Video Lesson: Clave & Cascara

By Richie “Gajate” Garcia Originally published in the April 2009 issue of DRUM!

Here are two patterns that go great together. The patterns will change hands in the second measure of each example.

First, set up any three or four instruments, such as three congas or a set of timbales with a Jam Block and cowbell. In this case, play the right hand on the mambo bell and the left hand on the large drum. Switch the left hand to the jam block and the right hand to the small or high-pitched drum on the second bar. Repeat back and forth.

Remo Ergo-Drum System Dumbek

By Gary Gardner Originally published in the February 2007 issue of DRUM!

Believe it or not, the dumbek was once thought of as the bottom of the food chain in Middle Eastern music. But that, fortunately, is in the past, and the dumbek has ascended to its rightful status as a hipster piece of percussion. Even better news, Remo has now given this wonderful instrument a face-lift and an upgrade. Visually stunning, each Ergo-Drum System dumbek is a powerhouse of intelligent design and rhythmic flavors.

OUT OF THE BOX

The drums are available in three visually striking coverings – Sapphire Ruby, Amethyst Citrine, and Emerald Garnet. The finishes have a cool sparkle and colorful tile-like design that is both unique and fitting for the contemporary percussion player. Real beauties. So if you’re a gigging du’er, you’ll definitely want to invest in some protection.

HEADS UP

Traditionally, many dumbeks have used fish-skin heads. Directly affected by weather, however, these heads were difficult and unpredictable to tune. (If any of you stick swingers remember playing calfskin heads, you know what I’m talking about.) The Ergo-Drum system, though, features Remo’s wonderful, brand-spanking-new Skyndeep graphic drumhead, which is synthetic and uses a proprietary ink-embedding process for the graphic. Rising or falling temperatures? Outdoor gigs? No problem for the Skyndeep. Cranking up the head was fairly simple and produced some outstanding slaps. The bass tone didn’t change all that much and never sounded choked off or distorted.

DUING IT

The name dumbek is derived from the instrument’s two pitches – doum (or dum) for the open tone and bek for the slap. And let me tell you that the drums whip out a whole lot of both. With the 8" drum you can achieve a big sound without compromising the high-pitch slaps and pops most commonly associated with Middle Eastern percussion. Bass tones from the 9" dumbek were also deep and full, while slaps and pops were crisp and tight. I tested the sustainability of the bass tones by cranking up the tuning a good bit. At a certain point, the bottom end was a little thin but not terribly so. Finger snaps and slaps cut through at both ends of the tuning spectrum.

The largest drum, 10" in diameter, really projects and has a terrific bass tone with great sustain. Just like on the smaller drums, slaps just pop out effortlessly. This is in part, I believe, because of the comfortable Ergo design and posture of the drum. I took advantage of the accompanying 5/32" nylon chord, which is used to extend the tuning range, as I put the dumbek through its paces. The nylon chord adds a pretty hip way to adjust the drum’s pitch range higher without having the drumhead protrude past the counterhoop. All you have to do is remove the counterhoop, lay the chord directly on and around the drumhead, replace the counterhoop, and then tighten normally. The drumhead stays flush with the counterhoop and therefore maintains a flat playing surface. After a certain point, though, the drum did not get any higher in pitch and began to choke the bottom end.

ON THE JOB

I took a couple of the drums for a real-world test drive. The gig was in a venue with lots of high ceilings, and the small ensemble included piano, flute, clarinet, and cello. During the concert, the dumbeks provided solid and full rhythmic support. I could hear every little nuance – from the softest pops to the long sustain of the open bass tones. With no amplification at all, the dumbeks cut through perfectly, and the balance between the instruments was wonderful. Tuning on the fly, however, was difficult because the ratchet end of the two-piece tuning key kept coming off the handle, leaving the end piece stuck in the drum. But that’s a small complaint when you consider that the drums added such a beautiful color and flare to the music.

How to wrap up my experience playing Remo’s Ergo-Drum System dumbeks? I simply have to give praise. The drums live up to traditional values but also seamlessly incorporate modern technology without sacrificing sound or feel. All three sizes perform excellently and look fantastic. So I’ll leave it up to you to decide which one to fall in love with.

Model
Remo Ergo-Drum System Dumbek

Features
Acousticon shell, ergonomic counterhoop, Skyndeep drumhead (with “Fish Skin” graphic), two-piece tuning key

Available Finishes
Sapphire Ruby, Amethyst Citrine, and Emerald Garnet

Price
8" x 18" $195
9" x 18" $205
10" x 18" $215

Contact
Remo, 28101 Industry Dr.
Valencia, CA 91355.
800-525-5134.
remo.com

Lenny Castro: The Art Of Accompaniment

By Joe Bosso Originally published in the April 2008 issue of DRUM! Magazine

In 1990, when he was 40 years old, Lenny Castro finally realized he was a musician. It didn’t matter that he began playing drums and percussion at the age of three, was trained at New York’s prestigious High School Of Music & Art, and by the time of his epiphany, had played on thousands of recordings and dozens of tours with icons as disparate as Stevie Wonder, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Boz Scaggs, Toto, Quincy Jones, Barbra Streisand, Ringo Starr, Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Fleetwood Mac. Even more ironic is that this definitive moment of validation came from the one artist Castro always dreamed of playing with, but never did.

“Miles,” he says matter-of-factly, with the understanding that the last name, Davis, is a given. “That was one of my biggest dreams, and I got so close.” Davis’ nephew, Vince Wilbur, informed Castro that the venerable horn legend was considering him for an upcoming tour. “I couldn’t believe it,” Castro recalls. “To play with Miles Davis, the legend – unbelievable! So I put a reel together of all the stuff I’d done. I’ve never had to put an audition reel together, but Miles insisted on it, so I couldn’t say no.” Castro sent the tape and proceeded to wait. And wait. And wait.

“A few months later, I was doing a showcase with Joe Sample, and [producer and record executive] Tommy LiPuma came and he brought Miles with him,” Castro says. “I had no idea Miles was coming. After the performance, I went up to them, and I was more than a little nervous. Trembling a little, I went to shake hands with Miles, and he did the strangest thing: he grabbed my hand rather quickly and turned it palm-up. Then he started touching my palm, just feeling it, running his fingertips over my calluses. After a few moments, he released my hand. He gave me this intense look and said, “Whoa!” And in that one second, I felt an acceptance I’d never known before. To get respect from Miles Davis …” His voice trails off as he replays the incident in his mind. Then he lets out a laugh and says, “The funny this is, I didn’t get the gig. Miles decided to hire one of his sons. Hey, I can’t compete with family, you know?”

The Specialist. Over the course of a nearly 40-year career Castro has had very little in the way of competition. Since his first big break playing in Melissa Manchester’s band in the early ’70s he has deftly navigated multiple identities as an always-in-demand recording and touring percussionist. With his big teddy bear countenance and infectious laugh, Castro is the sort of person folks want to be around. “I disarm people by making them laugh,” he says. “If things are getting heated, I know how to cool everything down real quick.”

But it is his uncanny ability to blend seamlessly into the most unorthodox of settings (one week it’s Dwight Yoakam, the next it’s The Mars Volta) that earned Castro the nickname, “The Specialist.” Castro chuckles self-deprecatingly at the moniker. “What I do isn’t so special,” he says. “The people I play with are special. Drumming is really about being an accompanist, and as a percussionist I’m an accompanist to the accompanist.”

To explain his appeal, he uses a culinary analogy: “Think of it as if you were making a stew. Now, in your band you’ve got your singer, your guitarist, your bass player, your keyboard player, your horn players, your main drummer, whatever – they’re the meat and vegetables and the broth in the stew. What am I? I’m the spice. Take me away and you’ve still got a stew, but it would be bland and tasteless. But if you want a great meal, a stew that’s going to knock you out, you need spice – that’s where I come in.”

Though Castro laughs at his own words, the secret to his lasting success lies in his Zelig-like ability to be something of a musical allspice. “I love straddling different worlds,” he says. “I’m a fan of all kinds of music. A lot of people like to say that, but the truth is they don’t expose themselves to a lot of music, either as a listener or a player. What artists like about me, and why I think they hire me, is that I’m a chameleon: I can change the way I play to fit whatever kind of music I’m playing. Sometimes my wife even tells me I look different from band to band. To me, that’s a compliment. Why put a limit on what I can do, or who I can play with?”

