New York and the International Sound of Latin Music, 1940-1990

Benjamin Lapidus

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781496831309
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

New York City has long been a generative nexus for the transnational Latin music scene. Currently, there is no other place in the Americas where such large numbers of people from throughout the Caribbean come together to make music. In this book, Benjamin Lapidus seeks to recognize all of those musicians under one mighty musical sound, especially those who have historically gone unnoticed. Based on archival research, oral histories, interviews, and musicological analysis, Lapidus examines how interethnic collaboration among musicians, composers, dancers, instrument builders, and music teachers in New York City set a standard for the study, creation, performance, and innovation of Latin music. Musicians specializing in Spanish Caribbean music in New York cultivated a sound that was grounded in tradition, including classical, jazz, and Spanish Caribbean folkloric music. For the first time, Lapidus studies this sound in detail and in its context. He offers a fresh understanding of how musicians made and formally transmitted Spanish Caribbean popular music in New York City from 1940 to 1990. Without diminishing the historical facts of segregation and racism the musicians experienced, Lapidus treats music as a unifying force. By giving recognition to those musicians who helped bridge the gap between cultural and musical backgrounds, he recognizes the impact of entire ethnic groups who helped change music in New York. The study of these individual musicians through interviews and musical transcriptions helps to characterize the specific and identifiable New York City Latin music aesthetic that has come to be emulated internationally.

CHAPTER 1

LATIN MUSIC EDUCATION IN NEW YORK

As I discuss in the introduction, it is a common misperception that musicians performing Spanish Caribbean popular music in New York City lack formal musical training and that the “university of the streets” is the principal locale for disseminating musical information and technique. Nothing could be further from the truth. This chapter details the formal and informal Latin music education settings and networks in New York as well as the ways in which musicians benefited from them. Some of the institutions explored include the East Harlem Music School, the Harbor Conservatory, and New York City public schools such as Music and Art High School in Manhattan and PS 52 in the Bronx that served as meeting grounds for musicians, and provided both rehearsal and performance opportunities for aspiring musicians. Private instructors taught theory, solfège, and instrumental technique to the most prominent musicians in Latin dance music.

Informal listening sessions among collectors of Latin music in New York City also served as educational opportunities and basic training for a number of musicians. Ensembles dedicated to specific genres of Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican folkloric music can be seen as important incubators for Latin popular music groups in New York City, but they have also functioned as a primary site for Latin music education. Mentoring of younger musicians by older musicians has remained a constant of the New York Latin music scene and is responsible for maintaining the intergenerational characteristic of many bands, but also ensures the passage of musical history and technique from one generation to the next. In addition, many musicians have spent considerable time in New York helping fashion the New York “sound” before moving back to their home countries, recognized as heroes and acknowledged by subsequent generations as legends whose advice, teaching, and performance are sought out and emulated. Finally, interviews with a number of musicians who have attained artistic success in New York and beyond reveal the importance of New York as an educational hub crucial for success as a musician dedicated to playing Latin music.

PRIVATE STUDIO INSTRUCTION BY THREE PUERTO RICAN WOMEN

The first group of educators associated with performers of Latin music in New York City did not teach Spanish Caribbean popular music or necessarily encourage its practice, yet they taught a substantial number of Spanish Caribbean popular musicians who would go on to achieve professional and artistic success. These early educators who served the Spanish Caribbean community included three Puerto Rican women: Victoria Hernández, Maria Luisa Lecompte, and Eduviges Bocanegra. Hernández was the sister of Rafael Hernández, the great Puerto Rican musician, composer, and recruit in the 369th Infantry orchestra, whose unit became world famous as the “Harlem Hellfighters.” In 1928 Victoria Hernández founded a record label, Disco Hispano. A year earlier, in 1927, she “Opened the Hernández record store on Madison Avenue. She sold 78-rpm records, pianola rolls, maracas, guitars, and guitar strings. A room at the back of the store housed a piano to teach students.”¹ Hernández helped handle her brother’s business affairs and can be seen as an early example of Puerto Rican women asserting their musical and business independence in post–World War I New York City. Although Hernández was intimately familiar with Latin popular music, with her own students she emphasized basic musicianship, technique, and appreciation for musical works of the Western canon. This personal bias in music education can be seen in a 1981 interview with Max Salazar, in which she states: “During the mid-to-late 1930s, two of my students were Tito Puente and Joe Loco. Tito told me to tell his mother that he liked to play drums instead of the piano.”²

