunch of years ago. Now Orquesta Aragon has a lot of new members in the band, and it’s not the same any more. Nothing stays the same, but we were fortunate enough that this band broadcast a lot and they recorded a lot. So the great era of Orquesta Aragon is preserved for all time.

TP: right now we’ll hear some of the most recent results of Andy’s long years of study, a track from each of two albums that have been put out by Fort Apache Band, as well as a promotional piece for Mayor David Dinkins.

ANDY: Dennis Rivera, the President of Local 1199, the Hospital Workers Union, hired us to produce a jingle, a Latin music jingle for the Dinkins campaign. So we came up with a little cute ditty. I wrote the melody. Manny Oquendo, as most of the time, comes up with the perfect idea, and then we built a song around it and an arrangement with Papo Vazquez. This is the Dinkins Jingle.

[MUSIC: Dinkins Jingle; Fort Apache, “Nutty”]

That was “Nutty” by Jerry Gonzalez and the Fort Apache Band. That concept for “Nutty,” when we were rehearsing the material for the album, I was the one who came up with the concept of playing it as a son montuno, because that’s a favorite rhythm that I like, and it seemed to blend well with the melody of “Nutty.” So that’s how we did that.

TP: It’s from a recording titled Rumba Para Monk, which is a studio date comprising all arrangements of Monk tunes. [ETC.]

ANDY: I was quite a frequent visitor to this station and other stations, too. But as time went on, I was just too busy to be here. Hopefully I won’t make myself so scarce in the future.

[MUSIC: “Jackie-Ing”–Enja, Obatala, 1988]March 13, 1991 (on Cachao):

[MUSIC: Descarga, “Criolla Carabali”; “Tunas Se Quemo”; “Bailando Entre Espuma”]

TP: You’ve done this before. You know the deal.

ANDY: I know the deal. I was up here last time for the Machito Festival with Manny Oquendo, and we did a pretty good show. Here, my partner in crime is Joe Santiago, who is another one of the bass players of my generation. We’re the ones who always… I guess we’re always giving credit where credit is due, and the cat that we picked up a lot from and learned a lot from, not so much by, say, going to his house for lessons or anything, just by listening to what he was playing… We really learned a lot from Cachao. To this day, there’s things to learn from listening to the kind of bass playing that he was doing, no matter what period, because he has such an extensive career, going back to the late 1930s. It’s an incredible body of music that he put together, and he sort of defined bass playing. Afro-Cuban bass playing was brought to a high art.

TP: It wasn’t just Afro-Cuban bass playing. Cachao is a world-class improviser.

ANDY: Oh, of course. Not only that. See, he comes from a family of musicians, and many of them were bass players. I heard there’s, at recent count, 40 bass players in his family, including his mother and father. So we’re talking about somebody that really knows the instrument. Not only that. When Cachao was young and just growing up, he was playing percussion instruments, too. He started out playing bongos. But naturally, he was playing the bass around the same time period, and bass playing in Cuba at that time was mostly in the danzon bands, the charanga bands, the tipica bands of the period. That was sort of the national dance music of Cuba, was the danzon. He has a rich tradition in that idiom, and it calls for a lot of classical style playing, such as bowing the bass instead of, say, plucking it. The plucking part was more percussive. That’s more the Afro-Cuban side of things. But the bowing of the instrument, as in any symphony, or any classical situation… He has the same kind of technique as the best of classical music.

So I guess Cachao to me is probably the most well-rounded, all-around bass player that I’ve ever heard. Because he can do all. He can play with a symphony, he can play with a tango band, he can play with any salsa ensemble, any Afro-Cuban ensemble. His knowledge of rhythm is so extensive, and he can just fit a part to something, either drum-wise or bass-wise.

TP: Another aspect of Cachao we’ll focus on is his compositions, which number in the hundreds.

ANDY: Yes, because he used to write a lot of danzones for the Arcaño band. That’s the band he used to work for — Arcaño Y Sus Maravillas. Jose Antonio Arcaño. He was a master flute player. And the leader of this band, Y Sus Maravillas, were the “marvels” of the age. At the beginning, they were called Los Maravillas, or de Las Maravillas del Siglo, which means “the marvels of the century.” This band really… In that band a lot of innovations took place. The creation of new forms of dance music, and new ways of playing it, and new combinations of rhythms and combinations of sounds in the rhythm section, including… You can hear Cachao bow the bass, slap the bass, play all over the instrument. It’s incredible; incredible to listen to this.

This is a whole part of the history of music, and I am surprised that jazz scholars who really studied the 30s and 40s and have a lot to say about the 30s and 40s, or even, say, the early New Orleans days…that they are not really hip to what was going on in Cuba. They mention it barely. It’s mentioned, like, “Yeah, this was going on, too.” But they really didn’t dig deep into that side of the African diaspora, or whatever you could call it, the African side of things. And they should have been more attentive to this.

TP: Certainly, musicians from Cuba and from the Caribbean made their mark on jazz music, but they were not particularly identified as that – they were identified as jazz.

ANDY: It’s also some cultural conditioning involved. Because I imagine for any jazz fan of that time to hear a danzon with the violins and whatnot, it would sound a little like hokey to them. It would sound like something else. But they were missing the point. And the point is the rhythm. And that’s the total point. To this day, still jazz cats have trouble getting behind the rhythm and how Afro-Cuban music works. But this is the master, one of the masters of any era.

TP: We’ll be having 2 hours and 43 more minutes of elaborations on this theme, with Andy Gonzalez on Cachao. Let’s talk about the three tracks we heard at the top of the show.

ANDY: This album is one of these strange records that came out in the early 60s, after the Revolution, of tapes of Cachao’s jam sessions, which he had done quite a few recording sessions. The personnel on some of these tracks, like, Yeyo Iglesias on bongos, Tata Güines. Papin also played on some of this stuff. The pianist wasn’t Jesus Lopez, who used to play with Arcaño’s band, so it probably was Orestes Lopez, Cachao’s brother, who along with Cachao were the musical directors and were responsible for the majority of arrangements in the Arcaño band. In the Arcaño band, Orestes played the cello. The instrumentation is 3 violins, flute, cello, bass, piano, and timbales — no congas at the beginning. The bass sort of held up the bottom and with the timbal and made it sound full, like the conga wasn’t really needed. He would slap the bass sort of like a conga, too. All those things are incredible.

I’ve been for more than a year now trying to hook up a way to get Cachao in concert together with Milt Hinton. We’re talking about some serious slap bass technique in jazz — in American Jazz and in Afro-Cuban music. Now, one of these days I’ll have my dream come true. But I’ve been waiting for that. I’ve been mentioning it to promoters, and they all say it’s a great idea, but so far nobody has acted on it. But that’s one of them I want to try to do.

