Mambo Kings: Mario Bauzá and the origins of Afro-Cuban and Latin Jazz

With tickets on sale for La Linea, the London Latin Music Festival which returns to the capital on 12 April; Pizza Express Soho’s annual Latin Music Fest already booking artists for later in the year; and Ezra Collective winning the Mercury Prize (the first jazz group to do so, beguiling the awards ceremony audience with the hypnotic Latin rhythms of ‘Victory Dance’), the conversation between jazz and Latin rhythms suddenly seems to have gone up a few notches. The closer you look, the more you realise the extent to which this compelling combination continues to be a winner with audiences. Largely unreported, but perpetually fashionable – a quick snapshot of the current London scene might include the proudly feminist Colectiva, the accomplished Alex Wilson and Omar Puente, Eliane Correa and La Evolución, the New Regency Orchestra and it’s hard to stop there – Latin jazz is exotic, technicolour music that seems to demand a physical response in return: to move your body in time to the music, and to dance.

Classical music is even getting in on the act with Arturo Márquez’s (b.1950) Conga del Fuego recently performed at the Hollywood Bowl, in Carnegie Hall and at the annual New Year’s Concert in Germany for Arte Television.

And while it took an infectious Cuban la conga rhythm to finally conquer those citadels of classical musical probity, the influence of Latin music has long been felt in rhythm and blues, rock, country music and, especially, jazz.

It was in the latter half of the 19th century New Orleans that composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who had spent time in Cuba and Puerto Rico, helped popularise the habanera. WC Handy was one who picked up on this with his habanera section in ‘St. Louis Blues’ while pianist Jelly Roll Morton claimed that without the Spanish tinge, “you will never get the right seasoning for jazz.”

The higher standard of living in the US was a magnet for Cubans and Puerto Ricans, who migrated there in considerable numbers in the early years of the 20th century, turning New York into a major Latin music centre. American recording companies became interested, and helped trigger a 1920s Tango craze followed by a rumba craze in the 1930s.

Among the many musicians who came from Cuba was Mario Bauzá, born in Havana, on 28 April 1911. Bauzá was a child prodigy, who at the age of 15, graduated from the Havana Conservatory of Music to play in the Havana Symphony Orchestra, where he once performed under the baton of guest conductor Leopold Stokowski. In 1926, he played a one-month engagement in New York as clarinettist with the Orquesta Antonio Maria Romeu.

During that trip, he heard the ensembles of Fletcher Henderson, Charlie Johnson and the Paul Whiteman Orchestra: “It was jazz,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. I heard Frankie Trumbauer and bought an alto sax – I wanted to be part of it.”

In 1930, he visited New York again, this time as a member of the Orquesta Don Azpiazú, whose huge hit ‘Peanut Vendor’ had just swept America. When Azpiazú returned to Cuba, Bauzá stayed in New York.

By 1933, he was playing trumpet for Hy Clark’s Missourians at the Savoy Ballroom, when he caught the attention of Chick Webb, then universally recognised as the finest drummer in jazz, who offered him a trumpet chair in his band.

It was a dream come true: “When I went with Chick, they say, ‘What do you know about jazz? You don’t know a damn thing! You better get ready, he’s a big man.’ But Chick taught me, he couldn’t read no music, but he taught me. He had learned every arrangement by ear. He rehearsed me by myself, to get the jazz phrasing – what a man, he was incredible.”

Within months Bauzá was playing lead trumpet in Webb’s band and, by 1936, he was its musical director. The occasion he remembers most vividly during his five-year stay with Webb was when they took on the Benny Goodman Orchestra in a battle of the bands at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom. It was the high spot of the Swing Era – the 4,000-strong audience broke the Savoy attendance record, another 5,000 fans were turned away, and mounted police were called out to control the crowd. “It was helluva night,” recalled Bauzá.

But Webb’s band was owned and financed by manager Moe Gale, and were notoriously badly paid. “If I was on a high salary I wouldn’t mind [all the work I had to do], but nothing. These people were making a lot of money, they exploit you.” When he left Webb, word of his musicianship preceded him, and he was hired to lead Cab Calloway’s trumpet section.

When he left Calloway in 1941, he joined his brother-in-law Frankie Grillo (who'd married Frankie’s sister Estella a few years earlier); known as Machito, Grillo had formed his own Cuban band the year before and had been urging Bauzá to join him to take over the musical side.

