Orestes Vilato: there's life after Santana

Latin Beat Magazine, Nov, 2002 by Luis Tamargo

Born on Mother's Day, circa 1944, in Cuba's main cattle region (Camagüey Province), timbalero/bongosero Orestes Vilató arrived in the Big Apple at the age of 12, after his fluently bilingual progenitor was recruited to be in charge of a couple of international flights inaugurated by Cubana de Aviación (Havana-New York and Havana-Chicago). A current resident of Martínez, Northern California, Vilató is regarded by this writer as the most influenttial Cuban timbalero north of Havana. Although the former leader of Los Kimbos admits that he "never took a single percussion lesson" in his entire existence, it is unquestionable that the transplanted camaqüeyano has exercised a profound influence on various generations of Latin percussionists, either north or south of the Sugarcane Curtain, as illustrated or implied throughout the following verbal exchange ...

LUIS TAMARGO: Is it true that your father was an opera singer?

ORESTES VILATÓ: Yes. He was raised in New York, where he studied opera and even sang operatic works like "Carmen" and "Rigoletto" in Italian at Carnegie Hall. Up until the age of 5, I was exclusively exposed to classical music, but I didn't really like it. It's hard fora 5-year old child to get into classical music! (LAUGHTER.) Eventually, he gave me a little guitar and stated, "You're going to study guitar." He did it because he knew that I was musically inclined, not because he was trying to force me to learn an instrument. But then, while listening to Cuban music from the radio, I began to turn the guitar the other way round and hit the back of the instrument as if it were a bongó. We were living in Camagüey, where we didn't have a television set, but had access to the radio. I also took a few trumpet lessons, but "bongó" became a magic word in those childhood years. My heart was captivated by the word, by the anxious desire to know what a bongó was all about.

LT: Who gave you the first bongó?

OV: My uncle, Rafael Misa, former urologist and surgeon at Havana's Calixto García Hospital and currently retired in Florida. I began to study that little bongó on my own, listening to the radio and kicking up a rumpus while trying to manipulate the bongó and playa maraca with my foot at the same time. It got to a point where I was trying to play three or four instruments at once!

LT: Who gave you the first timbal?

OV: After we moved to New York, my father gave me that first timbal. He said that he won it in a poker game.

LT: When did you meet Armando Peraza?

OV: Shortly after my arrival in New York, when my father took me to the Palladium to check out the musicians. My father never tried to dissuade me from becoming a percussionist. Instead, he helped me to pursue my musical goals, although he offered a pertinent warning: "You're going to be a starving musician. This is a difficult occupation. The bongoseros in Cuba have to shine shoes before nightfall!" (LAUGHTER). He wasn't lying at all. It was the plain truth. Even today, it is a very uncertain field of work. Two weeks after he gave me that timbal, I was playing with a New Jersey group called the Cuban Rhythm Boys, which featured a tumbador called Felo Barrios, who would later become Orquesta Broadway's lead singer. Then I joined Orquesta Oriental Cubana and worked alongside pianist Willie Ellis (future founder of Típica Novel), Felo Barrios (doing lead vocals) and Roberto Rodríguez, a trumpeter with whom I would work extensively, in the years to come, with Ray Barretto, Orquesta Broadway and others.

LT: How did you hook up with Belisario López?

OV: I played with Oriental Cubana at New York's Ateneo Cubano and Club Cubano del Bronx (an Afro-Cuban social club in which Arsenio Rodríguez and Belisario López frequently played). Belisario had just moved from Cuba when he saw me playing timbal and he remarked, "I want you to work with me." Belisario was very well known in Cuba as a danzón flutist and I was enchanted by the danzón genre. Belisario expanded my musical knowledge while we played together, before I joined José Fajardo's charanga, back in the times when JFK was assassinated and Cachao arrived in New York. In fact, my father was the one who picked him up at the airport and brought hito to Fajardo's rehearsal at a club called La Barranca. Playing with Fajardo and Cachao was a dream come true. Cachao's Jam Sessions in Miniature (Panart, 1957) was one of the most inspiring albums that I heard during my formative years as a young musician.

LT: What happened after Fajardo?

OV: I worked for a while with Johnny Pacheco's charanga. Back then, Jerry Masucci was Pacheco's lawyer. Masucci and Pacheco came up with $3,000 to found Fania Records. I never imagined that it would eventually become a multi-million dollar company ... I left Pacheco's charanga to go work with Ray Barretto. I was fortunate to play with Barretto when he led a charanga, and I witnessed how that charanga was transformed into a 3-trumpet conjunto. Before said metamorphosis was completed, Barretto combined two violins with brass (trumpet and trombone). Notice how Los Van Van adopted the same fiddle-and-brass format years later. In the case of Los Van Van, they added two or three trombones, but it has been confirmed by Juan Formell, Changuito and others that they spent a lot of time listening to Barretto's music. Working with Barretto stimulated my musical development because he allowed me to be creative. Coincidentally, as far as I know, the first band that was labeled as a "salsa orchestra" was the one led by Barretto. It happened in Venezuela in 1966, when we played a tune called Salsa y Dulzura and were asked afterwards, "Oh, so your band is a salsa orchestra?" During the transformation from charanga to conjunto, there was a significant level of stylistic development in Barretto's band, even before Roberto Rodríguez wrote Qué Viva la Música. There were many problems in New York with the promoters and their cliques and cronies, but we managed to survive.