The tunes on this album… It’s on the Maype label. It’s funny, Cachao… I’m glad that these records exist. But the companies that put these out were like bootleg companies. They used to rip off the musicians, and never pay them a penny for their stuff. So as much as I like the presence of having the record around, it’s a drag that Cachao never really makes any bread off these records. And they’ve been in print for 25 years, so it must be somebody’s making money.

Anyway, the tunes that we heard are “Criollo Carabali.” That’s an old Afro-Cuban chant of the abakua sect, or what would you call it… That’s sort of the Afro-Cuban version of the Masons. It’s an all-male society dedicated to preserving and sort of keeping each other cool. In fact, in the early years, they used to buy each other’s freedom from slavery. So that’s a chant of that style of music, abakua.

“Tunas Se Quemo” is sort of a descarga montuno, very simple. The tres player on this record is Niño Rivera, who is probably the most modern of the tres players and the most influential, besides Arsenio Rodriguez, who is probably THE influence on the tres. All these names I’m mentioning are just giants. Giants in Cuban music. Cachao was in there, too, as the giant of giants.

TP: We have cued up a collaboration between Cachao and Eddie Palmieri.

ANDY: This is not my favorite tune from the record, but Cachao gets a little solo in it, and I like the way he plays here. He’s a driving force in any band he plays in, but the collaboration with Eddie Palmieri was… I got to see that band live, in person, quite a few times, and I was thrilled by that. Joe, when was the first time you saw Cachao play live.

JOE SANTIAGO: Tito Rodriguez Orchestra.

ANDY: Same with me. I saw him with Tito Rodriguez Orchestra. I saw Tito Rodriguez’ Orchestra at the Embassy Ballroom on a Sunday afternoon in 1964. I was playing my first big-time gig. It was Federico Pagani, he was like the daddy of promoters in… He brought the Latin dance downtown to the Palladium and all this stuff. He’s like a legendary figure. Well, he was throwing these Sunday afternoon, all day,10 bands on the bill, and he hired our little Latin Jazz group. I was about 13 at the time. We were the tenth band on the bill. So we played, a little quintet, we made 50 bucks. But at the top of the bill was the Tito Rodriguez Orchestra, Eddie Palmieri La Perfecta, Joe Cuba Sextet — the hot bands at the moment. So I got to see them for the first time. I saw Cachao play for the first time. I saw Manny Oquendo playing with Eddie Palmieri’s band for the first time. All that was great. The Colgate Gardens in the Bronx. Neither one of these two places I mentioned exists any more.

Anyway, this is the Eddie Palmieri band with Cachao. This was recorded around 1968 or 1969 – “Ay Que Rico.”

[MUSIC: Eddie Palmieri, “Ay Que Rico”; Orquesta De Fajardo, “Fajardo y su Flauta”]

ANDY: That was actually Los Treyas Cubanas, but it’s a tape that ended up in Miami and came out under the title of Fajardo, who was the leader of that band until he left to come to the States. So that tape actually isn’t Fajardo at all playing there, but the tune and composition and everything is Cachao’s. The title on the album is Fajardo Y Su Flauta, but the original title is “Julio Y Su Flauta” — Julio Guerrero, who was the original flute player who played in the Estrella Cubana band. But that’s a really nice, laid-back version of that. There’s another version that Cachao himself recorded of this tune that’s a little faster. But this one, they gave it a nice tempo.

We’re going to hear now a long, 18-minute cut. It takes a whole side of a record. It’s from the Descargas at the Village Gate, Live — the Tico All-Stars. This particular descarga is “Descarga de Contrabajoas,” the jam between the bass players. And the two daddies are here — Bobby Rodriguez and Cachao.

Now, Bobby Rodriguez was a whole other style. I think Bobby and Cachao were probably the two main influences on my playing (and probably Joe’s, too, I guess). They were the cats, man. They were the ones with the best technique, the prettiest way of playing. Bobby was very pretty in his sound especially. There’s a very pronounced difference in their tone quality. Even the way they hit the strings is different. Bobby has more of a bell, clear, ringing kind of note thing, and Cachao is funkier, a little more street when it comes to plucking the strings and slapping the bass and whatnot. They’re playing two Ampeg Baby Basses here. Tone-wise, they still get their tone out, but sometimes the sound can be a little strange. But they do some great stuff here, and they just talk to each other back and forth.

TP: The liner notes attribute this to May 1966.

[MUSIC: Cachao-Bobby Rodriguez, “Descarga de Contrabajos”; “El Fantasma Del Combo”]

ANDY: Israel Lopez, Cachao, the great bass player of Afro-Cuban music. The track we just heard was one of his many descarga, or Cuban jam session recordings. This one is on a strange label called Musicalia. Even the cover is real strange. It says, Cuban Music In Jam Session, Cachao, in big letters, and then there’s a photograph of two dancers, a lady who has on a bikini-like outfit, her arms look like they’re crossed or tied together, and then the guy is leaning down, and it’s shot in the woods somewhere — a very strange photo. Anyway, it’s a great album for the things that are on it.

The tune we heard was called “El Fantasma Del Combo.” All those little effects and all the…that’s right out of Cachao’s ideas about doing things. I was fortunate enough to participate in something that he did years later for the Salsoul label. I’ve been to a few rehearsals where he puts these things together, and he just comes up with these crazy ideas. He sets up the percussion and everything the way he wants them to start off. He orchestrates a jam session.

Which is in contrast to that mish-mosh of a thing at the Village Gate, which I don’t care for that much except for the things that Cachao and Bobby Rodriguez get to play on it. But since it was out of their control, a lot of other things were happening that really had nothing to do with… Just good playing. But I just think that track is valuable for their work together, because it’s very rare when two bass players play together on a record — it’s usually just one bass and that’s it.

Now we’re going to start delving into Cachao’s past, in the real early days. We’ve mostly been listening to 50s and 60s work. We’re going back now to 1938 or 1939, I believe. The original source of this bass solo is a Koussevitzky concerto, Koussevitzky was a Russian composer and a bass player, and he used to write for the bass. They took this piece of music and adapted it for a bass solo in the Cuban danzon tradition. We’re going to hear two versions of this. Cachao recorded it in 1938 and then recorded it again in 1957 or so. We’re going to hear the early version, and then you’ll hear the newer version.

[MUSIC: Cachao, “Canta Contrabajo” (1938 and 1957)]

ANDY: I made a slight error. The first tune that we heard on my tape of real early stuff, I believe it was called “Al de Lante(?),” Cachao as musical director along with his brother of the Arcaño Y Sus Maravillas band of 1938 or so. I’m not positive of the exact date. We’ll now delve into that particular time period, because there are so many innovations going on, not only on the bass itself, but the transforming of the whole rhythm section happened in that band — and Cachao had quite a bit to do with it. In this time period, there was no conga drum in this style of band. The conga drum was sort of a lowly… They weren’t given much attention. They considered it a very street instrument, and it wasn’t accepted in the salon de baile, in polite society dancing, of which danzon was a strong part. But in the Arcaño band, the conga was introduced around 1946-47-48, that time period.