“When one marries Afro-Latin rhythms and good musical knowledge one gets fascinating music,” said Machito, who was born in 1909 and died in 1984. Recordings from that year, such as ‘Tingo Talanga’, ‘Sopa de Pichon’ and ‘Que Vengan Los Rumberos’ (that one moves from one side of the clave rhythm to the other, as in 3-2 to 2-3 and back) with a youthful Tito Puente on percussion, sold well to Latin audiences. But Bauzá had his eye on the bigger picture.

His experience with Webb and then Calloway had planted the idea of combining the power of the big bands with Cuban music. While Latin music was popular with the American public, it was through polite, formal Cuban acts such as Don Azpiazu, Alberto Socarrás, Antonio Maria Romeu, Alberto Iznaga’s Orquesta Siboney (later Orquesta de Alberto Iznaga), Noro Morales, Vincent Lopez, violinist Xavier Cugat and others.
In 1943, Machito was called up for military service, and Bauzá took the opportunity of seeing how far he could take his ideas. In May that year, he took the montuno from ‘El Botellero’, which he developed into ‘La Tangá’, with full blown jazz solos and jazz riffs; it became the band’s theme. It is generally regarded as the beginning of Afro-Cuban Jazz. It was finally recorded in December 1948 by Norman Granz, a five-minute performance released in 1949 as one side of a 12-inch 78, with Flip Phillips soloing on tenor.

On 24 January 1947, New York DJ Fred Robbins organised a concert to feature Machito’s Afro-Cubans at New York’s Town Hall with Stan Kenton and his Orchestra. Kenton was already intrigued by the potential of combining Latin music and jazz, and had been checking out the music of Xavier Cugat when he was told: “You should go and hear Machito – he’s the real thing.” Thrilled by what heard, Kenton said, “Machito plays the greatest Cuban jazz in America today.”

Three months later Kenton recorded ‘Machito’ in tribute, and his hit ‘Peanut Vendor’, featuring a five-man trumpet section, played an important role in awakening public awareness to Latin jazz. After the Town Hall concert, Machito and his Afro-Cubans became one of the hottest bands in New York, holding court at the Palladium Ballroom at Broadway and 53rd Street, alternating with Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez.

Another vital role in ushering Afro-Cuban jazz into the mainstream was played by the previously-mentioned Norman Granz, impresario and owner of Verve, who recorded Charlie Parker with Machito. The Machito/Parker sessions, on 20 December, 1948 – ‘No Noise Parts I and II’, and ‘Mango Mangue’ – and January 1949 – ‘Okiedoke’ – represent a high spot in the early merger of jazz and Latin music.
“Bird played the tunes right away,” recalled Machito. “Memorising each number after looking at the music once, and without a single mistake.” Parker worked and sat in with Machito often during this fertile period, Bauzá saying, “We loved him. He was there so often, he was considered a member of the band.”

Parker, together with trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, were key figures in bringing the nascent bebop revolution to the fore in the 1940s, with Dizzy Gillespie forming his own bebop big band in 1946. The band made its Carnegie Hall debut on 29 September 1947 – ‘A Concert of the New Jazz’ – featuring a major Latin composition by George Russell called ‘Cubana Be/Cubana Bop’ featuring Chano Pozo on congas. Recommended to Gillespie by Bauzá, who had first hired him for Machito’s band, Afro-Cuban jazz would subsequently become a strong strand of Gillespie’s performances, popularising ‘Manteca’ and ‘Tin Tin Deo’, both written by Gillespie and Chano Pozo, and recording the five-part ‘Manteca Suite’ with his big band in 1954.

Machito’s orchestra was now flying high, as a series of sessions for Granz in 1948 and 1949 attest. Collectively reissued as Mucho Macho: Machito and his Afro-Cuban Salseros in 1978, they capture the band in its prime, such as ‘Asia Minor’, a blockbuster hit and best seller in 1949 that led to Columbia signing the band in 1951. With Columbia, numbers like ‘Negro Nanamboro’, ‘Carambola’ and ‘Sambia’ are the realisation of Bauzá’s vision combining the power of American big bands with the drama of Afro-Cuban rhythms and forms, with a four-man trumpet section echoing Stan Kenton’s in power and voicings. And with hits like ‘Mambo Inn,’ co-written by Bauzá, and ‘Holiday Mambo’ written and arranged by Chico O’Farrill, Machito can lay serious claim – as his publicity at the time stated – to have helped trigger the Mambo craze of the 1950s. But for Bauzá, the finest album he was involved with during his time with Machito was the December 1957 album Kenya (later re-released as Latin Soul Plus Jazz), a high-spot of Afro-Cuban jazz, spotlighting soloists such as Cannonball Adderley, Johnny Griffin and Bert Varsalona: “There are four of my tunes on that, he said. “To me that’s the best Afro-Cuban jazz album that has been made, authentic jazz music and Cuban rhythms, everything came out right.”