Puente and fellow percussionist Joe Quijano were two of many musicians who studied with another classically trained Puerto Rican female musician based in New York City, Maria Luisa Lecompte de Varona, the mother of Machito pianist Luis Carlos Varona, whom she also taught to play piano.³ Lecompte’s husband was a Cuban concert violinist named Luis Humberto Varona. The couple lived at 234 W. 114th Street. Lecompte was born in Puerto Rico and, after studying violin with her father, spent time at the Conservatory of Music in Havana, Cuba, and later lived in Santiago de Cuba.⁴ Lecompte came from a family of professional musicians in Puerto Rico, and she performed there extensively as early as 1901.⁵ According to Callejo Ferrer’s 1915 study of musicians on the island of Puerto Rico, she was the only woman who “occupied a preferred post in the opera orchestra.”⁶

LeCompte’s music school was located at 112 E. 116th Street, between Park and Lexington avenues. Percussionist and bandleader Joe Quijano took the subway from the Bronx to 116th Street to study piano and solfège in Lecompte’s storefront music school and later studied with Eduviges Bocanegra in the Bronx.⁷ Quijano remembered other students who studied with both Victoria Hernández and Maria Luisa Lecompte included Charlie and Eddie Palmieri, Paquito Pastor, Hector Rivera, and Arte Azenzer.⁸ In addition to studying solfège, Quijano worked with the Hanon method, Alfred Burgemüller’s books, and loose sheets of Chopin as well as pop songs from the era such as “Beautiful.”⁹ Lecompte taught one student at a time for three dollars per lesson. Quijano recalled that he only worked on classical music with Lecompte during the one year that he was her pupil, but at that time he knew that her son, Luis Varona, taught and played Latin popular music. An advertisement for Lecompte’s school in La Prensa notes that she used the “plan of the Paris Conservatory” for piano, violin, and solfège and harmony.¹⁰

Lecompte organized public recitals for her students in New York City. A 1938 article in La Prensa describes a concert program to be given at Casa Valencia by Lecompte’s fifth- and sixth-year students; the program included works by Chopin and Beethoven, but the theme of the program was “Armonías Americanas” (American harmonies) and was conceived by the director of the Pan-American League of Students of New York.¹¹ Assemblyman Oscar García Rivera spoke at the event. A review of the concert with a picture of the best student, Viola Echevarría, who was elected “La reina de la música” (the queen of music), said that it was a success and that after the awards were handed out, and remarks were made, all the participants danced to the house band.¹²

Another public recital was held one afternoon at the El Toreador club/restaurant and the reviewer indicated that each of the participants, all with Spanish names, earned “repeated applause.”¹³ Another review of one of Lecompte’s annual student recitals at El Torreador states that her husband Luis Varona performed some of his own compositions on violin with Lecompte accompanying him; the couple is publicly acknowledged for “their important work of developing, in the metropolis, the musical education of so many students, children and adults in our colony [Spanish-speaking neighborhood].”¹⁴

It is interesting that Lecompte held her recitals in places such as El Toreador and Casa Valencia, the latter of which was a cabaret located at 300 W. 45th Street that would later became the Cuban Casino. Despite the fact that these venues were not recital halls, their location in midtown Manhattan, away from the center of the Latino community, meant that they were also intended for non-Latino audiences and thus deemed “respectable.”

