Eddie Palmieri on Cuban music
“There is no other rhythm on the planet that excites me like the structures that came out of Cuba. I learned them intuitively and then I learned them scientifically.”
– Eddie Palmieri
A night at the Palladium Ballroom
The clip starts out with the recollections of two Palladium Ballroom dancers. Then we go into a short film made about the place in 1955.
Some perspective for younger people:
1. Film was still an expensive and unwieldy technology back in the 1950s so rough as this footage is, it’s great someone made this film of the place in its prime.
2. If everyone looks overly dressed up, this is how people put themselves together in those days when they went out. The jeans and t-shirt, ditch-digger-on-a-break look was still a decade away.
What was the Palladium Ballroom?
Like CBGBs for punk rock and the Birdland for bebop, the Palladium was THE place for Latin music in New York City in the 1950s.
It was a second-floor dance hall at the corner of 53rd Street and it was huge. It could fit one thousand dancing couples.
How it started
Latin orchestras shared the bill with mainstream jazz orchestras throughout New York City in the 40s and 50s, but “Latin” places were all uptown in Spanish Harlem and the Bronx.
In 1948, event promoter Federico Pagani approached the Palladium’s owners Max and Helen Hyman with an idea to bring new energy to the place which at that point was in commercial decline.
The idea was a Sunday matinee featuring Latin music exclusively. At that time, this was the first club to try this “downtown.”
From the opening night, it was a huge success with dancers, but there was an initial glitch. Max Hyman was worried about the number of black and Latino dancers who were showing up.
While New York did not have the same kind of Jim Crow laws of the south, there was an informal segregation especially downtown.
Pagani reportedly said to Hyman words to the effect: “What do you care more about black or green?”
Hyman chose the green and New York City’s (perhaps America’s) fully first integrated dance hall came into being and Latin music took over the Palladium seven days a week.
What it was like
The music was non-stop and off-the-hook starting with the orchestras of the “Big Three”: Machito, Tito Rodríguez, and Tito Puente.
Arsenio Rodríguez performed there as did Celia Cruz, Beny Moré, Pérez Prado, La Lupe, and countless others.
Mass dance classes were given to the crowds that attended.
Jazz cats loved the place and sometimes sat in with the featured bands.
A short list of those seen there: Dizzy Gillespie, George Shearing, Cal Tjader, Buddy Rich, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Gene Krupa, Dave Brubeck. Paul Desmond and Joe Morello.
Celebrities loved it too: Marlon Brando, who occasionally sat in on bongos; Sammy Davis, Jr., Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, George Hamilton and Jerry Lewis.
The only people who didn’t like it were the top brass at the NYPD who, in their role as the scourge of black culture in NYC, harassed the place constantly.
A huge drug raid in 1961 led to the Palladium losing its liquor license, a financially crippling blow. That and cultural shifts brought in by rock and roll led the its closing in 1966.
The feature length film, The Mambo Kings, recreates the Palladium’s golden years Hollywood style.
Bronx-born Orlando Marin, a Palladium orchestra leader still performs regularly in the New York City area. If you get a chance to see him, do not miss it.
– Ken McCarthy
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Machito and his Afro-Cuban Orchestra
Where and when he was be born isn’t clear. Some scholars say he was born in Tampa. Others day Havana. Some put the year at 1909, others say 1912. Still others day 1915.
What isn’t a mystery is that he was raised in the Jesús María district of Havana and his foster sister Graciela (featured below) was born August 23, 1915.
What also isn’t a mystery is the impact he and his band had on world music.
Like so many accomplished musicians of that era, Machito moved to New York City (in his case in 1937) to take advantage of the opportunities in the Big Apple.
In 1940, he started his own orchestra The Afro-Cubans, one of the most important units in jazz and Cuban music history.
First, the band’s name: The Afro-Cubans.
This was a radical name for the time.
From a perspective, the term “Afro-American” was not accepted as common usage by the New York Times until 1990. So Machito and his musicians were fifty years ahead of the social curve.
Racism and the accompanying failure to acknowledge the power and virtue of African culture was as common and virulent in the Cuba of the 1930s as it was in the US.
Calling his band The Afro-Cubans was the 1940 equivalent of “We’re black and we’re proud” at a time when making such statements were rare at best and dangerous as worst.
Second, Machito’s orchestra was extraordinary by every conceivable standard and moved the art forward not only for Cuban music but for American jazz as well.
Though Dizzy Gillespie is rightly credited with helping the cause of Latin music in the US jazz world, “Manteca” wasn’t recorded until 1947 and New York City jazz musicians had been digging Machito’s music for years by then.
Also, the introduction of Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo was made by another giant of Cuban music, the incomparable Mario Bauzá who was Machito’s musical partner and music director.
We’re just scratching the surface here (as we do with all these brief profiles.)
Start with these clips and dig deeper with your own research and you’ll surely be richly rewarded.
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Benny Moré
So many great musicians, so little time.
Are you getting the sense that Cuba has produced a lot of great musicians?
Keep in mind that in this series we’re only able to show the tip of the tip of the iceberg and we’re still nowhere near covering all the ABCs.
Today we focus on the incomparable Benny Moré: singer, bandleader, composer.
Let’s start with the end: When Moré passed away at the too-early age of 43 in 1963 in Havana, over 100,000 fans attended his funeral.
Bartolomé Maximiliano Moré started life in a rural town in central Cuba. Family lore says his maternal great-great grandfather was the son of the king of a Congo tribe.
