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Chico Interview -- Party traces history of that irresistible music
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Montreal Gazette, Chico Interview -- Party traces history of that irresistible music >>
Chico Alvarez can spin tales of Afro-Latin music history for hours if you like. He'll tell you about how its defining style, son, emerged in Cuba's eastern, rural regions in the early part of the last century. He'll happily chronicle Cuban music's crossover success in the United States in the mid-1930s. He can easily trace the genre's antecedents and evolution and cite the names of its greatest visionaries and best records along the way. He can do all this with as much ease as if he were ordering breakfast.
No newspaper article could scratch the surface - and Alvarez knows it. His voice dropped to a whisper as he deflected a question aimed at giving the novice an entry point to Afro-Latin sounds: "Well, what is the novice looking for? Is he looking for really profound explanations? Is he looking to write a thesis in academic circles? Or is he looking to find the secret of how to dance it?" he asked.
Somehow, the New York-based singer and bandleader always gets back to the clave. That's a son-based rhythmic pattern, the dance element of what many call salsa - a term Alvarez seems to take with a grain of salt, given the style's evolution from the mambo, which came from the son and danzon styles.
"In the 1970s, you had the explosion of the salsa boom," he said. "It was a commercial term they used to market it and sell it, but the artists were all playing the same music again."
And the magic in that music is the Montuno section, Alvarez said. That's where the instruments improvise over a repeated two- or three-chord vamp. "That's the hook, the hypnotic groove," he said. "The beginning of the tune tells the story, you have your arrangement and your introduction, but the dancers really get hooked when the Montuno happens. It can go on forever."
Cogele el Gusto (Catch the Flavour) is Alvarez's contribution to Putumayo's recently released Afro-Latin Party compilation, which features mostly dancefloor-oriented artists like Africando, Ska Cubano and Pepe & the Bottle Blondes. The track's killer piano solo is played by Alfredo Valdes Jr., whose father came to New York in the 1920s with Cuban composer Ignacio Pineiro, whose Echale Salsita was later incorporated into George Gershwin's Cuban Overture.
Cogele el Gusto was originally released by Celia Cruz in 1960, and it's one of the first times the word "salsa" was used as a label for the Afro-Latin genre. "It wasn't used yet as a commercial term to describe music," Alvarez said. "It was just used to describe that element that gave it taste, gave it flavour. It was the same concept they used when they used the word 'soul'."
Coincidentally, soul music, as popularized in the 1960s, played an indirect role in pointing a teenage Alvarez back to his roots. Although he was born in Brooklyn, he grew up in Cuba, returning to the United States when he was 15. "When I came to the United States, I said 'Wow! I'm in heaven! This is rock 'n' roll country!' But on one hand you had black music, and on the other you had rock," he said. "Soul music was the rock 'n' roll of the blacks and rock was the rock 'n' roll of the whites. I said 'Wow! What's wrong with this picture? Before that, rock 'n' roll was a universal thing and all races dug it.
"I saw that separation and I didn't like it, so I rotated toward the Hispanic community, which is not into that separation nonsense. They're listening to pachanga and, later on, boogaloo, so I kind of rediscovered the Cuban roots in New York," he said.
Alvarez began fronting son groups in the 1970s, but the bridge between that roots music of his youth in Cuba and the urbanized music he embraced in New York is still where Alvarez as a bandleader walks. He has released seven albums, both as a solo artist and with his Afro-Caribe Band, which he broke up in 2001. He has since formed Palo Monte.
According to Alvarez, some "intellectual types" prefer their Afro-Latin grooves jazzy, with complicated arrangements and tricky improvising - a split that began in the 1940s and 1950s when Latin music moved from the dance floor to the concert hall. Alvarez said he can't get a lot of work playing Latin jazz: "There is a die-hard dance crowd that doesn't want to sit there and listen to great solos," he said. "I like to play that stuff, but I don't have a forum for it."
So Alvarez said he mostly plays for the dancers and watches the clave take hold. "Sometimes people are dancing, but there's another group that's just standing by the bandstand in awe of (the groove)," he said. "Maybe they're a little timid, maybe they're afraid to dance. Maybe they don't know how. But I notice they're tapping their foot and they're moving their shoulders, so that music is intoxicating them as well. These people still manage to be drawn into it, get hooked on it.
Chico Alvarez seems to know where every piece of the puzzle fits when it comes to Afro-Latin music history. Here's a sample of his comments regarding some key figures.
Ignacio Pineiro: composer who made his mark in the 1930s. "In the first era of the son, he was the very first real innovator and visionary."
Don Aspiazu : big band leader best known for El Manisero (The Peanut Vendor) in 1930. The song was later recorded by Louis Armstrong, Judy Garland and others. "It officially brought in the era of Cuban music in the United States. It was the first really, really big crossover hit. They labeled it as a rhumba-fox trot, but it was not. It was uptempo son."
Arsenio Rodriguez: blind Cuban virtuoso who popularized a style of son Montuno in the 1940s. "He took what Ignacio Pineiro had done with the son and expanded it."
Desi Arnaz: Lucille Ball's bandleader husband, best remembered as TV's Ricky Ricardo on I Love Lucy. "He discovered Americans not only loved the son, they loved the conga. He was an imitator of Miguelito Valdez, but he got on the inside, through Hollywood. He was pretty much instrumental in popularizing the music."
Perez Prado: developer and popularizer of the mambo in the 1940s and 1950s. "He fused the son and the last section of the danzon, which became the mambo. He didn't just throw them in this big stew, he methodically arranged them. They all considered him to be an eccentric and crazy, with all these arrangements."
Carlos Santana: Woodstock-era rocker still filling arenas. His Oye Como Va might have defined salsa for a generation. "In the '60s, I was still very much in love with rock 'n' roll - and here was rock guitar with congas and everything. It was very nice. I enjoyed it very much, but he was pretty much in a class by himself. Otherwise, Latin rock died a quick death."
-Bernard Perusse 05/07/05
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