Percussion Prodigy. Born and raised in New York City, Castro grew up comfortably on the Upper East Side. A self-described “special kid,” he had little interest in the games and usual activities of childhood. “Since I can remember, music was all I ever wanted to be involved with,” he says. By the time he reached the first grade, he was proficient on drums and the phalanx of instruments that comprise Latin percussion. “My parents bought me drums and really nurtured my development. I think they could tell that music was just cruising through my bloodstream. My favorite instruments to play were congas, bongos, and timbales – anything that was in the Latin circuit, that’s what I wanted to master.”

He was already well on his way to percussion mastery when, on a bracingly cold February night in 1964, he sat up with his parents to watch The Beatles annihilate America on The Ed Sullivan Show. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing – and hearing!” Castro laughs. “Ringo Starr became my idol that night. To see him up on the drum riser, shaking his hair and pounding out that big, steady beat, he was phenomenal. And all the girls screaming like crazy – who didn’t want to be Ringo Starr? I know I did.”

Although Castro continued playing percussion instruments, the impact of The Beatles left an indelible impression. “I went back and got comfortable with a proper drum kit again,” he says. “I studied those Beatles’ records back and forth, over and over. I knew Ringo’s every move. Even back then I knew he was a huge talent. There was so much artistry and humanity to his playing. He’s one of the most clever drummers of all time.”

Castro credits the High School Of Music & Art’s curriculum with helping him to learn how to read music (“very important when you get into the studio and they hand you a chart”). He cites another source as being equally important: the radio. “As a teenager, I was constantly listening to the radio,” he says. “You have to remember, it was an exciting time back then in the ’60s. Jazz, blues, Latin jazz, pop, rock, R&B, girl groups, country & western – you could hear it all on AM radio. It wasn’t like now, with these rigid playlists. Back then disc jockeys could play what they wanted. You turned on the radio and great music just jumped out at you. If you weren’t inspired by that, my God, you must’ve been dead!”

After high school, Castro floundered around New York City, struggling to jump through the fiery hoops of the session scene. “It was like this secret club,” he recalls, “If you weren’t hooked up with the right people, you wouldn’t get your foot in the door.” It seemed as if a secret password was necessary to score auditions, and for one reason or another, nobody would give Castro the code. “I was starting to get discouraged. I had ambition, I had ability, but something was lacking, and I didn’t know what it was. Luck, I guess. But how do you get lucky? That, I didn’t know.”

By the mid-’70s he was working at Frank Ippolito’s Drum Shop, where he was able to play all of the latest products. “I was a good worker,” he says, “but it was hard. I didn’t want to be a retailer, selling drums to players who were doing what I wanted to be doing.” One day, Castro received a call to audition for singer Melissa Manchester’s band – somebody from Melissa’s camp called Ippolito to ask him if he knew any percussionists. Ippolito recommended Castro without hesitation. Before leaving for the audition, Castro received a constructive piece of advice from his boss: “If you don’t get the gig, don’t come back here!” Castro lets out a laugh. “Frank meant it, too. All in all, it was a good boot in the ass.”

Castro landed the Manchester gig and toured with her for a year. “It was my first time seeing the world, getting real money, and playing in front of big crowds. I knew immediately that this was the life for me.” But when the New York-based Manchester decided to move to Los Angeles, Castro had to choose: relocate with the singer, or lose his first high-profile job. “It took me all of one minute to weigh my options and pack my bags for L.A. I had no idea how advantageous the move would be.”

Go West, Young Man. In Los Angeles, the invitations that seemed so elusive in New York came Castro’s way with an ease that stunned the young percussionist. Within weeks he was working with Diana Ross on a session produced by Richard Perry, where he met the hottest drummer in town, the late Jeff Porcaro, who would soon form, with other L.A. session monsters, the venerated rock group, Toto.

“Jeff and I clicked immediately,” says Castro. “We were two peas in a pod. He and a bunch of the guys who would eventually be Toto had just played on Boz Scaggs’ album, Silk Degrees, and the buzz on the record and the players was strong.” One day, Castro’s phone rang. It was Porcaro. “He said, ‘Hey, do you want a touring gig? Boz is getting ready to hit the road and I think he could use a guy like you.’ So he told me to come down to this soundstage where they were rehearsing. I ended up going with [Toto guitarist] Steve Lukather, who was also being considered for the band. I set up my stuff, and we played a few songs with Boz and the band. Things sounded good to me, but after it was all over nobody said a word; Boz was up and out the door. So I went to Jeff and said, ‘Well, what do you think? Did I get the gig?’ Jeff looked at me and said, ‘Man, you had the gig before you even walked in!’

Touring with the Boz Scaggs band proved to be an even bigger adventure, musically and otherwise, than playing in Melissa Manchester’s band. “We had a lot of fun in those days,” says Castro. “Lots of practical jokes, lots of good times – some of which I probably shouldn’t speak of.” Castro remembers Scaggs as being “an incredible bandleader, very generous as far as giving us room to stretch the music. I learned a lot from him. He knows how to write great pop songs, but he appreciates virtuoso players who can take his music somewhere else. A lot of times, you’ll play something that a singer isn’t expecting and you’ll get a dirty look. Not with Boz. He welcomed surprises – as long as they sounded good.”

While on tour with Scaggs, Castro met a singer named Paulette Brown. After a “quick but very romantic” courtship, the two married. They have two children: a son, Tyler, who currently plays drums in a heavy metal band, and a daughter, Christina, who sings and is pursuing a career in culinary arts.

Succession Of Stars. After touring with Scaggs and playing on his follow-up to Silk Degrees, the album Down Two, Then Left, Castro next worked with another maverick singer-songwriter, Randy Newman. “Randy was a flat-out gas,” Castro says. “We did the song ‘I Love L.A.,’ and I knew right away it was going to be a hit for him.” While cutting the track, an engineer was fiddling with a Linn Drum machine – it was the first time both Castro and Newman had seen the device.

“Randy went ballistic,” says Castro, laughing. “For one thing, it was taking hours for this engineer to try to get the damn thing to work, and that didn’t please Randy at all. Plus, he had a total aversion to the idea of a machine replacing a real live drummer. I remember Randy jumped up – this was after four or five hours of nothing getting done – and started yelling, ‘Enough! That’s the devil’s machine! That’s the devil’s work! I want real drums. Throw that thing away right now!’” Without further ado, the drum machine was toast.

During the next few years, when Castro wasn’t on tour, he would play with Toto both live and in the studio. “They were always very gracious and accommodating to me,” says Castro. “Whenever they were making some of their big hits, you know, like ‘Africa’ and ‘Rosanna,’ they wanted me right there with them. I used to watch them come up with their parts; a lot of the time they would bounce ideas off of me. It was a great collaboration, which is why so many musicians respect Toto. You can hear the difference when real players are communicating with one another.”

For a time it looked as though Castro was destined to become a permanent bandmember, but “political issues” stood in the way. If Castro was disappointed, his hurt feelings were soothed when Porcaro took him aside and told him it was a blessing in disguise. “I remember Jeff saying, ‘Listen, man, you should be glad you’re not in the band, because once you’re a member, you have to get permission to do anything.’ And it turned out to be true. In fact, the Toto guys started to envy me. I could go off and play with people like Stevie Wonder and do all this other stuff. Meanwhile, they weren’t working; they were always waiting for tours to get booked or albums to come out. They were tied down by the machinery of the band, whereas I was free as a bird.”

Performing with Stevie Wonder would prove to be one of the bigger challenges Castro had yet to face. The percussionist played with Wonder on the Woman In Red soundtrack, as well as two world tours. “He’s a pretty intimidating guy at first,” Castro remarks. “He doesn’t suffer fools gladly – or at all. And if you’re going to keep up with Stevie, you have to know his whole book, every song he’s ever done and then some, because he’s likely to call a tune out at the drop of a hat. You have to be right on it, and he knows if you’re not.

“He would constantly surprise the band, too, calling out covers that we hadn’t even talked about, let alone rehearsed. I remember one time we were playing, and out of nowhere he yells, ‘Alfie!’ You know that song – ‘What’s it all about?/Alfieeeeee ……’ I had never played it before in my life. I turned to the guitar section and they had this deer-in-the-headlights look: ‘We don’t know this song. What do we do?’ And we’re talking about a concert in front of 250,000 people. You can’t bonk in a situation like that; you just go with it.”