We’ll hear the band before the conga drum was introduced, from the very early Arcaño recordings. These are all done around 1938-39-40. There is no conga drum, so the bottom of the band is in the hands of Cachao, and in the hands of Ulpiano Diaz, who was the timbal player in the band. Listen particularly to the interplay between Cachao playing what they call the tumbao, the bass figure, plus he’ll be slapping the bass. You’ll hear slaps. You’ll hear little things that sound like percussive effects, like from a conga drum, but they’re not. They’re from the bass. That in conjunction with the left hand of the timbales, which plays a beat that’s a very bass kind of sound…those two things are the bottom of the sound of this band. And it’s 3 violins, a cello, flute — the great Arcaño himself on the flute, a tremendous flute player, with a very distinctive, sweet style. And the great Jesus Lopez on piano, who was one of the more, I guess…how would I call it…the chops — Mr. Chops. This guy was sort of the Art Tatum of his day, but in an Afro-Cuban way.

[MUSIC: Arcano Y Sus Maravillas with Cachao, 1938-39]

ANDY: That was a good dose of early Arcaño and then the last tune was “Buena Vista Social Club,” which is from the El Gran Cachao album on Kubaney Records (1958). This is I guess what the Arcaño band would have been like 20 years later, from the period that we were listening to the old 78s. For the recording, Cachao some woodwinds. You heard bass clarinet, you hear a clarinet; it added an extra texture to the sound of the arrangements of the danzon, of the strings and flute sound. So that was a pretty nice thing that he did on that record.

Now, the earlier cuts… I know all the melodies, and I’m a little vague on the titles. I wish Rene Lopez was here to help me out with the titles on some of these songs. But they were all Cachao’s arrangements. Although on the 78, I guess if you really listen closely, you can hear all the things Cachao is doing on the bass to make that bottom happen in the music, because there’s no conga…

[END OF SIDE 2]

[SIDE 3]

ANDY: …that’s where all his musical background really comes from. And then, the other side of Cachao, which is the street musician, who used to play bongos in little street ensembles and whatnot.

We’re going to hear a very historical recording, mainly because of the fact that we have… This is the record entitled Patato y Totico. It was recorded on Verve Records, and Teddy Reig produced it. Patato Valdes is well known to jazz fans. He’s been recording on jazz albums with Art Blakey and Max Roach and all these people since the middle 50s. But he got together his own recording session with Totico singing, and he managed to get Arsenio Rodriguez and Cachao on the same session.

[MUSIC: Patato-Totico-Cachao-Arsenio, “Mas Que Nada”; Descarga, “Rendencion”; Gran Orquesta Tipica, “Mambo Tipico”; Cachao, “Maria Elena”; Eddie Palmieri-Cachao, “Busca Lo Tuyo”–skips]

ANDY: Sorry for the scratchy record, but I couldn’t get a better copy of this. That was Cachao playing with Eddie Palmieri in one of Eddie’s best bands. Manny Oquendo playing bongos, and Luis Miranda on conga, and Barry Rogers taking a tremendous trombone solo…

TP: I guess you play that one a lot, Andy.

ANDY: Yes, this particular copy of the record I found in a budget bin somewhere, and it was used. I didn’t think it would skip on the tune, though. I couldn’t find my other copy. It’s one of those records that I used to play a lot, and my good copy got lost. But you could hear the driving force of Cachao in the Eddie Palmieri band. It was just such a good-sounding rhythm section — Cachao and Manny and Luis Miranda and Eddie on the piano. A driving rhythm section.

Cachao during his career… When he came from Cuba and settled in New York, he worked with quite a few bands. He did a lot of freelance work, did some symphony work. He did spend a good I guess two years or so with the Tito Rodriguez Orchestra, and recorded a few albums, did some touring. They tell me he wrote some charts for the band that they never recorded, which I would have liked to hear. In particular he wrote a danzon that I’d like to have heard, a big band arrangement of one of Cachao’s danzons. But I’ll have to wait until Tito Rodriguez, Jr., digs it up out of his father’s extensive library of arrangements.

During the time that Tito Rodriguez had Cachao in the band, which was a tremendous period for the band… The Tito Rodriguez Orchestra was always a top-notch unit. Other players around that time… He always had the best — the best accompanists in that band. So imagine that Cachao would be playing, and then he managed to steal Rene Hernandez away from the Machito Orchestra, and quite a few other players of note. Like, Mario Rivera used to play the baritone sax in Tito Rodriguez’s orchestra at the time. Also the lead alto was Bobby Porcelli. Just some great musicians.

TP: Before we play the next recording, by Tito Rodriguez, please run down the music we heard before the Eddie Palmieri track.

ANDY: Before the Eddie Palmieri thing, we heard a tune called “Maria Elana,” which Cachao wrote for his daughter on her birthday. That was recorded when Cachao was a member of the Fajardo Orchestra, which he spent some time with Jose Fajardo’s Orchestra. You can see him on the cover of some of the Panart albums.

Before that we heard the Gran Orquesta Tipica, “Mambo Tipico.” This was an album entitled The 64 Professors. What they did was they put together all the great violinists and flute
players and leaders of all the charanga bands in Cuba that were coming up during the 50s. They were very strong. They were the most popular bands. We’re talking about the America Orchestra, Enrique Jorrin, just the great figures of the music. And Cachao, his brother Jesus Lopez on piano; Ulpiano Diaz on timbales — people like that. They just all banded together to record a record of… Imagine. Full strings. It almost sounds like a symphony playing danzones. This tune was titled “Mambo Tipico.” That’s what it was. It wasn’t a danzon; it was a mambo of the genre at that time. It wasn’t the New York style mambo, which is quite a bit more frenetic and a lot faster. But the original Cuban mambo was a nice, slow-to-medium tempo kind of groove. That was a good example of it.

Before that we heard one of the Descarga albums, a tune called “Redencion,” which was written by Orestes Lopez, Cachao’s brother.

Now we’re going to play something Tito Rodriguez recorded, from a CD called Big Band Latino. I’m curious to hear this because I owned the original record when it came out on Musicorp Records, and I’m curious how they remastered it. The people at the Palladium label from Barcelona, Spain, are very meticulous. They put out some Machito records, and the sound is tremendous on them. The track we’ll hear is “Esti Es Mi Orquesta,” “This Is My Orchestra,” which was a direct cop off a Stan Kenton record by the same name — This is An Orchestra. Tito Rodriguez narrates a whole thing about having a band, and the musicians in the band — he names all the musicians and has them all play something. The arrangement itself is… Well, they adapted just the words Stan Kenton said about having a big band, and they translated that into Spanish, but then the rest of the arrangement is an original arrangement. Cachao gets a nice little taste here, and so do all the other members, some of whom are quite prominent today on the scene. This cut lasts a good 12 minutes.

