Toca, Alfredo, Toca: Alfredo De La Fe: violinist Alfredo De La Fe is back with beautiful music and a message

Latin Beat Magazine, March, 2003 by Jesse Varela

Last winter, violinist Alfredo De La Fé sent sonic shivers through Café Cocomo in San Francisco as he performed two electrifying sets with Johnny Polanco & Conjunto Amistad. I first saw him play in the 1970s with Típica 73 at César's Latin Palace in San Francisco and was impressed with his solos that fused jazz, rock and traditional charanga. He revolutionized the violin in Latin music with his wah-wah pedal and echoplex.

Unfortunately, his ordeal with drugs in the 1980s appeared to be yet another case of gifted talent circumvented by addiction. Living in Colombia and Italy for the last 20 years, he is back home in New York City, clean and sober. With a legal pardon, the prodigal instrumentalist is ready to tell his story to help others avoid the pitfall of drugs. To that end he has become a drug counselor and founded Latino Musicians Against Drugs.

"My message is that you can get off drugs," he said after his last set at Cocomo. "I started using them at a young age because all the musicians around me used them. It was the "in" thing to do. Now the young breed doesn't use them. It's good to see that. But we still need to do prevention so the young ones don't repeat our mistakes."

De La Fé came out and joined Polanco and crew on Decidete. The 49-year old jumped immediately to the dance floor and played his wireless violin among the appreciative crowd.

Polanco and De La Fé were a perfect fit with the potent Conjunto Amistad swing as he engaged improvisational moments with flautist Art Webb. Massive is the only way to describe the "trombanga" roaring elephant trombones with "las cuerdas del terror," Anthony Blea and Dan Weinstein.

At age seven, young De La Fé was introduced to the violin. His formidable talent led to studies at the Amadeo Roldán Conservatory in Havana, Cuba. His family moved to New York City in 1965, where he won a scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music.

Around 1966, he joined flautist José Fajardo and his charanga experience began. Just barely a teen, De La Fé couldn't keep up with his studies at Juilliard and soon dropped out. With his parents' blessing and that of his godmother Celia Cruz, he went to Miami with Fajardo and this move signaled the beginning of his professional career.

"Fajardo wouldn't let me improvise, but what he taught me are the roots of this music," he says. In Miami he played five nights in a hotel but since Fajardo wouldn't let him improvise, boredom set in and he started listening to and became influenced by the music of Miles Davis.

During the '70s, as the salsa boom developed, he returned to NYC and joined Ismael Miranda and Larry Harlow. In 1973, Eddie Palmieri hired him and motivated him to electrify his violin and experiment new possibilities.

"Palmieri gave me freedom to search out my sound," acknowledges De La Fé.

He relocated briefly to San Francisco with Palmieri and played with Carlos Santana, but he subsequently returned to New York City in 1977 to join the renowned orchestra Típica 73. It was at a time when the original Típica 73 split up and the new Típica was regrouping.

"One of the best decisions I ever made was to join Típica 73. It's one of the best orchestras Latin music has ever produced. We worked approximately 13 dances a week, sometimes up to three dances in a day. We worked as a cooperative and prospered."

Undoubtedly one of the best salsa bands of its time, Típica 73 brought De La Fé and his violin widespread attention. Working with veterans Sonny Bravo, Johnny Rodriguez and Mario Rivera helped his development. His role added new blood and colors to the popular ensemble. Recorded highlights abound for Típica 73 but the Fania album Intercambio Cultural, recorded in Cuba, is considered a landmark, and it featured De La Fé.

"Going back to Cuba then was amazing. It was a beautiful experience to be with all those great Cuban artists. Our visit was not political at all, it was a music project, but it created a lot of political problems. When we returned, people started putting us down for going and it destroyed a lot of things."

In 1979, De La Fé recorded his debut album, Alfredo, for Martin Cohen's LP Ventures. Nominated for three Grammys, it defined him as a leader. At a new juncture, he followed it up with the artistically rich Orchestra Rytmo Africa-Cubana, a fantastic charanga project featuring a young Néstor Torres.

But it was joining the Latin Percussion Jazz Ensemble with Tito Puente that brought him to the attention of the jazz world with a powerful rendition of My Favorite Things on the LP Ventures album, Live at the 1980 Montreux Jazz Festival.

"Yo soy un amante de Miles Davis (I love Miles!). I worked for a short while with David Amram and through him had the opportunity to play with Dizzy Gillespie. It introduced me to the school of bebop and Charlie Parker. Today, I really love McCoy Tyner, Gonzalo Rubalcaba and Paquito D'Rivera. There is a very strong African connection between our music and jazz."