Chico O’Farrill was a talented arranger and composer, who seemed to burst onto the late 1940s jazz scene masterminding Benny Goodman’s excursion into bebop, and subsequently his Afro-Cuban arrangements swim through jazz of this period – ‘Gone City’ for Machito; his arrangement of ‘Cuban Episode’ for Stan Kenton; which prompted Norman Granz to commission O’Farrill to write ‘Afro-Cuban Jazz Suite’ for Machito in 1950, featuring Charlie Parker.

This brilliantly-orchestrated five-part suite – ‘Canción’, ‘Mambo’, ‘6/8’, ‘Jazz’ and ‘Rumba Abieta’ – was the most adventurous Afro-Cuban composition to date, with Parker at his brilliant best on ‘Canción’ and ‘Jazz’. The resulting album sales were tremendous and gave considerable exposure to the Afro-Cuban movement and led to the formation of the Chico O’Farrill Orchestra.

Outstanding albums for RCA and Columbia followed and in 1975, Afro Cuban Moods, written, conducted and arranged by O’Farrill (and produced by Bauzá), for Dizzy Gillespie and the Machito Orchestra earned a Grammy nomination. In the 1990s O’Farrill appeared weekly at Birdland with his big band, and after his death in 2001, his son and pianist Arturo continued the tradition into the present.

By the end of the 1940s, several name jazz musicians were recording Afro-Cuban pieces – trumpeter Howard McGhee recorded ‘Cubop City’ with Machito which was ‘Tangá’ under another name; James Moody borrowed Chano Pozo from Gillespie for ‘Cu-Ba’; Kenny Dorham explored Afro-Cuban music on several Blue Note recordings; while Grant Green and George Shearing both recorded ‘Mambo Inn’, with Shearing adding conga player Armando Peraza to tour and record with his famous quintet. Peraza had been a member of Machito’s Afro-Cubans in 1949 and in 1954 he recorded the Afro-Cuban album Ritmo Caliente! (Fantasy) with Cal Tjader. He later joined Santana (in 1972), and during his 20-year stay was influential in helping shape Afro-Cuban rhythms within the band’s style.

Popular Latin bands led by Tito Puente, Tito Rodriguez, Perez Prado, Mongo Santamaria, Candido Camero, Bebó Valdez, Eddie Palmieri and Cachao Lopez remained in demand through the 1950s, 1960s and beyond; and to varying degrees, they all navigated a course that largely stayed in touch with both Afro-Cuban rhythms and jazz. Machito continued making great music into the 1980s, while Mario Bauzá formed his highly acclaimed Afro-Cuban Orchestra and, going back to where it all began, recorded a definitive version of ‘Tangá’ in 1992.

The next generation of Cuban musicians exploded at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1979. This marked the American debut of Irakere, a Latin ‘supegroup’ founded in 1973 by pianist Chucho Valdés. Irakere created a sound that mixed jazz, European traditional music, funk and even rock with the Afro-Cuban tradition, and many of the best Cuban musicians have played in the band during the past decades, including Paquito D'Rivera, Arturo Sandoval, Carlos Averhoff, Jorge Varona, Germán Velazco, Enrique Plá, Carlos Emilio Morales, Carlos del Puerto and Jorge Alfonso. The Columbia label was on hand record the Newport concert, (as well as a Montreux Festival date the same year) and if there is anything more rhythmically and musically exciting in Latin jazz than the opening two numbers of the resulting album, Irakere – ‘Juana Mil Ciento’ and ‘Ilya’ – the world is yet to learn about them.

In 1985, the intersection of East 111th St and Third Avenue in El Barrio in Spanish Harlem was named 'Machito Square' by Mayor Ed Koch; and the late John Storm Roberts, internationally recognised as the 'oracle' of Latin music, was able to write, “Of the 163 popular melodies given more than one million performances between 1940 and 1980, 23 – almost one in seven – were Latin in origin, and most of them Cuban. Only half as many jazz, blues, and soul numbers combined and 19 country songs made the same list.”

Latin music, and Afro Cuban jazz in particular, has become a major thread in jazz that continues to inspire and excite, the musical tradition living on in the present at the hands of inspirational masters such as Danilo Pérez, Gonzalo Rubalcaba, Miguel Zenón, Eliane Elias, Arturo Farrill, Magos Herrera and Claudia Acuña.