[Tito Rodriguez, “Esti Es Mi Orquesta”]

ANDY: That was the Tito Rodriguez Orchestra with Cachao on the bass and all the other great musicians in that band at the time period — that was around 1964 or 1965. Tito Rodriguez gave up his big band around 1965 and moved to Puerto Rico.

And Cachao? Well, Cachao always was in demand as a player. He could fit in any situation, and got to play with all the bands really. I saw Cachao play with Machito’s orchestra. That was tremendous! I saw him play with Orchestra Broadway, most of the bands. But I guess the bands that he most impressed me with from what I saw in person was the Tito Rodriguez Orchestra, which you just heard, and the Eddie Palmieri band. To me, those were where he really got a chance to shine as a section player, as part of the rhythm section.

We’re missing quite a few records that I wish we would have had a chance to play tonight. I guess we’re going to have to do Cachao, part 2, and bring in all the stuff that we’ve been missing. There’s a bunch of live tapes also of Cachao with Manny Oquendo and Libre, with two basses. I had the honor of playing along with Cachao last year, doing the two-bass thing at SOB’s, at the Village Gate, and most recently at the Atlanta Jazz Festival. Unfortunately, I misplaced my tape from Atlanta. I was tearing the house apart looking for it to bring it here so you could hear it. But I’ll have to wait until Cachao, part 2, to play it.

Also, the records Cachao recorded in the middle 70s for the Salsoul label, which he got to play some of his early danzon arrangements, newly recorded in the studio, and he also got to do new descargas, and he brought together people like El Negro Vivar on trumpet… Those were his last record dates before El Negro passed away of a heart attack in Miami. He was one of the great trumpet soloists of Cuban music. Chocolate is on the recording also, the other daddy of the trumpet. Papaito is playing there, and Virgilio Marti — quite a few of the Cuban Mafia in New York played on those records. Unfortunately, right now, they’re not here. But we’ll get to hear them on another occasion.

But that was the first that people had heard about Cachao in quite a few years. Especially the New York scene, of which he was quite popular here. He got to play on some of the Allegre All Stars things, the Tico All Stars. He took part in quite a few recordings with Charlie Palmieri, and quite a number of sideman dates. So his work as a leader didn’t revive until around 77-78, when he recorded the albums for Salsoul under Andy Lopez’ and Andy Kaufman’s production. We’ll get to hear those on I guess our second part. Cachao is so prolific a composer and a musician and a record-maker, although as a leader there are not many recordings.

Also, there’s a few that he recorded recently, in the last couple of years, for a small label in Miami. I think the label is entitled Tania Records…as opposed to Fania records, I guess…I don’t know. But there’s some great, great contemporary Cachao bass solos on those records also. Unfortunately, again, they’re not here.

But we do have quite a bit of Cachao’s early career and we do have quite a bit of his middle career, which… A lot of people consider that some of his best work took place in the middle to late 50s in Cuba with his cohorts and contemporaries, such as Emilio Rivera. Tata Guines, the great conga virtuoso who took the conga farther than it ever had gone as a musical instrument in the 50s — he’s a very strong influence on just anybody who’s playing congas today. He was quite a part of Cachao’s entourage in Cuba during the time when they were recording those Cuban Jam Session records.

We’re going to return to the Cuba Jam Session period now and hear a town called “La Luz.”

[MUSIC: “La Luz”]

[END OF SIDE 3]

[MUSIC: “La Luz” (skip)”; “El Manicero”; “Juan Pescao”; “La Luz”; Cachao Descarga-Nino Rivera, “Potpourri de Congas”;

ANDY: That was the great Niño Rivera on tres with Cachao and his Descarga group. On bongos of course was Yeyito, and on the congas was Tata Guines, on the timbales was Guillermo Barretto, and I imagine that was Cachao’s brother playing the piano. Those are classic recordings, and they are more obscure ones, because the great album that everybody knows is the Descargas In Miniature album, which we don’t have a copy of here, but we’ll get it for part-2.

All these records were originally recorded… The first Descargas in Miniature were done… The reason they called them “In Miniature” is because they were all done for release on 45s, of which I have a few. As a matter of fact, I didn’t realize it until I started hunting through some record bins in Chicago and ran across some Panart 45s of some of the tunes from the first Descarga album. That one to me is the classic of classics. If they ever have Grammys for classic albunms, that should win one, because Cachao really put together a stellar organization, and his ideas and the way he puts little jams together, he really sets them up. They don’t just happen. He sets them up real nice.

Basically, the two great recording feats of Cachao’s career are the whole thing with the danzon and the tradition, and how he sort of was instrumental in new innovations in Cuban music. And then, the whole thing with the descargas, of which I hear that he wasn’t the very first to do a Cuban jam session — there were other albums. But the ones he put together are considered…they’re classics of the genre.

We just heard quite a few of these little Cuban descargas. There was one called “Potpourri of Congas,” which started to skip so we had to take it off. These are old records, man. Some of them I’ve played to death for years and years, and unfortunately as best as we can clean them, they still skip.

TP: We made an adjustment on “La Luz.” Meticulous cleaning job!

ANDY: I’ve been collecting records for so many years, you learn that sometimes you have to put some soap and water to it and scrub out the gunk. And they play! You’d be surprised. Vinyl is very resilient. They spring back to life.

Anyway, we’ll get back to some early Cachao. We’d like to continue this on another occasion and have Cachao Part 2 with more of his great solo work. Unfortunately we weren’t able to bring some of that material with us today. But we’re trying to give you an all-around view of how great a musician he is. Hopefully, to those who have never seen him play in public, make a definite attempt to see him in person. He is one of the most dynamic figures to watch while playing, because he does so many things. He’s an entertainer. He knows you’re watching. He’ll do some stuff to dazzle you. Watching him play whatever he’s playing, his tumbaos or whatever, and then all of a sudden he’ll just surprise you with something and make you go nuts.

We’ll hear some of Cachao’s arrangements from the Arcaño band. He’s playing bass, of course. He doesn’t get much of a chance to do any solo work on these records. But, what he does do in the rhythm section, behind the rhythm section, as an accompanist and as just an all-around player, there’s quite a bit of very interesting stuff going on. All bass players give an extra ear to this.

[MUSIC: Cachao-Arcaño, “El Nono Toca” and more titles from early 40s]

ANDY: That was the music of Arcaño Y Sus Maravillas, and that last track was called “Cubanita,” and that was Los Hermanos Rigual that were singing the front part of the tune. They were pretty well known as a trio singing in harmony. They did some work with the Machito Orchestra, particularly with Graciela on “Contigo En la Distancia.”