Castro’s 14-year association with Bette Midler proved to be just as much of a struggle. On four separate tours with her, Castro became, in his words, “a comedic actor posing as a musician.” During the course of any given show, Castro and the rest of Midler’s band would be called upon to perform songs that spanned and sometimes mixed genres. “Burlesque, vaudeville, blues, R&B, swing, rock, disco – you gotta know it all,” Castro says. “To play with Bette, you had to have Broadway chops. You had to read charts. And to top it all off, you had to have a good sense of humor, because she had these comedy bits in the show and she liked to include the band.”

A more relaxed collaboration with Stevie Nicks – “a girl who’s 100-percent rhythm; a total joy to be around” – led to Castro joining Fleetwood Mac on their massively successful reunion tour, The Dance. “Stevie suggested me to Mick Fleetwood, who welcomed me with open arms. A few weeks before the tour, Mick and I got together in a room, and we just locked. You know, you have your technicians, your Vinnie Colaiutas and people like that, but when it comes down to just laying down a big fat 2 and 4, Mick finds that pocket like nobody else. And the things he does on the hi-hat … the guy has nuances for days.”

Fountain Of Youth. Of all the acts Castro has performed with over the years, perhaps none seems more anachronistic than the youthful prog-rock outfit, The Mars Volta. But the veteran percussionist feels perfectly at home with the frenzied concept kings. “Oh, man, Cedric [Bixler-Zavala] and Omar [Rodriquez-Lopez] are my boys! Talk about high energy. I have to work out for a whole week before I play with them. But I love running with the young guys; it keeps me on my toes. What’s funny is, as intense as their music is, they hear the room for different kinds of percussion. They like nuances and different shades. Without generalizing, I think it’s because of their Latin heritage: Percussion is in their blood.”

Castro credits his metalhead son with keeping him up to speed with some of the more current acts on the scene. Bonding together at Slipknot concerts might not be every father’s dream, but to Castro, “It’s the coolest thing ever. My son has turned me on to so many cool groups. Mastodon – my God, those guys are off the hook with their riffs and their crazy lyrics. I might have to work out for a month, but I’ll tell you, I’m putting the word out right now to those guys: Give me a call. I can add some cool stuff to what you do!”

And what if he was asked to join Mastodon? “That’d be okay,” says Castro, laughing. “They’re definitely nuts!”

Castro’s Setup

DRUMS LP
1. 12.5" x 25" Djembe (Original African)
2. 11" x 30" Classic Quinto
3. 11" x 30" Classic Quinto
4. 11.75" x 30" Classic Conga
5. 11.75" x 30" Classic Conga
6. 12.5" x 30" Classic Tumba
7. 12.5" x 30" Classic Tumba
8. 7.25" Classic Bongo
9. 8.625" Classic Bongo
10. 14" Tito Puente Timbale (chrome)
11. 15" Tito Puente Timbale (chrome)
12. Hi-Lo Cowbell

PERCUSSION
A. SpectraSound Mark Tree
B. Caroll Music Bell Tree
C. Ludwig Vintage Tambourine
D. Vaughncraft Woodblock
E. Homemade Shaker

CYMBALS Paiste
F. 15" Crash
G. 14" China

Lenny Castro also uses Remo drumheads, and Rhythm Tech shakers.

The Ray Barretto Story

By Robert Doerschuk Originally published in the June 2006 issue of DRUM! Magazine

It’s a little too easy to paint Ray Barretto in shadows. He was, by some reports, not the easiest guy to get along with. Especially in his later years, he could be prickly with associates or even with members of his audience. He may have at times felt cut off from at least some of his colleagues, who perhaps didn’t appreciate what they saw as his deviations from the Latin music canon. Worse than that, there were family problems – and worse still, even with his devotion to jazz, his favorite music above all, and his vast catalog of performances and recordings with respected jazz artists, he never felt like that community had accepted him fully as one of their own.

At least that’s how it seemed until the very end, literally the last hours of his life, on January 13, 2006, when Barretto stood on a stage in New York City and accepted the National Endowment For The Arts’ honors as a Jazz Master – the highest distinction a practitioner of jazz can attain from America’s cultural establishment.

With his fellow recipients Tony Bennett and Chick Corea standing nearby, Barretto took in the applause from the dignitaries and musicians gathered for the event. And then he responded with a statement he had prepared in advance: “To receive this honor is the gift of a lifetime. Jazz has been my spiritual babysitter since my youth in Harlem and the Bronx, and I’ve spent my career trying to give something back. With gratitude and respect to everyone at the National Endowment For The Arts, please allow me to consider myself, still, a jazz student.”

Maybe he had written this out a few days earlier, but in truth Barretto had spent a lifetime anticipating this moment. Latin musical culture, particularly in New York, has long ties to jazz, going back to before Barretto’s arrival. The salsa explosion of the ’80s rode on a chorus of trumpets echoing Dizzy Gillespie and pianists voicing harmonies as advanced as anything Bill Evans ever laid down. But it wasn’t always easy to notice these connections behind the firestorms of rhythm ignited by the front line: the timbales, the congas, and the bongos.

Barretto benefited from his identity as a Latin musician, yet his heart was always in jazz. As a result, there was enormous diversity in his work, which stretched from Puerto Rican dance band genres through R&B and, briefly, psychedelic rock all the way to bebop. Most often there were elements of each in the explorations he led with his various ensembles, in particular his last one, New World Spirit. But as the NEA confirmed early this year, Barretto was first and foremost a jazz artist who played Latin percussion, which made him unique and, until his last days, maybe a little lonely as well.

Sadly, this moment of redemption preceded a rapid denouement. Just one day after being anointed by the NEA, Barretto suffered a heart attack. Rushed to Hackensack University’s Medical Center in New Jersey, he received treatment for pneumonia and, shortly, quadruple bypass heart surgery. Complications set in, aggravated by his asthma, and on February 17, at 5:00 in the morning, the great conguero’s story came to its end.

It had begun 76 years before, on April 29, 1929, with Barretto’s birth in Brooklyn. His mother played recordings of Puerto Rican music at home, but Ray, like his brother and sister, felt a stronger pull to the big band jazz that dominated local radio at the time. At age 17, he enlisted in the Army and shipped out to Munich, Germany. There he found a club, the Orlando, and began sitting in on jam sessions. He had to build his own drum, essentially a banjo with the strings removed, which only emphasized how anomalous the idea of playing percussion in a jazz setting was at the time.

But then Dizzy Gillespie came to town. At that time, the great trumpeter was drawing heavily from Afro-Cuban music and blowing over a rhythm section that he’d built around Cuban percussionist Chano Ponzo. Gillespie’s appearance was all it took to convince Barretto that the idea of transplanting Latin percussion into a jazz context was viable after all. By the time his tour was up, he was eager to lead the way.

His first gigs back in New York were with Latin bands led by Eddie Bonnemere and José Curbelo. But then, one night in the early ’50s, after Barretto had wrapped up a gig at the Apollo Theater, Charlie Parker suddenly appeared and invited the young percussionist to sit in on his set. They played together at the Apollo that night and for several days after that; given Parker’s already iconic status, this was the greatest possible confirmation of Barretto’s arrival.

In 1957, when Mongo Santamaría left Tito Puente’s band, Barretto took his place. While gigging and recording with the great timbalero, he worked exhaustively to establish a beachhead in the jazz world. Some of the earliest of these dates were with the pianist Red Garland, whose trio Barretto first supplemented on two sessions in 1958, for the albums Manteca and Rojo. These performances forecast the challenges that Barretto would face on his jazz odyssey: His ability to complement the drummer, without getting in his way, is evident, and his swing feel can’t be denied. Yet Garland uses the congas only on the up tunes; in fact, he speeds up ballads like “Darling Je Vous Aime Beaucoup” and “Mr. Wonderful,” no doubt reasoning that percussion has no place at slower tempos. And, truth be told, if the congas were erased from these tracks, the drums, with their idiomatic post-bop approach of active ride cymbal and occasional left-hand accents, would certainly have gotten the job done on their own.

This, then, was Barretto’s dilemma: The congas, coupled with traps, would inevitably sweeten rather than drive the engine of the groove in a jazz context. To stay out of the drummer’s way, he tended to simplify, often playing little more than a high slap on the second beat and two lower hits answering as eighth-notes on the fourth beat of each bar. It did swing, but on his sessions with Gene Ammons, Kenny Burrell, Wes Montgomery, and other jazz headliners, the irony was that he usually did so by laying down a pattern that allowed the other musicians, including the drummer, more room to stretch.

