The heart and hands of Louie Bauzo

Latin Beat Magazine, April, 2007 by Jesse Varela

IT was a sunny Sunday morning last year, at Jack London Square in Oakland, when I met with percussionists Wilson "Chembo" Corniel and Louie Bauzo. They were in town performing with Larry Harlow's Latin Legends of Fania at Yoshi's Jazz House. The musical depth of these two Latín drummers is very special.

The interview was conducted with both Corniel and Bauzo, but I will feature the interview portion with Louie Bauzo on this particular occasion, as he has not been previously profiled in Latín Beat Magazine. Once upon a time, the hands of Louie Bauzo graced the cover of the Village Voice when they did a piece on rumba in NYC. Today, he is passing on what he has learned as a rumbero and studied percussionist to whoever wants to learn.

Jesse Varela: How are things for you, Louie?

Louie Bauzo: Everything is going well. I'm still at the school--Boys and Girls Harbor--teaching the big band workshop and the Afro-Cuban class on Wednesdays and keeping up the Raices Archive. Our students range from kids to adults.

I have always said that I invented my gig. Ramón Rodríguez, at Harbor, invited me over in the late 1970s. I started teaching there, and since then, we have created a nice curriculum on how to play and interpret this music. I also includes learning about the history and culture.

JV: What got you started?

LB: My mentors were Mongo Santamaría, Tito Puente and Willie Bobo. I have always appreciated their styles. I'm from Puerto Rico, and my family is from Loiza, which is the hub of bomba and plena. In New York, I was raised on the Lower East side and went to school there. I meta lot of great people, like my friend Freddy Lugo, and a guy named Tyrone, who used to play congas in the parks. That's how we got started. My father also played rhythm guitar and sang in trios in Puerto Rico. On the weekends his friends would come over and drink beer and jam. So, I naturally gravitated toward it.

JV: You've been involved in both salsa and Latín jazz. Talk about the differences in the styles.

LB: I come from more of a world percussion perspective. What I know is music that is based in Mother Africa. Playing jazz, Latino, folkloric or whatever, I come from the perspective of the talking drum, where the drum speaks the tradition of the language. That's what interests me about the batá drums; how they talk and sing the songs. So, the way that I approach Latín jazz, típico of modern Latín music, is to make my drum become one of the voices in the entire musical fabric.

JV: One of the things you did with Harlow was to add the batá drums to salsa.

LB: It's not something that I invented. Years ago, Harlow had Cachete Maldonado and all these folks add batá drums on some sessions. I first heard batás put into a dance environment on a bunch of Chico O'Farrill records from the 1950s. He had Geraldo Rodríguez and all these great drummers. That is the first time I heard batás within a band setting. The great composer Gilberto Valdés also wrote music based on the melodies of santería music, which he orchestrated. But Chico had the pop hits of the day and had batás playing on them. During my tenure with Larry Harlow, he maintained many of those hits in his repertoire, like La Cartera. He claims that it is the tune that has kept him working for the past 30 years and it comes from those Cachete sessions.

JV: What was your first break?

LB: I was 17 years old and I had this job at a Japanese importing company. One of my fellow workers was this guy named Hermán González, who was a trumpet player with Joe Quijano. He didn't have a bongó player so I started hanging around the band with Hermán, and eventually started playing with them. We played everything, including his big hits from "Fiddler on the Roof" and his monster hits, Nosotros and La Media Vuelta. It was a Bronx-based band, so I started spending a lot of time around Casino and the Hunts Point Palace.

JV: What has been the high point of your career?

LB: For me, the seven years I spent with Tito Puente was a high point. He was always my idol. The first album my father bought for me was Cuban Carnival. He was one of my heroes. I've traveled all over the world. The only continent where I haven't played is Antarctica, but I'm 58 years old, so I might still be able to play in Antarctica for the penguins. (Laughter). I have enjoyed my musical career, playing with Machito, Mongo Santamaría, Eddie Palmieri, Dizzy Gillespie ...

JV: One of the guys that taught at Harbor was the great conguero, Frankie Malabé. Did you know him?

LB: Yes, Frankie taught there for the last five years of his life. We were friends for about 20 years, and he was one of my idols. He was there with us on the ground floor when we started doing the batá thing. Malabé was one of the first to do a lot of variations off the tumbao on the congas, and expand the horizons of the drums, by playing three drum patterns.

JV: The loss of Ray Barretto, Ray Romero and others last year signals a changing of the guard. You guys are the next generation stepping up and pushing Afro-Caribbean forward. What is the responsibility of the next generation of Latin percussionists?