That’s it. We’re wrapping it up. We haven’t really, except for a couple of instances, shown Cachao in the light of being the great soloist that he is, and that’s what I think the 2nd part of our Cachao special should focus on.December 1, 1993:

[MUSIC: Libre, “Imágenes Latinas”]

TP: Tonight we’ll focus primarily on a kind of autobiography via recordings spanning 20-25 years. What was that selection?

ANDY: First, good evening, Ted. It’s a pleasure to be back here at WKCR. I have a tendency to come up and publicize my heroes. When you asked me if I want to do a show on me… I’m not one to blow my own horn on the radio. It’s not my style. But I figured that it’s time to do a show on my greatest adventures in music, which there have been quite a few over the last 25-odd years that I’ve been playing in the business.

The tune we opened with was an original, a poem by Bernardo Palombo that I put music to, and we recorded it on our second album, Manny Oquendo and Libre on Salsoul Records. They went out of business, and those records are hard to find. They haven’t come out on CD yet. Hopefully they will. This was something that we’re very well known for, which is our descarga jam kind of situations. This was pretty much an invention in the studio. We had an outline, a basic format as to how we wanted to play. That was the late, great Barry Rogers at the beginning of the tune. To me, that’s one of his nicest statements on record, that whole beginning of the tune. He really plays it. I asked him to do something specific for me, and that was to imitate a vocal. Like, guaguanco, the beginning of a vocal is what they call the diana, when a singer goes, a-nah-nah, a-nah-nah, a-nah-nah, sort of to establish the key and to establish the mood of the song. So I had Barry do that on the trombone. He did a great job. It’s like the first Latin Jazz instrumental diana for a guaguanco. It’s really great.

I thought I’d bring up different things I’ve recorded over the years with Manny Oquendo and Libre; with Palmieri – the two Palmieris, the Palmieri brothers; with Tito Rodriguez; Machito; Puente; and the latest Latin Jazz things that are going on today with Fort Apache with my brother; and Charlie Sepulveda and Hilton Ruiz; and also older stuff — stuff when I was working 20-something-odd years ago with Ray Barretto’s band and Eddie Palmieri’s band. Things like that, and occasional jazz things here and there.

TP: The first thing you’ve cued up comes from 1975-76, when you seem to have been quite busy in different bands, a time when a lot of fresh ideas were being formulated.

ANDY: Well, that time was the beginning of Libre. We had started working as a steady band on the circuit here in New York, and we had gone on some trips already — to Africa and Brazil. Now, this particular recording we’re going to hear is from that period, but it was with a friend of mine by the name of Bobby Paunetto. He’s a Bronx-raised musician, pianist, vibist. I knew him from… He went to Berklee, graduated out of Berklee School of Music, and came back with a lot of fantastic music. But I’ve always known him to play more or less the same kind of style musically; he’s always adhered to that style, even though it’s progressed harmonically and he’s a great composer. Unfortunately, he’s been kind of bedridden…not bed-ridden so much, but apartment-ridden – he’s been in his apartment quite a bit. He’s come down with multiple sclerosis, and it’s kept him from really developing his career as a player. But before came down with this illness, he recorded these two records with a lot of friends and help from family. They’re great records, and I think that eventually they’re going to be re-released on CD. This is called “Brother Will.” He wrote this in memory of his brother, who was mugged and murdered during this time period. This was his putting into music what he felt about the situation. It’s Pathfinder Records. The players are people like Todd Anderson, Billy Drewes, Ronnie Cuber is on some of this, Manny Oquendo plays on some of it, and Jerry, myself, Milton Cardona. When we were all up-and-coming, struggling young musicians in the Bronx, Bobby was one of us, and he sort of took his particular sound and concept to another level by going to school and really learning his trade, his art. When he got out of school, this is what he came up with.

[MUSIC: Bobby Paunetto, “Brother Will” (1975); Ray Barretto, “Tin Tin Deo” (1969); Eddie Palmieri, “Adoracion” (1973)]

ANDY: The thing about “Adoracion,” which was from an album called Sentido, is that the beginning part was totally improvised. What I came up with was to play harmonics on the strings with my bow. For years after that, people were asking me, “What is that sound?” This was before synthesizers were being used on recordings and stuff like that. So it’s an unearthly kind of sound, and a lot of people were freaked by it — they didn’t know what it was. But it was me playing the bow.

TP: How long were you playing with Eddie Palmieri? How did you become involved?

ANDY: I was working with Ray Barretto’s band, and we worked a lot opposite Eddie. Nicky Marrero was the timbalero in the band at the time. I was always an Eddie Palmieri fan from way back when Manny Oquendo was the timbal player in the band, and sort of the heartbeat of the Eddie Palmieri band. All through the years, the names of Manny Oquendo and Barry Rogers keep on popping up on these records, especially the records that I have anything to do with, because these are the cats — they’re the ones who were the movers and shakers of the Eddie Palmieri band. They made things happen in that band. Manny still makes things happen with Libre, and Barry was always one to make suggestions and add to the music to make it spectacular.

TP: That band was pushing the boundaries of Latin music.

ANDY: There’s some truth to that. Eddie was a good catalyst for other people to push the band. Eddie was good at sort of being the glue that made all the innovations and things happen. Some of the ideas were his, but the majority of rhythm ideas were from his players.

TP: What are some of the innovations that happened within the Eddie Palmieri bands of that time?

ANDY: Well, one was just the sound of the trombones, a band with just trombones in it, two trombones. That was kind of unique. It wasn’t original. Other bands had that sound also. But the Eddie Palmieri band, the La Perfecta, brought it to a height of musical excellence. Barry was in charge of making sure that the music was hip, and Manny was in charge of making sure the rhythm was hip — and Eddie was Eddie, doing what he does. It’s a unique sound. That band was really influential while I was growing up, as part of the soundtrack of when I was young.

TP: Since you were a toddler, has your life been suffused with music?

ANDY: Sure. My dad was a vocalist, and he used to sing with bands, and he’d take us to the rehearsals when we were 6 or 7 years old. We were listening to Cortijo y Su Combo and La Sonora Matancera and Machito… The house music, what we’d hear in the house in the day and at the family parties and stuff like that.

TP: Is that the process by which you learned to play, by hearing the music all the time and being around musicians?