Scholar Lorrin Thomas writes that Lecompte was aware of the political movement of the colonia hispana of the late 1930s and the plight of Puerto Ricans.¹⁵ Lecompte and Varona can be seen performing on a program commemorating the sixty-second anniversary of the proclamation of the Republic of Puerto Rico that was sponsored by the New York delegation of the Nationalist Party of Puerto Rico on September 23, 1930.¹⁶

Lecompte’s obituary states that she taught piano and violin for twenty-five years in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and New York, “graduating 7 students” in addition to being a member of the Chopin Society, the Association of Music Teachers of New York, and the Ateneo of Puerto Rico.¹⁷ Her “advocacy for the social betterment of [Spanish-speaking people] and children’s education” is also singled out in the obituary.¹⁸ Lecompte was also socially minded as an active performer in New York City; she lent her musical talents to noble causes such as performing the Puerto Rican national anthem at the opening of the Festival of the Association for Blind Hispanic Americans.¹⁹

Lecompte’s student Quijano also studied for one year with the piano teacher Eduviges Bocanegra, who taught lessons in her third-floor apartment at the corner of Kelly Street and Longwood Avenue across from PS 39.²⁰ Quijano did not know if Bocanegra played Latin dance music, but he did recall that “she would whack you with timbal sticks” to correct his hand positions at the piano.²¹

Another pianist who had visited, but not studied at, Lecompte’s school is Paquito Pastor. Pastor, who grew up on 111th Street between Park and Madison avenues, also remembers that Luis Varona taught piano at Lecompte’s school and that Gil Suarez was one of his students. Pastor recalled not having the one dollar that Varona charged per lesson, but he knew that Varona was a great teacher because Varona would walk around the room and hear that the student was playing the wrong notes and identify them.²² Pastor studied at the New York Schools for Music for one dollar a lesson, though the initial rate was thirty-five cents a lesson. Throughout his youth Pastor’s teachers pushed classical repertoire by DeFalla and Albeñiz, and some of his teachers such as Billie Cane and Josefina Andrade also pushed classical repertoire even though they played with Latin dance bands. Generally speaking, Pastor felt that pianists who played Spanish Caribbean dance music did not want to teach him or any up-and-coming young players “because they were thought to be competition.”²³

Pastor also studied with the legendary Puerto Rican pianist and educator simply known as Bocanegra in the 1970s, and he remembered her large apartment, and excellent piano, to be located either on Tiffany near Prospect Avenue or on Longwood Avenue.²⁴ He remembered Bocanegra as a “very methodical” teacher and that she was able to solve his technique problems in “four or five lessons.”²⁵ Pastor had pain in his fingertips from playing loudly and extending them outward in dance band situations. Bocanegra used a ruler to emphasize that he curl his fingers to play correctly and emphasized classical music and technique. Pastor also confirmed that Eddie Palmieri was a student of hers. Pastor recalled that her husband had been a musician and that Bocanegra herself played in bands in the 1940s and early 1950s. Like Lecompte, Bocanegra also organized public recitals for her students that were also written about in La Prensa. In these reviews, her students were singled out for their “surprisingly advanced execution of musical pieces.”²⁶

Margo Bartolomei was another student of Bocanegra for roughly two to three years from the age of eleven or twelve. As an adult, Bartolomei would achieve fame as part of the mambo dance team of Augie and Margo that I discuss later. She recalled that Bocanegra “knew some danzas … I used to play boogie woogie for her and she said ‘I liked the way you played that’ and not to give up the classical.”²⁷ Bartolomei recalled that her lessons with Bocanegra were given in Spanish and focused entirely on classical music such as Beethoven, the Hanon book, the Eslava book, and learning scales. Bartrolomei also remembered learning the danza “La bella trigueña” in her lessons with Bocanegra.