It was, in other words, the antithesis of what drew Barretto to jazz in the first place: freedom, interactivity, spontaneity.

The irony continues in the fact that, from his first album as a leader – Pachanga With Barretto, a charanga project in 1961 – through his final recordings, he found these qualities more in Latin than jazz settings. Partly this owed to his experiments at enhancing the genre with jazz as well as R&B influences. These efforts earned him commercial success, beginning with “El Watusi,” which became the first Latin single to break into the Billboard Top 20 and eventually earn gold status. But his creative breakthrough was probably Acid, released in 1967. Despite the title’s trippy implications, these performances evoke street intensity more than spaced-out grooviness. On the Stax-oriented numbers, such as “A Deeper Shade Of Soul,” he even restructures the feel created by Al Jackson Jr. without a trap set in sight; it works, too, though with enough air between the congas, timbales, and tambourine to allow room for a drummer to join the fun.

Acid was the first of a series of LPs involving Barretto on the Fania label. Most of them were credited to the Fania All-Stars, which was exactly what the name says: an assembly of legends in Latin music, including Willie Colón, Rubén Blades, Celia Cruz, and Johnny Pacheco, recognized now as the band that launched the salsa music craze. Fans and musicians still remember their concerts; one, at Yankee Stadium, peaked with Barretto and Mongo Santamaría locked in a percussion battle on “Congo Bongo” that whipped the crowd into a frenzy that hastened an early end to the show. But even though he would cross paths with most of the group’s members in years to come – most memorably with Cruz, with whom he would share a Grammy for their performance on “Ritmo En El Corazón” in 1989 – Barretto would sometimes seem to resent their impact on reinforcing the perception that he was fundamentally a Latin, rather than a jazz, artist after all. To one interviewer he would grumble, “Playing with the Fania All-Stars was as much about showbiz as it was about playing music.”

Writer Carol Amoruso captures this ambivalence in her description of a Barretto performance, posted at imdiversity.com: “The boys from the barrio … were out to boogie, but Ray was out to uplift them with new sounds. They were not about to hear it and called up to the bandstand, letting him know they wouldn’t be happy until he brought back the Fania days … Ray was not about to comply. The sultry air got thicker … until Ray got up and called to his band to quit the stage. Something or someone moved him back behind his drums again and, perfunctorily, he gave us another 20 minutes. When he’d been done, he didn’t go away mad, he just stood up and went away.”

Salsa diehards weren’t any happier as Barretto moved back toward jazz through the ’80s and ’90s. Typical was an exchange at Mr. E’s, a venue owned by the great West Coast timbalero Pete Escovedo in Berkeley, California, one night in the ’90s. Midway through the evening, a member of the audience, impatient with the genre-hopping of Barretto’s New World Spirit band, started shouting his objections and demanding that they dust off some salsa standards instead. Barretto gave no ground: He and the customer exchanged heated words for a while, until the set resumed in the same progressive vein in which it had begun.

Through stubbornness, determination, refusal to compromise, and above all his supreme gifts as a player and bandleader, Barretto was able to achieve his dreams over these past several years. His 2004 album Time Was – Time Is stands as his most complete synthesis of aesthetics; the horns play over a wide emotional range beyond the razzle-dazzle of salsa solos, the piano comps on chords with only an occasional montuno moment, and the rhythm balances perfectly between modern, Elvin-oriented drive and Latin simmer. For all that he had accomplished up to this point, this was the CD that Barretto had imagined and pursued and finally captured throughout most of his journey.

With that journey’s end earlier this year, the factions that had debated his merits came together at last. Family, friends, politicians, Randy Weston, Bobby Sanabria, and other musicians, many carrying their instruments, sent him off in New York at the Riverside Memorial Chapel; two conga drums, and two floral sculptures of congas, stood near his casket. In the old district of San Juan, a group of Puerto Rican congueros regaled thousands of dancers at a memorial service. On the West Coast, the respected percussionist and educator John Santos cited the “great strength” and “giant love” in writing a personal farewell to the master.

And amid the festivities and eulogies and stories shared by those who knew and respected Barretto, that gap he had tried through his life to close, between his heritage and his true music, narrowed a little more, almost without anyone noticing.

Joe Lovano Remembers A Friend

Joe Lovano stands in the front line of great modern jazz tenor saxophonists. His credits include a three-year run with Woody Herman, followed by gigs and/or sessions with Elvin Jones, Charlie Haden, Paul Motian, and for the past 15 years as leader of his own groups. He has won a Grammy Award and been honored as “Musician Of The Year” by Downbeat magazine.

“I first heard Ray on record, especially with Gene Ammons, when I was a kid. We met at the Heineken Jazz Festival in Puerto Rico. I was there with my quartet and he was there with his band, and I ended up sitting in on some of his set. It was a thrill when he called me to participate in a recording session with his group, the World Spirit Band, on Portraits In Jazz And Clavé. Some friends of mine were in that band, like Mike Mossman, Adam Colker, and John Di Martino. Bobby Sanabria played percussion along with Ray, and Vince Cherico played drums.

“I played live with his band on most of his stuff, but on a few tracks I dubbed my part over music they’d already laid down. Kenny Burrell played live with the band on those, and they left some spaces for me to play within those charts. But Ray played along with me along with the tracks, so it wasn’t like I was overdubbing by myself. Instead, we had a great interplay, and you can hear it in what both of us were laying down.

“Ray always thought of himself as a jazz musician. He used to say that he didn’t play Latin jazz, he played jazz Latin. That was his approach especially when he worked with jazz players. He was in a lot of groups led by jazz musicians, before he emerged as a leader himself, and he embraced that whole Art Blakey tradition of leading a band from the drum chair. Playing with bands whose leaders are in different positions taught me a lot about how to compose and put music together based on the attitudes of different places in a band. They get other kinds of insights, which can make magic happen in their group – and Ray had that. He knew a lot about how to put things together as a leader. He was especially good at playing with other drummers without getting in their way. He could make himself part of the drummer’s concept without standing out by himself. A lot of the music he cut with Gene Ammons or Lou Donaldson, some people might think he was doing a simple, minimal part, but it added so much to the groove. He had a special way of turning trio and quartet performances into a quintet sound.

“Ray was an improviser. He didn’t want to play just for dances or parties. Most of the famous Latin bands, like Tito Puente, played for dancers. Ray came up in a different environment through playing in jazz clubs – real listening rooms. So he led concert-type bands. I’m sure he played for hundreds or thousands of dances too – we all did – but as the leader he focused on playing with a concert attitude, whether it was in a club or not. He played to play, like the Jazz Messengers. That also shaped his career. Maybe he didn’t get into the limelight like a lot of people did, but everybody knew the beauty in his music. He was powerful, too. He had an incredible sound onstage; it was the focus of everything that went on in his band. But he wasn’t a showboat. A lot of cats are showboats when they hit the spotlight. They might be playing great things, but they’d be jumping all over the place and playing by themselves. He had his moments, but especially in those early sessions he was the consummate rhythm-section player.

“I never went on the road or hung that much with Ray, but being around him was a joy. He had a beautiful spirit.”

Mr. Hard Hands’ Grooves

Ray Barretto was tagged “Mr. Hard Hands” because of the rich, cutting tone he gained by spanking his congas like no other conguero of his time. The inimitable sonic pioneer of the tumbadoras had many songs of commercial success in both American popular music and salsa, even though his heart and soul was that of a jazz man.

Barretto’s crossover mega-hit was El Watusi (1962), which was recorded as a pachanga dance style that was trendy in the early ’60s. He never thought much of the record musically but enjoyed the recognition and fame. Nevertheless, Barretto’s fundamental conga rhythm drives the tune in a way that only Mr. Hard Hands could (Ex. 1).

A pioneer of salsa music, Barretto was a member of the famous Fania All-Stars for three decades. Toward the end of his salsa career, he recorded the album Ritmo En El Corazon with the late “Queen of Salsa,” Celia Cruz, earning a Grammy award in 1990. On the title track’s conga rhythm, Ray drops the last conga tone on the final bar of each musical phrase to very musically set up the next section (Ex. 2).

His last solo studio record, Time Was – Time Is, is all about Barretto’s jazz side featuring his sextet. The African-based 6/8 groove on “Motherless Child” (Ex. 3) complements the haunting trumpet lead by displacing the conga open tone on beat 6.