ANDY: That’s sort of part of it. When you’re growing up and listening to the music, you get a feel for it. It became a normal thing to hear that kind of music. What knocked me out is my uncle had a red record. I said, “A red record? What is that?” Fantasy Records. It was Cal Tjader. That opened our ears to another way of playing than just listening to dance music and playing dance music, and tipico, Afro-Cuban-based New York music. This was Afro-Cuban, but it had jazz in it and improvisation, and the sound of the vibes was a very nice, pretty sound. I heard those records when they were new, and that was in the middle 50s. I was just 5-6-7 years old. Even back then, it was a revelation to me. Just the sound of it sounded so nice. I didn’t realize until later how much jazz influenced they were. Cal Tjader was a very heavily Milt Jackson influenced…

[END OF SIDE 1]

…in the fourth grade, playing violin. I played violin for a year-and-a-half and then switched to the bass. At that time, the charanga craze was happening in the dance music of New York — the violin sound with the flute. That was pretty prominent. I had no real aspirations to play that kind of music. From the get, we were trying to play Latin Jazz. That was our thing.

TP: Was your brother always a drummer?

ANDY: He started as a drummer, a conga player and trumpet player at the same time. We sort of started coming up in music together.

TP: Before “Adoracion,” we heard you in a Ray Barretto band playing Dizzy Gillespie’s “Tin Tin Deo.” You were young.

ANDY: I was 18. It’s from an album called Ray Barretto, Together. It’s the first album I recorded with Barretto, on the then-fledgling Fania label. Fania hadn’t hit its stride yet as the big salsa label. I lasted in the band about a year after that recording, and then I left and went with Dizzy Gillespie’s band; me and my brother joined Dizzy Gillespie’s band. We stayed there for about 8 months, toured a bit, played a lot in the city. That was a great experience playing with Diz.

TP: Had he heard you with Ray Barretto?

ANDY: He’d hired my brother first to play percussion. Then they needed a bass player who could play without getting lost in the rhythm. They had a couple of bass players play in the band, but Dizzy wasn’t satisfied with how they were approaching the rhythm, so Jerry recommended that I come in. I came in and…

TP: Was he emphasizing Afro-Cuban things, or was it the full range of what he did?

ANDY: It was a unique band. There were no traps, which is unusual for a jazz band at the time. It was Mike Longo on piano and George Davis on guitar, myself, and Jerry on congas — and Diz.

TP: No timbales.

ANDY: No. Just the congas. And it made it. For the kind of music Dizzy was playing at the time, which was… You’ve got to remember at the time, we were still immersed in the boogaloo era, kind of rhythm-and-blues with Latin rhythm combined kind of thing. Dizzy was reflecting some of that sound in his music.

There was one tune that made some noise and is still remembered these days from the album we did. It’s called “Olinga.” I think Milt Jackson covered it and a few other people covered it. So that’s one of the points in my life that I’ll always remember.

TP: It must have been a harmonic education for you.

ANDY: Of course. Matter of fact, I didn’t think I was ready to play with Diz. But he would egg us on. He was very generous with his time, as far as showing musicians what they needed to know about his music. He was just the funniest person you could ever know, and great to be with. He got along very well with all of us. To show you what kind of person he is, he met my parents when he hired us, and he’d come by the house every now and then, and my dad and him became pretty good friends. Then we were out of contact with Diz for a while because he was busy doing stuff. With the U.N. Band, they were down in Puerto Rico at the time that my dad was hospitalized. Diz found out about it and called my dad at the hospital to find out how he was and whatnot. I’ll always remember that about Diz, how nice and sweet a person he was.

TP: Also at the time, there was so much activity… Wasn’t Kenny Dorham also someone you performed with?

ANDY: Yes. We were close to Kenny for about a good year, and we were playing almost every day. At the time, they had passed…well, they had anti-poverty funds, and they set up schools. I was teaching bass, Jerry was teaching percussion, and Kenny Dorham was teaching trumpet. We didn’t have too many students, so we’d play every day, just for our own enjoyment. We got to play a few gigs, too; we formed a little Latin Jazz quintet. That was another education, because K.D. was an amazing musician. Another beautiful, sweetheart kind of person.

TP: You had the opportunity to be around two of the great trumpet masters, as well as experiencing the whole range of Latin music that one would hear at the time.

ANDY: Yes. I was also into the jazz… I got to see Trane play, one of the next-to-last gigs he ever did, at the Village Theater. That was exciting, with the Ornette Coleman Trio and John Coltrane Octet. That’s when he had Pharaoh Sanders, Alice Coltrane and Jimmy Garrison. Jimmy Garrison I got to know pretty well after Trane’s death. He lived in an apartment next to a friend of mine, and I was always paying him visits. That’s how I got to buy a bass that someone had left in his house.

TP: Who were some of your teachers? Was it pretty much through gigging and practical experience? Or did you have a more formal thing?

ANDY: The Latin side of it was pretty much self-taught and listening to the masters — listening to Bobby Rodriguez, listening to Cachao. Those were the cats. Those were my heroes. They still are.

For jazz, I was fortunate when I was in junior high school… I had the audacity to call Steve Swallow and ask if he gave bass lessons, and I took about two years of bass lessons with Steve Swallow. This is before he made the decision to switch from upright bass to the bass guitar.

TP: Was he with Art Farmer at the time?

ANDY: He was with Stan Getz, Art Farmer, and Gary Burton.

TP: Let’s get to another set of music. This one will have a more contemporary slant, and begins with a 1980 album that brought the music of you and Jerry into very clear focus. It’s from Ya Yo Me Cure on American Clave Recorda.

ANDY: This was our first attempt at putting out something more or less our sensibilities about things. Trying to improvise, trying to move the music forward, and also keep some roots to it. Guaguanco roots. We were listening to a lot of Cuban music and Cuban groups. Also we were doing a lot of jamming at my house, at New Rican Village, which was a place on Avenue A where I used to be the musical director. This particular album really reflects all this time period where we were doing a lot of jamming and a lot of playing, and we were starting to formalize kind of a direction in Latin Jazz that we wanted to move in.

[Fort Apache, “Agueybana Zemi”; Grupo Folklorico, “A Papa Y Mama”; Libre, “A Chango Y Maria”; Papo Vazquez-Milton Cardona, “Chango Y Yemeya”–Breakout-Timeless]

TP: You’ve been working with Papo for 15 years or so.

ANDY: Papo has been working with us in different situations since he was 16 years old. That was 1975 or 1976. Well, he’s like part of the family, part of our extended musical family of quite a few musicians.

TP: Like many of the musicians you’ve worked with, and you and Jerry, he’s totally fluent in the idiomatic performance of Latin Jazz and Jazz, and can merge them or code-switch easily.

ANDY: That’s part of the experience of growing up and dealing with New York City. I don’t think there’s any other place in the world where we could have so much access to musics as here in New York. When I was a teenager, I used to run to Slugs to hear Jackie McLean or to hear McCoy or hear… We were jazz fans. We had so many musical heroes that used to follow and go hear all the time. And studying history, there’s quite a few heroes that… Over the years, you start learning about who’s who and who did what in the music, in jazz and in Latin. I did quite a bit of studying. I was fortunate to acquire a large cache, they call it, of old Downbeats, and I started reading each one of them cover-to-cover just to learn about what was going on, what people were listening to and who…

TP: Reading old Blindfold Tests is an interesting exercise…

ANDY: Yeah. Like Miles Davis saying he’s going to step on Eric Dolphy’s foot the next time he sees him. Things like that. Those are funny.