Not much else is known about Eduviges Bocanegra Pino. The 1920 census of Puerto Rico lists her as a twenty-nine-year-old black single woman, with the occupation of piano teacher, and a resident of Guayama.²⁸ Other documentation has her living at 244 W. 136th Street in Manhattan.²⁹ An April 14, 1941, article in La Prensa documents one of Bocanegra’s own performances in New York sponsored by the Department of Children’s Literature at the New York Public Library on 174 E. 110th Street, indicating that she was going to perform a selection of “danzas by Puerto Rican composers.”³⁰

Bocanegra’s student Paquito Pastor recalled being rebuffed by a renowned Cuban composer and music publisher with legendary musical technique with whom he wished to study. However, he did study solfège or solfeo with a Puerto Rican teacher named Adolfo Mesorana on West 116th Street in the 1950s.³¹ Mesorana’s advertisement in La Prensa announces instruction for every instrument but focuses on “preparation of singers for radio, television, theaters, etc., and modern orchestrations.”³²

Santiago Mesorana (unrelated) was another Puerto Rican musician who taught at Juan Mas’s music school at 727 Avenue of the Americas. As chronicled in the New York Post, students received private lessons from 6:30–8pm on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays before the full ensemble rehearsed. The music school provided instruction to “boys and young men, 11 to 21, of Puerto Rican and other Spanish background,” and they performed as the Banda Hispana Los Granaderos, which was formed in August 1958. Mas explained, “the main reason for forming the band was to combat delinquency” and that playing a “musical instrument is the best thing for mental and physical soundness.” By Mesorana’s estimation, “80 percent of the boys have never touched a musical instrument before they came here, [but] they all soon develop great interest and the desire to play the music.”³³ Mesorana’s most well-known student would be Hilton Ruiz, who I profile in the chapter on Puerto Rican musicians. At the age of eight, Ruiz debuted at Carnegie Hall performing a solo recital of Mozart and Chopin.³⁴

PRIVATE STUDIO INSTRUCTION IN MIDTOWN MANHATTAN WITH THREE MEN: OSVALDO ALÉN, NICOLÁS GOODWIN RODRÍGUEZ, AND ALBERTO SOCARRÁS

In the 1950s a gifted Cuban pianist named Osvaldo Alén ran a music instruction studio in midtown Manhattan and raised his family on the West Side of Manhattan. The focus of Alén’s lessons was classical music and light-classical Cuban genres such as contradanza and zarzuela. Born in Cienfuegos, Cuba, Alén had been the organist and choral director of the cathedral in his hometown. After relocating to Havana and performing in various nightclubs, he signed a contract in 1955 to become a regular performer at El Liborio, one of New York’s most celebrated Cuban restaurants. The contract covered moving costs and transportation to New York City, paid $75 per week, and included meals. Alén was also active as a performer beyond El Liborio and can be seen in nightlife photos from various newspapers playing with numerous Latin American and Caribbean musicians (such as his contemporary Noro Morales), actors, politicians, and celebrities in a variety of circumstances.³⁵

Alén’s studio was located at 1687 Broadway, Suite #2, at the corner of 53rd Street; his business card advertised modern courses of music, piano, voice, and repertoire. While it is unclear if he taught any Cuban popular music, it is known from concert programs and newspaper clippings that he performed a wide range of Cuban music including popular and light-classical genres. The studio space that Alén taught in was also used to host press events for visiting Cuban artists such as Tony de la Fuente and Roberto Gormes. Although Alén also performed at El Rancho, boxer Patsy Álvarez’s restaurant, and in Carnegie Hall on a number of occasions, he was best known for his tenure at El Liborio.³⁶ In New York, Alén also performed in patriotic concerts to help the Cuban rebels and continued to perform in concerts that supported the new revolutionary government.

Alén’s son, the distinguished Cuban musicologist Olavo Alén, recalled an interesting story involving his father and the new Cuban leader, Fidel Castro.³⁷ When Castro came to the United States on Apri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Latin Music Education in New York
• Chapter 2: Strings and Skins: Latin Music Instrument Makers in New York
• Chapter 3: Sonny Bravo, Típica 73, and the New York Sound
• Chapter 4: “This Guy Does Not Look Latin,” The Panamanian Connection: Race, Ethnicity, and Musical Identity in New York
• Chapter 5: Puerto Rican Engagement with Jazz and Its Effects on Latin Music
• Chapter 6: “Where’s Barry?”: Another Look at Jews and Latin Music in New York
• Chapter 7: “Invasión del 80/¡Yo vine del Mariel!”: The Musical Impact of the Mariel Boatlift
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• References