Barretto’s recordings as a sideman and solo artist number in the hundreds, and these three examples simply represent moments in time of his rich musical history. If you are a conga player, or an aficionado of Latin and jazz music, you owe it to yourself to seek out the recordings of Ray Barretto.

Guiro Grooving

By Richie “Gajate” Garcia Published in the February 2006 issue of DRUM!

This month we are going to look at some widely used guiro patterns that should become part of your percussion vocabulary. Ex. 1 is a medium-tempo cha-cha-chá. Ex. 2 is a fast-tempo charanga. Ex. 3 is a slow-tempo dannón. Practice the faster patterns slowly at first, gradually bringing up the tempo when you feel comfortable.

Guiro Grooving Exercises

Richie “Gajate” Garcia has played with Phil Collins, Diana Ross, Hiroshima, and John Denver, recorded movie soundtracks, taught at Musician’s Institute for more than ten years, and performs clinics worldwide.

Arthur Hull & Babatunde Olatunji: Changing The World, One Beat At A Time

By Arthur Hull Published August 4, 2009

With his passing in 2003, Babatunde Olatunji’s legacy to western culture will be his creation of today’s grassroots nonprofessional drumming and dancing community. Baba spent more than three-quarters of his life tirelessly working towards building community through “rhythmaculture.” He was, in a true sense of the word, a rhythmical evangelist.

As a musician, Olatunji introduced African musical elements to the west, which had an immediate and lasting affect on American jazz. He created worldbeat music, generations before the term had even been conceived. Olatunji was also included in the Grateful Dead’s musical family, having contributed to the 1992 Grammy-award winning Planet Drum album, produced by Mickey Hart.

As a teacher, his workshops brought to us a deeper understanding of African culture in both dance music and song. Olatunji also helped other great African drummers and dancers come to the U.S., including Titos Sompa from the Congo and Ladji Camara from Guinea. He guided them in New York in his Drums Of Passion dance and drum troupe, before they established themselves as elders in the national ethnic arts community.

As a community builder, Olatunji was a man on a mission, and is the great grandfather of our ever-growing personal percussion movement. With his inspiration and guidance, this group has developed into a national community-drumming network.

The following interview was pieced together from a number of long conversations that took place while I drove Olatunji to our various “Drums Of Passion” gigs during the 1995 West Coast summer tour. He was very curious about the newly developing cultural phenomena called facilitated drum circles, and we spoke at length about it. Baba’s observations from years ago, when there were only a handful of drummers exploring facilitation, is even more appropriate now that there is a fully developed rhythm event facilitator community.

As we move closer to Baba’s dream of “a drum in every household” may we honor his memory with every beat of our drum.

Hull: Let’s talk about when you first came to America.
Olatunji: I was playing the hand drum when I was on the boat, coming here in 1950. I remember the engineer on the boat, the M.V. Eluru of the West African Boat Line that brings all the cargoes from West Africa to the United States through New Orleans. It wasn’t a passenger boat. It had a few cabins that they would sell to passengers, but it was actually a cargo boat. The engineer said, “A strange man in a strange land shouldn’t sing a strange song,” because every morning I would play my hand drum just to amuse myself. It was a sakara — it’s a small hand drum, which has the form of a tambourine. I came over to become a Rhodes Scholar, studying to become a diplomat. I was hoping to be able to one day represent Nigeria in the U.N., or as a diplomat or an ambassador to some country.

Hull: Instead you became an ambassador of African culture in the U.S. How did you make that transition?
Olatunji: Because of circumstances that led me to doing what I’m doing now. When I arrived on the campus of Morehouse College in Atlanta, I saw a lot of African Americans, brothers, who looked like people I know very well at home. I saw people who looked like my cousins, or my uncle. I saw women who looked like women I liked very much. And I said, “You look like friends of mine.” And they’d say, “Oh no, I’m not from Africa. Don’t you ever tell me that. I’m a Negro and I’m from the United States.” I couldn’t believe my ears. I said, “Your ancestors are from Africa.” They were very sincere, but I could not fully understand why they said that. They asked me questions about whether we had lions running the streets. I was not discouraged, though, because I had discovered the sincerity in their voices, in the way they asked the questions, they wanted to learn. Then I discovered Hollywood’s unholy war on Africa — the betrayer of Africa. Movies I saw in the ’50s portrayed Africa with Tarzan and Jane swinging from tree to tree, people sleeping in trees, headhunters, as if nothing good could come from Africa. So I really wanted to identify myself with Africa, and say, “Let me educate you about Africa.” And that is how the first program was put together. The first dance company, the first production, that’s how I started. Then after graduating, I moved to New York. I decided to move there on my first visit to New York in my freshman year. I saw Harlem and said, “Oh, this is where my people are. This is the place to come to continue the program.”

Hull: How long did it take before the public began to take notice of your work?
Olatunji: That started just after the release of the Drums Of Passion album in 1959. It was right there on Billboard’s Top Ten for weeks and weeks. That started getting us national attention. Then also, it was during the ’60s, a period when social change was happening in this country, which also gave me an opportunity to participate in this change.

Hull: Young people were looking for and discovering a new way of living and recreating their culture.
Olatunji: That’s right. So I was credited with the cultural awareness that was going on, of the African Americans and all young people both black and white. How many black radio stations did you know then? Very few if any. There was one in the New York area, WLWU, with a very wonderful man Murray The K, who would always open his shows with “Akiwowo” [from Drums Of Passion]. And he would play it and say, “Well the chief is here today. The change is coming. Look out you guys.” The young people on college campuses both black and white would listen to Drums Of Passion.

Hull: That’s basically where I first heard Drums Of Passion, in college. It paved the way for the workshops you did throughout the country. And that began the birthing process of the drumming communities that we see today.
Olatunji: We first introduced African dancing and drumming on college campuses throughout the United States. We traveled the length and breadth of the United States and visited over 1,000 colleges and universities over the last 20 years. Probably any college in the East to the Midwest, Minneapolis to California. In the ’80s we opened with a jazz band at the same time we were running the dance company. The jazz band consisted of people like Yousef Lateef and Charles Lloyd, and the manager of Birdland would always give me 13 weeks to open all the big bands that came there. And then we opened the Troubadour in Los Angeles and another club in San Francisco in 1963 before the march on Washington. When we would go to places to perform, I’d also take the opportunity to say, “Do you have a center where people go? Let me go and give a lecture there.” That was very important because it became more than just people coming and doing a concert for the students. I’d give them a workshop in drumming and dance. It was an opportunity to sell the act, but also an opportunity for people to have an understanding of what we are doing. It’s important to let people get a little closer. So that they can see and experience and feel what you are doing and what you are a part of. It’s also okay for someone to perform and for people to clap their hands at the end then leave. But to really be a part of it, to know that they can be a part of it, is more.

Hull: Why do you think people from all walks of life are picking up a hand drum and getting involved in this hand drumming phenomena that is sweeping the United States today?
Olatunji: Well, they are going back to their roots. We’re people who started with body percussion, with clapping of the hands, stamping of the feet. I guess it’s the way we started to amuse ourselves. That’s how we learned to imitate sounds of birds and all kinds of things we hear around us, because of man’s capacity to imitate. That’s how we figured out how to make different instruments. So we started way back, and now we are going back to just ourselves. Rediscovering ourselves. And from there on we can move forward. We are trying to put together the great things of the past with the present for the future. You know the sky is not the limit anymore, it is space now. We are discovering that we need to come back down to earth, from where we started. It’s as if we are trying to balance things up, in essence.

Hull: We are trying to balance the technological society that has taken us away from ...
Olatunji: That has taken us away from the reality of the earth that supports us.

Hull: ... the reality of our connection with the earth and our connection with each other as people ...
Olatunji: It gave birth to us in the first place. We need to recognize that it will always be there. It’s there for us to use, replenish and leave for forthcoming generations, so we cannot afford to destroy it. We are learning to do that now. We are also finding the simple things that people can do together. All people from all walks of life, all colors, have various things that they can do together, and it’s the simplest thing to make music and sing together.

Hull: Let’s talk about your workshops. They do more than just educate people about African culture. They are basically a place for a community to come together. You address a tremendous amount of your work to building and feeding a healthy community though the dances, songs and rhythms that you teach. Do you always try to convey such a message through your workshops?
Olatunji: Well, I must confess that I deliberately make sure my presentation is geared towards the message that emphasizes togetherness, the one that promotes love and the one that makes everyone feel important. I know I must think about what I’m going to say, and I know also that my actions speak louder than my words. So I also try to practice what I preach.