But I did learn about the different critics who were around, and how they tried to formulize people’s tastes. Critics used to put Coltrane down; they used to put Charlie Parker down — things like that. I used to think that was kind of silly. Most critics are…their particular opinions… It seems to me they’re frustrated because they’re not playing. I don’t know what that is. You know, in the Latin world there aren’t too many critics. I think that’s because they’d find themselves in cement shoes at the bottom of the ocean if they say something bad about somebody! [LAUGHS]

TP: On “Chango y Yemeya,” the percussion were Steve Berrios, Milton Cardona and Patato; Papo Vazquez on trombone; Andy Gonzalez, bass; Edgardo Miranda on cuatro; Bill O’Connell, piano; and Mario Rivera.

ANDY: If you’ll notice, most of those guys were on the Ya Yo Me Cure record. Like I said, we have an extended family of musicians; we’ve all been playing together for years.

TP: Before that was “El Chango de Maria,” from Los Liberes de la Salsa. That’s from a compilation of two sessions by Libre from 1978 and 1979. Papo Vazquez, Jose Rodriguez and Barry Rogers on trombones; Manny Oquendo and Jerry Gonzalez on percussion…so many, and I’m not sure who is on which particular track.

ANDY: Before that, “A Papa Y A Mama” is by Henny Alvarez, by Grupo Folklorico Y Experimental Nuevayorquino. That was a pretty historical record for its time, because it really… When that record was released was when Fania was starting to move up and try to establish their particular sound as the commercial sound in Latin American music, in Salsa, and they were the ones who sort of pushed that name, “Salsa,” on the music, because it didn’t have that kind of title before. We sort of recorded it, and it became like an antidote to that commercial sound.

TP: Why was that sound objectionable at the time? Or not “objectionable,” but what were you reacting to?

ANDY: Well, it wasn’t a deliberate reaction to the other kinds of music that were happening. It was just a natural…it was an evolution rather than a revolution. It was something that evolved, partly because of the jams we were having in the basement of my house, including a lot of these musicians. We formulized a group to play folklore and also to experiment with new forms. We played a few college concerts with that, and out of that, with the help of Rene Lopez, we were able to get a recording contract on Salsoul. We ended up recording two albums. The first one was a 2-LP set, Concepts in Unity, and then a year later we put out Lo Dice Todo – “We Say It All.” We were true to what the title says — a Grupo Folklorico Y Experimental Nuevayorquino. It’s a folkloric group that’s experimental, and we are from New York, so it’s going to involve all the influences of New York.

It was pretty much Afro-Cuban. On the second album, we did a Brazilian tune by Jose Rodriguez. By the way, he’s in the hospital and I’d like to wish him my best. He’s not been feeling well lately. He was the powerhouse trombone player to be teamed up…

[END OF SIDE 2]

…or any kind of experimental Latin music until we decided to do this. It created quite a stir, because some of the tunes on these albums are very exciting. To this day, people ask me, “When are these things going to be released on CD?”

TP: I was about to ask you that myself.

ANDY: I have no idea. I’ve been pestering the owner of the label to re-release the stuff, and hopefully he will do so.

TP: It seems also that the notion of delving into the broad folkloric spectrum has filtered into the contemporary approach of many of your generation of Latin musicians.

ANDY: I’m sure that these records had to have had an effect. They were quite popular when they were released, and they made quite a bit of noise. Everywhere I go, people ask me about them and ask me different things about the recordings, and the tunes, and the people who played on these records. There’s been talk of a reunion, like a new recording of Grupo Folklorico Y Experimental. But that’s just talk right now. But most of the people who participated in the original recordings are still around, and it’s quite possible to get them all together. So who knows?

TP: The next set will focus on some of Andy’s musical heroes. The first he’s selected, and at the top of the apex, is Cachao, on whose music we’ve done several radio shows over the last few years.

ANDY: We’re going to hear something Cachao recorded in Cuba. This is the second version of this recording. The first he did in 1939 or 1940. It’s called “Canta Contrabajo,” which means “sing contrabass.” What it is, is Cachao’s adaptation of a bass concerto by Koussevitzy, who is a great bass virtuoso, who wrote classical music for the bass. Cachao adapted the melody and then put a montuno on it, and he made a danzon out of it, which was Cachao’s… The great body of work that he has done is mostly in danzones, original danzones, which is the national dance of Cuba. It’s classically oriented of sorts.

Cachao has composed thousands of these danzones, and they’re all great, and they’re all… I would call them little symphonies, and they have a great deal of original thought in Afro-Cuban composition. That’s why I really enjoy Cachao’s work. I learned quite a bit from listening to the way he put Cuban clave counterpoint. That’s the art of Cuban music, is the counterpoint. It’s a whole world of rhythm. That’s the world I’ve involved myself into, and I’ve been in that since I started, because I realized that’s really the study that one has to do to be able to play this music correctly, is really involve yourself of that particular aspect of the rhythm. Clave counterpoint.

TP: It’s an extension of the concept of African drumming, which is interlocking rhythms playing against each other…

ANDY: Yeah, polyrhythms, all that stuff. Anyone who studies that… If you put your mind to it, it becomes another language that you can utilize in your music or in your improvisations. This is something I intend to maybe get some literature put out on. I’m working on a bass book now. I think all bass players should study this kind of counterpoint, because it really makes for a varied approach to the instrument. It’s not only harmonic, and it’s not only 4-to-the-bar walking. It adds another dimension to your playing.

TP: We’ll play the selection from album that’s autographed to you from Cachao.

ANDY: Oh, yes. That was at the time when we were rehearsing for Cachao’s recording sessions on Salsoul. He did two albums, which I don’t have here. Also, we were preparing for a concert at Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center, and that Grupo Folklorico Y Experimental, Cachao and his Danzones, and Manny Oquendo and Libre — we all performed in concert. I was at the one of the rehearsals where I gave the album to Cachao and he signed it to me.

[MUSIC: Cachao, “Canta Contrabajo”; Arsenio Rodriguez, “Kila, Quique Y Chocolate”; Chappotin, “Los Jovenes de la Defensa”]

ANDY: That was the great Chappotin Y Sus Estrellas, with Miguelito Cuni on the vocals. That whole genre of Cuban music is one of my favorites. That’s the school that Arsenio Rodriguez sort of started, which was the cut we heard before that — “Kila, Quique Y Chocolate.” That was Arsenio’s rhythm section. It was a tune Arsenio wrote…in other words, stating that without the rhythm, there just is no Cuban music; there’s nothing to it.

