The LIFE and MIRACLES of PAQUITO D'RIVERA

Latin Beat Magazine, Dec, 1998 by Luis Tamargo

The album's first track, La Moracha (1905), is the type of early Argentine tango which was denounced by the New York Mail in the 1910s as "an immodest and barely suggestive exercise tending to lewdness and immorality." Such critics never suspected that La Morocha (meaning "the darkskinned female" in Argentina and Uruguay) would be someday interpreted by a full-string orchestra and a rhythm section led by a soprano sax player.

Moralist New Yorkers, however, were more tolerant of the "international" style of Latin American songs exemplified by Ay, ay, ay (1915). It was written by the Chilean globetrotter Osmán Pérez Freíre, but the new version features such non-Chilean instruments as Aquiles Baez's Venezuelan cuatro and Roberto Perera's Paraguayan harp.

Such folk instruments are not found in the remake of Tu Mariposa (1920), the first paseo vallenato ever recorded. Notice how D'Rivera's soprano replaces the traditional function of the accordion, while blending magnificently with a lively trio of acoustic guitars and Luis Conte's rhythmically correct percussion. Even justo Almario, the world's foremost exponent of instrumental vallenato (according to Gabriel García Márquez), would be proud of this musical butterfly.

Another tropical path is explored in Vereda Tropical (1936), a song authored by Gonzalo Curiel, who belonged to an exclusive Mexican elite of prominent bolero composers which included the likes of Agustín Lara and Consuelo Velásquez. Vereda Tropical was popularized by Toña La Negra, but said jarocha (Veracruz-born) diva never imagined that it would be performed instrumentally, many years later, by a Cuban clarinetist and a Venezuelan guitarist. Such wonderful duets are hard to come by these days.

Speaking of bolero icons, it must be noted that Acércate Más (1940) was penned by Osvaldo Farrés, who has been described by our colleague, Cristóbal Díaz Ayala, as "a magnificent illustrator with the gift of composing gorgeous and contagious melodies. " Like Agustín Lara, Farrés was able to read music, but he couldn't even play the piano. However, he got much closer to fame and fortune when he hosted the popular Cuban television program Bar Melódico de Osvaldo Farrés. Shortly after Fidel Castro's advent to power, Farrés' melodic bar ran out of booze and melodies, and the famous composer died in exile.

A similar dictatorial plague afflicted the population of the Dominican Republic in 1957, when Luis Kalaff wrote Amor Sin Esperanza. Kalaff devoted most of his compositional efforts to the merengue (a dance form heavily sponsored and promoted by the ruling tyrant, Rafael Trujillo), but occasionally managed to deviate from the party line, for the sake of sanity, and compose a few romantic songs about hopeless love in the former Ciudad Trujillo.

A collection of romantic Latin American tunes would be incomplete without a bossa nova, a carioca genre represented on this occasion by Corcovado. It was coauthored by Tom Jobim and Newton Mendoca in 1960, when they were known to hang out at a few bohemian watering holes located on a narrow street nicknamed Beco das Garrafas (Bottles Lane) due to the adjacent neighbors tendency to disperse the noisy, late night crowds below by throwing bottles at them.