Hull: Such as “getting even”?
Olatunji: As the old Chinese proverb says, the only people that we should really get even with are those who have done us a good turn. So I don’t let go of anybody who has done something good for me. Those are the people that I spend my time and energy with. I have no time or spare energy for anything or anyone who is being detrimental to my spirit, or keeping me from my goal. When you think about it, it’s true. The energy that you put together trying to get even with people who do unpleasant things to you can kill you. But the energy that you put together to get even with people who are nice to you gives you more power, gives you joy, and that accelerates you.

Hull: You often hear people talk about the spirit of the drum. This phrase is used a lot, but hasn’t been well defined. We as a group feel that something happens when we gather to drum together, and people say “Oh, that’s the spirit of the drum.” But what is it?
Olatunji: [laughs] A great teacher of mine once said, “There are some questions that can never be answered, and would be useless if known.”

Hull: [laughs] And this is one of them!
Olatunji: Not totally. It is answerable. The spirit of the drum is something that you feel but cannot put your hands on it. You feel when people come together to play. It does something to you from the inside out, but you can’t really put your hands on it. You feel it while you’re playing and after you play for a while, sometimes for 24 hours, sometimes for two or three days. It hits people in so many different ways, that to try to define it would just be a matter of semantics, the use of words. But the feeling is one that is satisfying and joyful. It is a feeling that makes you say to yourself, “Yes, I’m glad to be alive today. I’m glad I’m here. I’m glad I’m a part of this world.” It stays with you until other things come and take your attention away from it, but you will always remember it.

Hull: Another part of your mission is to be the focal point for orchestration. As a facilitator, you bring people together to express their rhythmical spirit in a community drum circle. As our drumming community grows so does our need for more facilitators. And as new facilitators crop up, the question is, what priorities should they have? I think as long as they are promoting the community rather than themselves, they are learning a basic and very important aspect about the mission.
Olatunji: First of all, whoever is given the opportunity to be a facilitator must have realized that it’s an opportunity to develop our own talents. It’s true; drum teachers might have certain knowledge that probably will prepare them to facilitate a drum community. But you cannot allow self interest to supersede the goal. I’m not playing a double role. I have to play the role of the facilitator, not the teacher, to bring out the common ground to all of the people in the community. That is the goal.

Hull: So, a drum teacher can have good facilitation tools, which you can use in a drum circle. But if you put them on top of the hierarchy of priorities then all of a sudden you’re teaching a drum class rather than facilitating spirit in a drum circle.
Olatunji: That’s right.

Hull: But, if you don’t use the tools that you’ve generated as a drum teacher then of course ...
Olatunji: You fail.

Hull: I’ve seen some people who aren’t good drummers become good drum circle facilitators.
Olatunji: Yes.

Hull: Because they understand the importance of the mission.
Olatunji: Because you are not there to teach or to show people how well you can play. You’re there because you know how to bring music out of them. You have to say, “Look, you’ve got something that you probably don’t know you’ve got. I will prove it to you that you can do it by just doing it.” That’s what we’re talking about.

Hull: You taught me a great lesson. A few years ago while I was being pushed out into the national drum community circuit, you took me aside and said, “You come into town and get them all excited and leave. What are you leaving? You have given them inspiration, but have you introduced them to teachers in the area?”
Olatunji: Where can they go after you’re gone? What are they going to do tomorrow or next week?

Hull: Now wherever I go, I contact all the drum teachers and facilitators in the area that I can, and have them come to the drum circle so they can be introduced and acknowledged.
Olatunji: So that the community will know “Oh yeah, we’ve got these people in our community.”

Hull: What would you like to say to the growing number of facilitators who are coming forward and fulfilling this need in the community?
Olatunji: The great teacher said, “Blessed are the peacemakers, that they shall inherit the earth.” Facilitators have to rejoice in the fact that they are messengers. They are given an opportunity to be the one who is called upon to help build the bond that exists between people. He’s the one who goes around telling it to the world, “Don’t you forget. We all have a job to do. We need to heal our community and heal the planet.” He becomes the servant of all. Because of that assignment he will be provided for automatically. Because it has been ordained that the flock will always take care of the shepherd. So the shepherd has to be there for the community to remind you that you are just as important as everybody else.

Hull: No one is any more or less important in a community drum circle. Everyone has something to give to bring the community song alive and to make the magic.
Olatunji: That’s what makes it become an irresistible force that can evolve and become an immovable object.

Hull: The media is calling this grass roots movement “the hand drumming phenomena.” It’s really the beginning of something that is going to affect the culture of the United States in some strong ways. I’d like to put you in a time machine and send you ten years into the future. Based upon what you have seen happening within the U. S. since 1950, where do you think hand drumming will be ten years from now?
Olatunji: Well, it depends on how we promote it. I think we will have to teach it to our schoolchildren as part of their education, like football or basketball. That way it will not be a fad. We don’t want all of them to be musicians, but they will know it because they have touched it.

Hull: It will be a part of our culture.
Olatunji: Yes. It needs to be a part of the culture for the simple reason that the world is here in America. And because the world is here, the world has brought its culture here. The world culture then must be preserved here as well. There will be people who know how to play sakara in Berkeley even if its not being played in Lagos, so at least it’s being preserved.

Hull: That’s why it has to be integrated into our cultural expression.
Olatunji: It’s happening now. This is a mosaic. It’s what makes this country great. There is no other place in the world like America, right? People come from all parts of the world to make America what it is. Cultures must be preserved for that reason. Let me tell you what’s going to happen. We are so lucky that some of the people who are now in our drumming and dance classes and our workshops can become executives. So they’re going to use it. It’s a good thing. They are young now, and are interested in what’s happening, and they are going to make sure that this thing survives. They are going to be different than the CEOs that we have now because of their exposure to multi-cultural situations. It is a quiet cultural revolution that will unite all people. It will solve many of the problems that seem so impossible. I have a great hope for this happening in the future. That will be a wonderful thing to see.

15 Years Behind The Timbales With The Allman Brothers

By Robert L. Doerschuk Published July 28, 2009

Picture the Bronx in the early to mid ’70s. What comes to mind? In the shadows of the trestles that bore the Nos. 2 and 5 trains into and back from Manhattan, life and music played out to a salsa rhythm, or maybe early disco, depending on where you were in the borough.

Where Marc Quiñones grew up, you might have heard the latest albums by the Cuban trumpeter Alfredo “Chocolate” Armenteros or La Conspiración or Chino y Su Conjunto Melao -- bands that his Uncle Rafael played with. You might also have heard Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, or Frank Sinatra, all of them favorites of his mother.

What you wouldn’t have heard was The Allman Brothers.

“They weren’t a big hit in my neighborhood,” he says, laughing at the irony. “Certainly I wasn’t listening to them or to any rock and roll for that matter. The closest I got was Santana, and I listened to them only because they had a lot of drumming going on.”

Quiñones still lives in the Bronx, but from his earliest days of jamming at his uncle’s gigs as an underage interloper, his horizons have stretched far beyond the city’s limits. Eventually they would lead to a most unlikely job as percussionist with those same Allman Brothers. From their first sessions together, for Shades Of Two Worlds in 1991, the multiple influences that inform Quiñones’ style on conga, bongo, and timbales fit with surprising ease into the blues/Southern rock approach that the band more or less invented in the late ’60s.

Onstage and in the studio with the Allmans, with superstars Mark Anthony, Rubén Blades, or Celia Cruz, on tour with David Byrne’s all-star Latin ensemble, on film soundtracks like Do The Right Thing and The Mambo Kings, in the pit with Paul Simon’s Capeman musical, and even back when he was sharing the stage with Tito Puente as part of the precocious Los Rumberitos quartet, Quiñones insists that he always plays essentially the same way – his way, with a personal touch that he developed more through intuition than analysis.

Born To Drum. Quiñones knew, when he was old enough to know anything, that he would someday play percussion, just like his uncle and his father – like people they brought over to his house every weekend.

“Now, Spanish Harlem was known for salsa music blasting out from the windows and people socializing in the street, but the Bronx was different,” he explains. “We lived near the Bronx Zoo, and there was a park-like area there where people would take over a few benches, drink, and have a good time playing drums and singing until the wee hours, without any interruptions from the police. And there was jamming at our house too; people would come over and have an all-out drum festival. Really, I was surrounded by drums pretty much from the beginning.”