At 17, he cut sugar cane and sold fruit and medicinal herbs and used his earnings to buy his first real guitar.
Rising slowly up the show business ladder in Havana, a gig brought him to Mexico City where he changed his name to “Benny” and decide to stay awhile. In time he hooked up with Pérez Prado and appeared on 22 recordings as the singer for Prado’s orchestra.
As we’ve pointed out in the bio of Prado those were heady, prosperous days for Cuban musicians in Mexico City which in addition to being a big market unto itself was an ideal launching pad into the greater Latin American music market.
In 1952, after establishing his fame throughout the Spanish-speaking Americas, Moré returned home to Cuba where, surprisingly, he was not well known. Radio appearance and public performances helped change that.
When Moré put together his legendary Banda Gigante (Big Band) it was a near-instant hit. It was so popular that in addition to playing to sold out crowds throughout Cuba, he toured Latin America and the US where the band was invited to play at the Oscars. At home in Havana, the band dominated two of the city’s key music spots: La Tropical and El Sierra.
Though he never learned to read or write music, Moré was able to convey what he wanted to his arrangers by singing the parts to them.
After the Revolution, Moré unwilling to leave “mi gente” (my people), remained in Cuba until his death in 1963.
Note: There are a wide variety of opinions as to who the piano player is in this clip. If anyone knows for sure (fact, not opinion please), we’d love to know and will publish it here.
Playlist:
1. “Me Voy Pa’ Moron”
2. “Bemberen”
3. “Tuñare”
4. “El Baile del Sillon”
5. “Montura y Caballo”
6. “Cienfuegos”
7. “Baila Mi Son”
8. “Bonito y Sabrosa”
– Ken McCarthy
Jazz on the Tube
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
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Pérez Prado
Pianist, drummer, singer, dancer, composer, band leader
Like many Cuban musicians, Matanzas-born Dámaso Pérez Prado left the island in search of greener commercial pastures.
In his case, he moved to Mexico City in 1949 which was experiencing an economic and social boom.
Mexico had a large motion picture industry at the time which means that Prado who was very popular had ample opportunities to have his work documented on film.
It’s a bit hard to find clips of him that are not part of elaborate Hollywood-style spectacles, but we found this one above.
The video below is example of the kind of dance and staging that accompanied his Mexican film work.
“Qué rico el mambo” aka Mambo Jambo
Lilia Prado, the popular Mexican actress and dancer (“the Mexican Marilyn Monroe”), is featured in this clip. Despite sharing a last name, she and Pérez were not married.
“Prado”, a fairly common surname, means “meadow” in Spanish.
Our young friends from Cuba play “Qué rico el mambo” at the United Place in New York City on their first trip to the US for an audience of school kids.
– Ken McCarthy
Jazz on the Tube
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
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Bebo Valdés
Introducing Dionisio Ramón Emilio Valdés Amaro (aka Bebo Valdés).
We’ve paid a lot of attention to the African roots of Cuban music, and rightly so.
In this video, we tip our hat to the Spanish father too.
(“Want to understand Cuba? Remember: Spanish father, African mother.”)
Of course, Spain (and Portugal) had its own African influences. In 711, a raiding force of Berbers from northwestern Africa invaded the Iberian peninsula and held various portions of it for over 700 years creating a culture unique in Europe.
In this video, Spanish cantaor (flamenco singer) Diego Ramón Jiménez Salazar (Diego el Cigala) performs with Bebo Valdés.
Who was Bebo?
Pianist, bandleader, composer, and arranger Dionisio Ramón Emilio Valdés Amaro was born on October 9, 1918 in Quivicán, Cuba a small city in the western part of the island, in the south and facing the Caribbean Sea.
He began his professional career as a pianist in Havana night clubs in the 1940s and in the 1950s was leading his own orchestra, holding down a regular slot at the Tropicana and backing singers like Benny Moré and Pío Leyva.
Valdés played an important role in adapting the mambo to the big band format (it was previously performed by charanga orchestras.)
He also created his own rhythm to compete with Pérez Prado’s mambo, which he called the batanga.
Valdés was a key player in the Afro-Cuban jazz scene in Havana and worked with producer Norman Granz to document the movement in the early 1950s.
Career rebirth
In 1960 Bebo left the island and went into exile, spending some time in Mexico and the US before eventually settling in Stockholm, Sweden to be with the love of his life there.
Off the music industry’s radar and a representative of “old” music from a country that was essentially commercially blockaded, Bebo’s work fell out of public awareness.
But his gift, continuously cultivated in Stockholm hotel piano lounges, proved to be too brilliant to be forgotten.
When he was 76, Cuban saxophone player Paquito D’Rivera produced a session with him called “Bebo Rides Again” and captured it on CD.
At 82, Fernando Trueba had the good judgement to include Bebo in the film “Calle 54” which brought his art to a new and wider audience.
When he was 85, he and Diego El Cigala recorded the album “Lágrimas Negras” (Black Tears) and toured together widely.
Here Bebo plays with a group of young Brazilian musicians in the film “The Miracle of Candeal” (El Milagro de Candeal.)
“The Miracle” is about the Brazilian favela (ghetto) of Candeal, where the young residents gave up their guns for musical instruments under the leadership of rocker Carlinhos Brown.
– Ken McCarthy
Jazz on the Tube
P.S. Our unique programming is made possible by help from people like you. Learn how you can contribute to our efforts here: Support Jazz on the Tube
Thanks.
Stan Getz