max salazar on TITO PUENTE - Entrevista

Latin Beat Magazine, April, 2002 by Joe Hernández

I visited journalist Max Salazar at his upper West Side apartment in New York City on a warm, breezy afternoon. I was eager and anxious to sit down and talk with Max. We sat down in his living room and chatted about a number of things, but mainly about the great legend Tito Puente.

Max Salazar, a native New Yorker of Puerto Rican parentage raised in "El Barrio" is a journalist, collector and Latin music historian who has spent a lifetime documenting our music. He is currently senior editor of this publication and a contributing editor to Impacto Magazine. He has written over 200 articles, which have appeared in numerous publications including the Village Voice, Latin Times, Billboard, etc. He has been a lecturer at UCLA, Smithsonian Institute and several colleges. He's written various articles on Tito Puente in addition to having been a very good friend of "El Maestro." Following are some excerpts from our conversation.

(This article first appeared in the Tito Puente special edition of BochinChat Magazine, 2001)

Joe Hernández: First let me express the outmost respect that I have for you and for the enormous contribution you have made in documenting the history of our music over the last fifty years, especially here in New York. Your work, which has always been a labor of love, has played en enormous role in helping us better understand the development and growth of Latin music. You have interviewed, rubbed elbows and listened to some of the greatest legends of our music. I don't think anyone has come close to providing us with the rich oral history that you have been able to document. I mean you were there, you saw it and lived it. You bring a perspective that very few "historians" can equal. There are a lot of people in the field who have en enormous respect for the work you've done. Tito Puente expressed it many times. Max, when did you first meet him?

Max Salazar: Thank you for the kind words. I first met Tito in 1968.

JH: Do you remember the conditions under which you met him?

MS: Yes, there was a dance and Latin New York Magazine was out at the time and the staff was there which included its founder, a man by the name of Peter Rios and Walter Vélez who was the artist and Izzy Sanabria who was an outstanding cartoonist and illustrator. We were at the dance. Peter Rios introduced himself to Puente and then he introduced the staff. So I said to Puente, "I would like to talk to you one day. I'd like to write a piece about you." I never did, because everybody was asking him the same thing and they were better known writers. At the time I was just starting out. But I met him and then I ran into him again a month later and he didn't remember who I was, you know, because he met so many people and writers. He was really like a matinee idol. He was at the peak of his popularity then.

JH: How close did you come to know Tito Puente?

MS: Pretty well, because of Latin NY Magazine and I was doing a lot of radio shows speaking about the history of the music, things I had learned because of Machito.

JH: Was this on WKCR?

MS: No, this is before that, around 1969 and 1970 when the boogaloo was at its peak. I used to go on a few radio programs and speak of the things that I learned about the history of the music, its development and the musicians of the '30s, '40s and so on from Machito. I would speak about that and I'd run into Puente once in a while. I really got to know Puente really well in 1972. I used to visit his office at 1674 Broadway which I think was at 51st and Broadway on the 4th floor and there was a very popular TV show on channel 13 at the time called "Realidades" and they wanted to honor Puente. So Puente said to me: "Max, I would like you to write the script for that. Whatever you come up with." I said, "Well, I'm gonna have to interview you. I don't know how long it's gonna take until I feel that I'm satisfied that I've got enough meat and I want to see some photographs so that I can select for what they're gonna use on the show." Well, he brought down a big photo album and after I finished interviewing him for 3 or 4 days, about 3-4 hours a day, I picked his brain clean and asked him to let me borrow some of the photographs. He said no. So I said, "Look, I would like to have some of these because in the future when I write about you I want have something to use." So it was all right with him if I brought my 35mm telephoto camera with a spotlight and we started doing the interviews in his office, and that's how I acquired information about Tito, his early childhood and the photographs.

JH: So you really got to know him well?

MS: Sure. At one time I was very close to Tito. We used to take walks together when he lived on the West Side of Manhattan.

JH: Why do you think he selected you to write that piece for "Realidades?"

MS: I think he heard me on radio speak about him and about others and without wasting words I would give the audience nothing but meat and he wanted someone like that. Tito was that kind of guy who liked professionals, people who knew what they were doing, who were not hesitant.