By age three, Quiñones was listening and watching carefully as his father’s friends dropped by for their rhythm jams. Though he worked full-time to support his family, José “Tony” Quiñones was a fluent conga player. As he was growing up in the Fort Apache section of the Bronx, he hung out with kids who would one day make their mark as percussion masters. These longtime friends and colleagues – Milton Cardona, Frankie Rodriguez, Frankie Malabe, Andy and Jerry Gonzalez – were among the regulars at those weekend sessions, and each contributed to the knowledge that young Marc absorbed from the sidelines.

Soon Marc was playing too. “They tell me I started physically playing at three, but in my mind and my heart I had been playing before then,” he says. “Even before I was born, my father and my uncle were playing at my house, so who knows if by osmosis that was transferred to me while I was in my mother’s womb? Music was always happening: Cuban music, Puerto Rican music, salsa music, music where the drumming was prevalent. So maybe it was just meant to be.”

With all the talent flowing through his living room, Marc had the opportunity to study directly with one or more of the top Latin hand drummers of the day. Tony Quiñones, in fact, had taught hand drumming privately in Spanish Harlem for a while. But for whatever reason, Marc never took lessons; almost everything he now knows as a percussionist came to him through self-education. In later years, his father would teach him the basics of music theory and introduce him to melodic instruments; he would learn enough this way to play trumpet in his high school band. Drums, though, were always his home, and he built that home solely with his own hands.

He began on his father’s congas, hand-made instruments from a manufacturer whose name he has long forgotten. He also began going to Uncle Rafael’s gigs, despite the obvious problems involved with bringing kids into nightclubs. “The funny thing is that sometimes he would be babysitting me, so he’d have to take me along,” he remembers. “The club owners would give him a hard time because I was only six or seven years old. They were like, ‘We can’t let this kid in here.’ Uncle Rafael would tell them he had nowhere to leave me; he was like, ‘If I can’t bring him in, then I can’t play. I’ll have to leave and you won’t have a conga player tonight.’ So they had to give in. They’d tell him, ‘Well, keep him in the corner, because if anybody sees this child we’ll lose our license.’

“And,” Marc laughs, “before you knew it, I’d be onstage, playing along with the band.”

Percussion Prodigy. Soon the young Quiñones was a regular at the drum gatherings that ran regularly throughout the city. On Saturdays he spent hours joining in with the hand drummers near the Bronx Zoo or elsewhere in the borough, at Crotona Park. Sundays were spent with another group at Orchard Beach or going into Manhattan for the largest of all the weekly events, in Central Park. He learned quickly – so quickly that by age nine he had already made his debut at Carnegie Hall, as one of the battery of drummers in a production that Quiñones recalls as “almost a Latin version of Tommy.”

One of the lead characters in that show was a good friend of Marc’s father. Sensing something special in the young conguero, he urged Tony Quiñones to take his son down to Roberto Clemente State Park in the Bronx, where Tito Puente was looking to put some of New York’s most talented children into a percussion quartet that he would feature in his shows.

“So we went there,” Quiñones says, “and that’s where I met Bobby Allende, who was at the time seven years old, his brother Tito, who was a few years older, and this kid named José Jusino, whose brother is Eric Velez, Marc Anthony’s conga player. We played together, and Tito Puente was so taken with us that for the next three or four years we played with him everywhere around the city: Lincoln Center, Madison Square Garden, the Central Park band shell, and at all these outdoor festivals. We even played with him at nightclubs. He had this regular gig every Wednesday at the Corso, and he would have us come down and play. This was a school night, so here we are, these kids in a club, falling asleep at the table until it was time to perform.”

(As a side note, Quiñones and Bobby Allende have remained close friends. Like Quiñones, Allende would earn a high-profile, though somewhat abbreviated, position with a hugely successful rock band – in his case, Santana. Currently the two are working together on a joint percussion recording project, under the name “Q and A.” Allende was profiled in the Sept. 2005 issue of DRUM!)

The four percussion prodigies called themselves Los Rumberitos, and they were a smash. Backed by a pianist and bassist, with Puente playing along, they’d showcase their versatility by switching instruments, with each boy taking a turn on congas, bongos, and timbales. The act lasted about six years, until they reached their mid-teens and the novelty began to wear off. By the time they broke up, though, all four had advanced significantly as players, though once again more from their own work and from watching Puente in action.

“Growing up, before I started taking an interest in timbales, I would listen to a lot of Tito’s records and try to emulate his solos,” Quiñones says. “The funny thing was that before I got to see him play, I was learning it all wrong. We played this thing called an habanico, which is a roll that introduces the next section of a song, like when you’re coming out of a mambo section. It sounds like a single-stroke roll, but it’s actually a double-stroke. So when I finally saw him playing, I was like, ‘Oh, man! This is totally off the wall!’”

Just as important, Puente encouraged all four members of Los Rumberitos to keep growing as musicians. “He appreciated our talent,” Quiñones says, “and he was always very warm to us. Even in his later years, he was always supportive. We became a family because, with us being so young, I think he took to the fact that we had potential.”

Masterclass. When Los Rumberitos broke up, Quiñones concentrated on high school until he was old enough to start working the club circuit. His reputation was already established, thanks to the exposure he’d earned through playing with Puente on bills that included three or four other bands. So it was no surprise when he got a call, at age 17, from one of the top Latin singers of the time, Rafael de Jesus, who had just left trumpeter Luis “Perico” Ortiz’s band to cut a solo album.

“He hired me for that session,” Quiñones says, “and I have to admit it was intimidating because this was my first opportunity to record with real artists – heavyweights like [pianist] Oscar Hernandez, who is music director for the Spanish Harlem Orchestra, and the conga player Juan ‘Papo’ Pepin, who was a big influence on me. Sal Cuevas, one of the biggest salsa bass innovators, was on the gig as well. So there were lots of heavy cats, and here I am, this newbie, thrown into the mix.”

Apparently Quiñones acquitted himself well, since de Jesus invited him to join his band. With that, the doors flew open, and soon every open night, when he wasn’t working with de Jesus, was filled with freelance jobs for other bands. “From when I was 16 to 20 years old, I played with basically every salsa band in New York City,” he says. “My steady was with Rafael, but I also played with José Alberto ‘El Canario,’ who had his own band, and with Raphael’s old boss, Perico. Back then there were so many clubs that there weren’t enough musicians to go around, so I subbed a lot. There might be three clubs in one block, so on one night I’d start at one, go across the street to play the next set, and then pack up and go to the third club. It was ridiculous.”

It wasn’t only his playing that raised Quiñones toward the top of the percussion list. Thanks to his years of playing trumpet in high school, he had developed an ability to sight-read charts – not a common asset among even his more seasoned colleagues. His skill at playing treble clef lines on sight translated into an even stronger capability with percussion parts – which, unlike a trap drummer’s score, consists only of slashes to mark each impact and accent.

The music business being as it is, even all this work wasn’t enough to cover living expenses after high school, and so Quiñones mixed his nighttime regimen with a nine-to-five ordeal as a Citibank teller – “handing out money,” he points out, “rather than making it. During this time, I was really just playing music for fun. It wasn’t a job; it was more about making a little money, hanging out, meeting girls, you know what I’m saying? I always thought I’d have to subsidize my playing with a real job.”

That began to change when bassist Sal Cuevas tipped Quiñones off to a job sitting in for Milton Cardona on a recording date with Willie Colón. At the time this seemed no different from the fill-in gigs that Quiñones often played. What he didn’t know was that the band’s drummer, Johnny Almendra, had noticed how easily the young substitute handled each arrangement, thanks to his reading. Nor did he realize at the time that Colón was having problems with Cardona, who had the habit of missing rehearsals and shows every now and then.

So when Colón called out of the blue with an offer to join his band as a conguero, Quiñones jumped at it. The day job was instant history, and for the next five years he traveled and recorded with the celebrated trombonist and New York salsa pioneer. He worked his way up as the band’s bongosero, timbalero, and eventually music director, with responsibilities ranging from leading rehearsals to making sure everyone had the right uniform for the night to getting the band to the airport on time.

