Los pioneros de la salsa - música latina - TT: The Pioneers of SALSA - TA: latin music

Latin Beat Magazine, Dec, 2001 by Max Salazar

During the same time period, Latinos who danced to Cuban rhythms found a new idol in Cuban blind guitarist Arsenio Rodríguez, when RCA released his Yuca de Catalina. During the mid '30s, Rodríguez played guitar for El Sexteto Boston and Conjunto Bellamar before forming his band in 1940. Miguelito Valdés once said that Arsenio was the first to utilize the conga drum in Cuban popular music. It was trumpeter Benitín Bustillo who inspired Arsenio to create the son montuno, which is actually Orestes López's danzón-mambo rhythm. Bustillo confessed to Cuban music historian Obdulio Morales in 1953, that he copied Antonio Arcaño's flute riffs for trumpet, which at first Arsenio called "el diablo." Later, he called it son montuno, a rhythm that would make him popular throughout Cuba and many parts of the world.

In May, 1946, Afro-Cuban drummer/dancer Chano Pozo left Cuba for the United States. Mario Bauzá introduced Chano to bandleader Dizzy Gillespie; this was the start of Latin American percussion instruments being utilized in jazz bands. On December 27, 1947, Chano Pozo stole the show from Dizzy Gillespie at Town Hall when he put on an incredible chanting and drumming show. One of the tunes he drummed to on that historic evening has become the jazz classic, Manteca.

On January 24, 1948, The Machito Orchestra formally introduced Afro-Cuban jazz at New York City's Town Hall. Thus, the Afro-cubop era began. Half of Machito's 1948 recordings featured jazz trumpeter Howard McGhee, alto saxophonist Charlie Parker and the tenor saxes of Brew Moore and Flip Phillips. It was the November, 1948 Roost label recording of Cubop City with McGhee and Moore fronting the Machito band that indicated this new rhythm was going to catch on.

Half way through 1949, a new Afro-Cuban rhythm caught fire and started another music trend. Cuba's Pérez Prado's Mambo #5 became a hit and officially kicked off the Mambo era. For years now, Pérez Prado has wrongly been accused of taking credit for Orestes López's mambo. Lopez's mambo for the danzón is arranged differently than Prado's, which is for brass instruments. These are two different mambos with different syncopation, only the name "mambo" is the same. Prado's mambo became popular with West Coast dancers. In New York, dancers preferred Machito's Asia Minor, Tito Puente's Abaniquito, Noro Morales' 110th Street & 5th Avenue, Damirón & Chappuseaux's Anabacoa, and Miguelito Valdés Harlem Special. The New York mambo, which subsequently became the Palladium mambo, became the accepted mambo in town.

In 1952, Cuban trumpeter/composer Arturo "Chico" O'Farrill kept the Afro-Cuban jazz movement alive with his Afro Cuban Jazz Suite. It was the year that mambo reached its peak and enabled two Puerto Rican bandleaders, Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez, to rise to superstar status. By mid 1955, the chachachá exploded on the New York scene by way of La Playa Sextet's El Jamaiquino, on Dick Ricardo Sugar's radio show. According to Cuban flutist/bandleader José Fajardo, the birth of the chachachá occurred in 1952 when Orquesta América was playing violinist Enrique Jorrin's Silver Star. While the dancers moved to the scratching of the güiro, their shoes scraped the floor to the rhythmic cadence of One... Two... One, Two, Three. Then, quite unexpectedly, Orquesta América's chorus sang "chachachá," the sound similar to the güiro and the scraping shoes. Thus, the chachachá was invented.