Remembering the Mambo King
by Hishaam Aidi
The unexpected June 1 death of bandleader and percussionist Tito Puente left many jazz and Latin music aficionados grieving inconsolably at the loss of an irreplaceable musical giant and cultural icon. It is only with the passing of “El Rey” and the posthumous tributes paid to the “Mambo King’s” memory that many are beginning to grasp the magnitude of Puente’s contribution to Latin Jazz, and the indelible imprint he left on the rhythms of the African diaspora.
The hundreds of mourners who appeared at Puente’s wake at Riverside Memorial Chapel on June 5th included lawyers, cab-drivers, homemakers who reminisced about meeting their husbands at the Palladium in the 1950s, and famed Latin musicians such as the Grammy-winning singer Ruben Blades and the flutist Johnny Pacheco. Mourners waited for hours in a line stretching down West 76th Street before entering the funeral home and walking up a staircase to the chapel, where Puente’s body, decked in a white suit, lay in a coffin. The casket was surrounded by white orchids and eight photographs, one of a young Puente in a U.S. Navy uniform, another of the percussionist hammering away gleefully at his timbales. Well-wishers said prayers, kissed the Plexiglas covering the open coffin, and shared memories.
“I first saw Tito in 1954,” said Milton Cardon, an African American clad in the white robes worn by followers of the Afro-Cuban religion Santeria. “I graduated from high school in 1963. We were hitting the clubs, the Palladium. I grew up on 127th Street, and Tito played in the Barrio on 116th. He made you feel part of the experience even if you weren’t Latin. Man, it was one hundred percent right! His music just said, ‘Africa’s coming out, irrespective of the police!’”
“We were all members of the original Yoruba Temple of Harlem,” said Fela Wiles, a Trinidadian-born Santeria practitioner standing in line besides Cardon, in white robes and a white head-wrap. “Tito became a yawo [a Santeria devotee] in 1976. Our priest was Nelo Tandre.”
Though a Catholic, Puente also practiced Santeria and was an initiate of the orisha (god) Obatala. According to Newsday, days before his death, Puente walked into Botanica Santa Barbara in uptown Manhattan, and bought scented oils and “a half-dozen votive candles – including one emblazoned with the images of Saint Lazarus, to whom followers of Santeria often pray when they are in ill health.”
Towards the late afternoon, as the throng thinned, Puente’s older aficionados moved to the Westside Brewery Co., a nearby Irish bar, which quickly took on the air of a Caribbean dance club, as mourners chanted Puerto Rican anthems and offered toasts, and as the fiery brass and pulsating congas sent old-timers gliding, twirling, and kick-stepping across the floor.
Puente’s life and music in many ways captured the African American-Puerto Rican cultural symbiosis that has distinguished New York City. Born in Harlem Hospital on April 20, 1923, Ernesto (“Ernestito”) Puente grew up on 110th Street, just off Madison Avenue in the bicultural and bilingual world of El Barrio, Spanish Harlem.
The young Puente studied piano and timbales (a pair of single-headed drums mounted on a stand, often accompanied by cowbells, a woodblock and other percussion instruments) at the New York School of Music on 125th Street and Lenox Avenue. Puente found an influential mentor in Frank “Machito” Grillo, who had come to New York from Cuba in 1937, and, along with his musical director Maurio Bauza, began blending Afro-Cuban sounds with jazz. Cuban music had gained popularity in New York as early as the 1930s, with clubs like Havana-Madrid and La Conga opening up in midtown, and Machito and Bauza found a receptive audience for their new musical fusion.
In 1942, Puente joined the Machito Orchestra as a drummer, and recorded unforgettable arrangements including “Oye Negra” and “El Botellero.” After serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II, Puente returned to New York and started his own band, the Piccadilly Boys, which was later renamed the Tito Puente Orchestra.
It was at the Palladium during the 1950s that Tito established his reputation as the “King of the Mambo.” At the fabled ballroom on 53rd and Broadway, Machito, Puente, and Perez Prado fused bebop and jazz with Afro-Cuban rhythms. Puente added a jazz rhythm section to his orchestra and made the timbales player more prominent by placing him in the front of the orchestra. During these years, Puente recorded his dance hits “El Rey del Timbal” and “Mambo Gallego,” mixing cha-cha and big band swing compositions.
“I played with Tito in 1950 in Cuba, where he perfected his music,” said veteran Cuban trumpeter Alfredo “Chocolate” Armenteros, who began playing in the Machito Orchestra in 1957 and was one of the “mourners” who celebrated Puente’s legacy at the Westside Brewery. “I recorded two CDs with him, including his 100th album. Nos dejo una herencia grande (He left us a great heritage).”
Puente is often credited with making Latin music known to the world, but his ambassadorship started at the local level, bringing Latin rhythms from clubs uptown (such as the Park Palace on 110th and 5th Avenue) to the Palladium and its initially white clientele. “The Palladium was a phenomenon,” Puente said of the era. “The place was a big melting pot – Jews, Italians, Irish, blacks, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, you name it. Everyone was equal under the roof of the Palladium because everyone was there to dig the music and to dance.”