The next cut we’ll hear is one of my all-time favorite cuts to play for bass players. It’s to show you what bass players can do in the music. Some musicians tell me in Salsa that they’re tired, that they play the same kind of what they call tumbao, which is a vamp. They are reluctant to move away from the vamp because they think that maybe it might spoil the rhythm or something. But this bass player… I’m not sure who it is. The bass player that played with Arsenio is LázaroPrieto at that particular time. He was quite skillful about playing what Arsenio liked to hear, which was great counterpoint kind of bass lines. The bass player with Chappotin was a guy named Sabino Peñalver, and he was another master of making up these absolutely great basslines that laid right in the pocket, and swung like mad.

Now, this next bass player, I’m not sure of his name. The band was a big band called Orquesta Sabor de Cuba. It was led by Bebo Valdés. They’re backing up a vocalist called Pio Leyva. He’s still around in Cuba, and he’s a popular singer of son montunos and guajiras and stuff like that. Now, he recorded a tune called “Pobre Nicolas,” “Poor Nicholas.” When the montuno starts on this tune, the bass player starts doing the most incredible things. It’s not all about fast or anything. He’s just laying down notes that fit right in there. I use this as an example to all my students of how to be free and play Cuban counterpoint and just be right there. Nothing is missing. It’s just laying down time in certain ways. It’s a great record.

[Bebo & Pio Leyva, “Pobre Nicolas”; Tito Rodriguez, “Me Faltabas Tu”; Machito, “Soy Salsero”]

ANDY: That was an album Machito did for Harvey Averne and the Coco label I think he was doing at the time. That was a strange record. It came not too long after Mario Bauza had departed from the Machito Orchestra. There was quite a controversy about that. It seemed that Machito had an opportunity to take a band to Europe, and there was an argument about… They couldn’t take the whole band, and Mario was very upset. He wanted the whole band to go. It ended up that they took a small ensemble to Europe. But I think Machito’s instincts were correct. What it did was open the door for Latin bands to appear in concert in the jazz concert circuit in Europe, and that opened the door for all the bands that came afterwards. Machito’s band was the first one to appear. Then Puente, and then a bunch of them. The door opened wide open for bands. Now at the jazz festivals in Europe, you’d see bands from Cuba, you’d see bands from the New York circuit, and you’d see the new Latin Jazz artists that are coming out now. Fort Apache has been there, and Libre has been there, quite a few of the artists are starting to go to Europe now.

TP: Fort Apache recorded for the German Enja label, and Messidor is a Germany-based label that’s been recording a lot of contemporary Latin music as well.

ANDY: Yes. It’s very popular over there. The festivals usually include at least one evening of Latin American or Afro-Cuban kind of entertainment. It’s become like THE popular event at most of the festivals. This album was recorded using Machito and part of his band — unfortunately, without Mario Bauza. It’s just strange because it came out around the time this happened. To me it was kind of shocking that Mario would leave the Machito Orchestra to go on his own, because Mario didn’t start his band until years later.

TP: The last tracks on the set featured you with Tito Rodriguez and Machito — hits you did with other people. How long did you work with Machito? What was he like?

ANDY: I’ve worked with the Machito band as a sub, on and off, since around 1970. It was always a pleasure for me. I’ve subbed with the Tito Puente band, too. What I get a kick out of is playing the classic charts — the classic Machito charts, the classic Tito Puente charts. A big feather in my cap, and I’ll never forget it, was the recording I did with Tito Rodriguez. I was 19 or 20. I had been working… I was working with Palmieri, so I was about 21. What happened was that Palmieri was playing a dance opposite the Machito band, and the Machito band was backing up Tito Rodriguez for a special set of music that Tito had, like a show set of all his hits. The bass player who was playing with the Machito band had arthritis in his fingers, and he couldn’t be counted on at that moment. He was a great bass player, but just old, and couldn’t be counted on to really cut the chart for the Tito Rodriguez show part of the thing. So they asked me to do it. I sight-read the music perfectly, which was to my surprise, and Tito liked it so much that he asked me to do the recording session. The album is entitled Algo Nuevo, and it was Tito Rodriguez and Louis Ramirez, another figure who passed away recently. To this day I really appreciate the opportunity to have recorded with Tito Rodriguez, who is one of my big heros, too. Also, I enjoy the sound of the recording. It was recorded in Media Sound, on 57th Street. It was like a church, a big room. The sound is pretty nice on that record.

Continuing with the sessions… I’ve done quite a few sessions for other bands as a bass player. I just picked out a few that I could find at the moment and ones I kind of liked. This is one of the earlier things that I did as a session player. I was with Ray Barretto’s band. This is Ray Barretto’s rhythm section backing up Justo Betancourt and Johnny Pacheco. This is a nice tune that I enjoyed when it came out, “Mango, Piña Y Marañón.”

[MUSIC: Justo Betancourt and Johnny Pacheco, “Mango, Piña Y Marañón”; Totico Y Sus Rumberos, “What’s Your Name?”; Libre, “Little Sunflower” (1983); Steve Turre-Dizzy, “Toreador” (1993); Astor Piazzolla, “Street Tango”]

[END OF SIDE 3, INTO SIDE 4]

TP: All featured Andy and are from recordings made during the past 10 years.

ANDY: [Astor] was another feather in my cap. I was always a fan of Astor Piazzolla, because he was the…I guess you would call him the rebel of the Tango. Some innovations that he did were not quite accepted by the Argentinean diehard Tango fanatics, but I thought it was great music. When they called me to do this session, I was like, “Wow, I don’t believe it; I’m going to record with this guy, and he’s one of my heroes.” Another hero. I was lucky to record with the man. He passed away this past year. I recorded on his last recording session, which I think will come out this year sometime.

“Toreador” from Sanctified Shells featured Dizzy Gillespie’s last recorded solo. Carmen Turre, Steve’s mother, played castanets. She plays them very well, and she knows her music. She was on it, boy. She was telling Steve, “Listen, in bar 39 of this, do you think that rhythm is correct?” She’s really knowledgeable. She’s an amazing lady. I hear there’s another shell album in the works due to the popularity of this one, so I’m looking forward to it. I’ve appeared with Steve and this group, the Sanctified Shells, in a few concerts. We just did the San Francisco Jazz Festival recently.

Our version of “Little Sunflower” is already a classic. A lot of people told me it should have gotten a Grammy when it came out. [Montuno records] We have a new one coming out soon, Manny Oquendo and Libre, “A Hora.” It should be in the stores within a month or so.

Totico Y Sus Rumberos did that old doo-wop standard.

[MUSIC: Charlie Sepulveda-David Sanchez, “Nina’s Mood”; Fort Apache Band, “Interior Motive” (from Moliendo Café]