Steven Loza, Puente’s biographer, concurs. “It could be said that the Palladium and its Latin music did more for integration than the theories and methodologies of social scientists,” he writes in Tito Puente and the Making of Latin Music. “Music, dance and the art of it all seemed to captivate the soul, exorcising the physical and cultural restrictions of a historically segregated society.”
Puente’s influence was not just on his audience. He played with and had a significant impact on a number of noted jazz musicians. Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker, who often played at Birdland, a block away from the Palladium, heard Puente’s music and frequently added mambo elements to their jazz arrangements. In addition to headlining at the Palladium, Puente was also a regular at the Village Gate’s Salsa Meets Jazz series, which paired him with various jazz artists.
According to author Loza, the Palladium era “changed the course of musical style in New York City and elsewhere” and led to “the mixing of jazz and Latin, frequently referred to as ‘Cubop,” [and] began a movement that would eventually evolve with other labels such as ‘jazz mambo,’ ‘Afro-Cuban jazz’ and ‘Latin jazz.’” The era’s signature album is Puente’s Cuban Carnival, “a cross between Ellingtonian orchestration and Latin percussion.”
During the 1960s, Tito recorded with renowned female Latin vocalists Celia Cruz and La Lupa, and hosted his own TV show, El Mundo de Tito Puente on Spanish language television. In 1968, Tito served a grand marshal for the Puerto Rican Day parade, and became a fixture at the annual celebration for the next thirty years.
In the 1970s, the Afro-Cuban jazz Puente helped to establish evolved into “salsa,” which soon eclipsed the jazz mambo sound. Puente can be credited with helping to lay the foundation for “salsa” music, but he would forever be critical of the label itself, preferring the term “mambo.” “Salsa means sauce, literally,” he complained. “My problem is that we don’t play sauce, we play music, and Latin music has different styles: cha-cha, mambo, guaguanco and son. Salsa doesn’t address the complexities and the rich history of the music that we play.”
The 1970s also saw the cross-fusion of Latin jazz and American blues, which were combined by artists like Carlos Santana to create a new musical offspring. Santana’s 1970 rendition of Puente’s “Oye Como Va,” a song the Mambo King penned in 1962, became an international hit and provoked a rift between Puente and Santana until the former started earning royalties for the song.
In the 1980s and ‘90s, Puente’s band, renamed the Latin Jazz Ensemble, gained worldwide notoriety performing in Latin America, Asia, and Europe, winning five Grammy awards, most recently in February 2000 for the recording Mambo Birdland. Puente also worked with jazz musicians James Moody and Hilton Ruiz, and won acclaim for his continued experimentation with musical syncretism through his ingenious adaptation of John Coltrane’s “Equinox,” which set the composition to an Afro-Cuban 6/8 tempo, and a mambo rendition of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.” Puente also worked with non-jazz artists including Gloria Estefan and the Sugarhill Gang, and made a crowd-pleasing appearance with Dizzy Gillespie on The Cosby Show in 1986. In 1992, Puente helped produce and appeared in The Mambo Kings, a film based on the Oscar Hijueles novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, which beautifully captured the Palladium years.
Wherever Puente performed, his rhythms and flamboyant style, endearing tics and humorous facial expressions delighted audiences the world over. “I’m not Ricky Martin, to wave my hips around and show my belly button,” he once said, referring to the ‘90s Latin pop teen idol and explaining his own distinctive performance style. “I don’t have a girl in front of the band singing. I need the people to see that I’m having a good time.”
Although Puente appealed to a wide audience, he regularly paid tribute to “Mother Africa,” the primary source of his music, and indefatigably celebrated his Puerto Rican heritage. “I have always had a big, large English-speaking audience,” he once said, “and I always, as we say in Spanish, ‘Plantao Bandera’ [plant the flag] – wherever I go, I represent more or less, the Puerto Rican people.” He performed frequently for the Latino populations of Harlem and the Bronx, appearing regularly at Jimmy’s Bronx Café on West Fordham Road and Willie’s Steak House on Westchester Avenue in the Bronx. Puente also established the Tito Puente Scholarship Fund to aid needy students. In recognition of his contributions, East Harlem community leaders are backing a plan to name a stretch of East 110th Street “Tito Puente Way,” and in July 2000 the City Council is due to approve a plan to erect a statue of the Mambo King on 110th Street and Lenox Avenue, next to one of Duke Ellington.
On Tuesday, June 7, Puente’s funeral procession snaked its way through Spanish Harlem on its way to his final resting ground. Scores of mourners lined the streets, weathering the rain to bid El Barrio’s native son a final adieu.
“ ‘Puente’ in Spanish means ‘bridge,’” said Joe Conzo, who first befriended Puente some thirty-five years ago when the percussionist would play in Central Park. “And that’s what Tito was – a bridge between peoples, a bridge between cultures.”
“His music was una lengua de amor, a language of love,” Milton Cardon added, his voice shaking. “Tito’s like a butterfly, man, a mariposa. And now he’s playing music for the gods.”
[First Published: June 8 2000]