Following his run with Colón, Quiñones signed on with Rubén Blades, a world-class job that placed him at the pinnacle of Latin music from 1986 through ’89. This, in turn, led to a stint on timbales with Talking Heads founder David Byrne, who devoted a year to fronting a huge, 17-piece Latin ensemble whose members included a red-hot rhythm section, with Cardona on congas and José Mangual Jr. on bongos, and more than a few legends, including Colón, Ray Barretto, and Celia Cruz. When that tour closed, Quiñones was recruited to play percussion with jazz fusionists Spyro Gyra. Though that position lasted for just a year, it ended at an opportune time.

Allman Who? Following a show in Tallahassee, Florida, Quiñones was relaxing, making himself a sandwich, backstage, when a total stranger came rushing up to him. “He’s ranting and raving about my playing, like, ‘Man, my wife and I couldn’t keep our eyes and ears off of you! You’re amazing! You know, I think I’m going to have to steal you from this band!’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, whatever, man,’ but I gave him my number, and when he left, the manager of Spyro Gyra was like, ‘Man, that’s Butch Trucks from the Allman Brothers!’ Which meant absolutely nothing to me.”

Shortly after that, Trucks called with an offer to fly Quiñones down to Memphis, where his band was getting ready to lay down tracks for Shades Of Two Worlds. “I say okay, even though I still have no idea who the Allman Brothers are. To me, it’s just another session. I see Jaimoe sitting on a cooler, chilling out; I think he’s one of the roadies. I thought one of the guitar techs was Dickie Betts. But Butch and Jaimoe will both tell you now that it was a blessing that I had no idea who they were, because I didn’t have any preconceived notion of what I should play.”

They got to work, and right away producer Tom Dowd took note of that same reading ability that had helped Quiñones hit his stride in New York. “They were paying this complicated instrumental that went from 4/4 to 7/4 to a 2/4 bar here and there. The changes were going by so fast that I asked Tom to sketch out a diagram for me. And he goes, ‘You read music? Great! That makes it easier for us.’ He sketches out a part and we knock it out, and he’s going on about how amazing that is, because Gregg Allman and Dickie Betts can read only chord charts.”

After the session, Quiñones flies back home to news from Spyro Gyra leader Jay Beckenstein that the band has decided to “go in a different direction” and let him go. For two months, nothing much happens. Then Trucks calls again, this time with news that everyone in the band was so knocked out by his work in Memphis that they wanted him to play on their upcoming European tour. “That was 15 years ago, and I’m still here,” he smiles.

Quiñones was the answer to the band’s long search for a final rhythmic ingredient. Both drummers, Butch Trucks and Jaimoe, had always wanted to add percussion to the mix. Both had, in fact, gotten up from behind their kits on occasion to make that addition. Yet everyone was committed to the two-drummer concept, which stemmed from the late Duane Allman’s admiration for how James Brown used that formulation to maximum funk effect. From his perspective, Quiñones played in this setting more or less as he had played over the years with every other band: the same patterns, the same feel. Apparently, no adjustment was needed to fit into what Trucks and Jaimoe had cultivated – but there was, he concedes, one new twist to working with the Allmans.

“Before coming to the Allman Brothers, I’d never worked solo,” he points out. “I was always part of a percussion section. With Willie Colón, I shared the stage with two other percussionists. With Rubén Blades, there were three other percussionists. With the Allman Brothers, I’ve got two drummers to contend with as opposed to a bongo player, a conga player, and a timbale player. That’s the only adaptation I’ve had to make. Otherwise, my approach has always been the same: Less is more.”

Looking ahead, Quiñones can foresee the end of his journey with the Allmans. “It’s slowing down a little,” he admits. “They’ve been on the road for almost 40 years, so they’re getting tired of it. But I never thought I’d be in this band as long as I have, so I can’t project what’s going to happen. Five years from now I could still be doing the Allman Brothers or I could be doing something different. I’ve never projected the future and I’m not going to start now, other than to say the spectrum is wide. From the opportunities I’ve been blessed with over the years, I know that anything is possible.”

Butch Trucks

Quiñones' Percussion Sidekick

The voice is craggy, like a road rutted by a thousand touring vans. But even though he’s talking about something that happened more than a decade ago, Claude Hudson “Butch” Trucks sounds as amazed as if he’d first heard Mark Quiñones only yesterday.

“That was back in … my God, it was 1991,” the veteran Allman Brothers drummer recalls, amazed as well at how quickly time can pass when you’re having fun. “He was playing with Spyro Gyra and completely dominating them – and that’s not a half-assed band. So I went backstage after the show, told him I played with the Allman Brothers, and said, ‘I’m stealing you.’ He acted very impressed, but after I walked out he turned around and said to everyone else in the room, ‘Who the hell are the Allman Brothers?’”

You’ve already read Marc’s account of this encounter, but what you haven’t heard is how his playing affected the Allman’s groove, as assessed by the drummer who had been in charge of that groove since the band’s debut in 1969. Fact is, despite their formula of working with two drummers, Trucks and Johnny Lee “Jaimoe” Johanson sensed almost from the start that something was still missing from the rhythm. That something was a percussionist.

“Since way back when we did ‘In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed’ on our second album [Idlewild South, 1970] we’d been looking for a Latin percussionist because a lot of the jamming we do lends itself to those rhythms. But we play louder than the average band, so finding someone with the musicianship and the power to play with us was difficult.”

For a while, they thought they’d found their man in Mark Morris, the now-seasoned session player whose credits include Johnny Cash, George Jones, and Dolly Parton. “He had the musicianship, and he did a couple of albums with us, but when he got onstage with us, he was completely lost,” Trucks recalls. “He might as well not have been there.”

From the start, though, Quiñones fit right in, in part by changing the roles that the two drummers had defined through their years of playing together. “Before Marc joined the band, I held down the fort so Jaimoe could play around me,” Trucks explains. “Now that Marc is there, I don’t have to worry about that. I’m much freer to explore and take more chances. I can throw threes against fours, and if my three doesn’t happen to come out with my four, it’s okay because Marc is there.”

Sometimes it’s more than okay, Trucks admits, with an affectionate laugh: “When we’re playing at full tilt and I get completely and totally lost, I’ll turn around and look at Marc. He’ll give me the 1, and then I hit it hard and act like I knew what I was doing. Sometimes that happens so often that I get a crick in my neck from turning around and looking at Marc. The honest truth is that he embarrasses me because he’s just so good.” —Robert L. Doerschuk

Glen Velez: Colors & Scents

By Iris Brooks Originally published in the February/March 1997 issue of DRUM! Magazine

The Los Angeles Reader calls Glen Velez one of the planet’s most versatile percussionists as well as a captivating composer. Yet his vast instrument collection doesn’t include a drum set. For the last 20 years, Velez has been performing on tambourines — large, small, circular, triangular, square, plastic, lizard, snake and fish-skinned, some with jingles and some without. This family of frame drums has become a powerful percussion arsenal in Velez’s virtuosic and sensitive hands. He’s introduced audiences to tambourines through his performances on five continents in clubs, caves, and concert halls.

“In this culture the tambourine is stigmatized,” says Velez. “Westerners haven’t done a lot of hand drumming. But within this family of instruments, the drums have great melodic potential and traditional sources create a wide vocabulary to draw from.” He has worked with these traditional sources, studying tambourine styles from Brazil, South India, the Middle East, and Central Asia. And after years of working with masters, Velez has created his own pan-global drumming style in which he incorporates techniques from his world music studies, his days at the music conservatory, and his own vivid imagination and creativity.

He rubs, taps, snaps, scratches, and strokes his instruments, coaxing a surprising variety of timbral possibilities from his portable drums. How he strikes the tambourines was shaped by his early studies with Fred Hinger at Manhattan School Of Music. Velez was profoundly influenced by Hinger’s “touch tone” system, which explores the relationship of pulsations. “Hinger had unusual and brilliant ideas about sound and about percussion,” Velez says. “He focused on the word 'touch' rather than 'strike.' Touching is very different than striking. That vocabulary creates a new approach and the sound relates to the touch.”

While studying with Hinger, Velez began an active freelance career as a multi-percussionist, working mostly with sticks. He performed and recorded with Steve Reich And Musicians, played symphonic music with the Israeli Philharmonic and contemporary chamber music with Parnassus, and did session work with Suzanne Vega, Eddie Daniels, and Richard Stolzman. Eventually he realized that the emotive part of his being wasn’t satisfied. In the late ’70s he started playing hand drums and studied the South Indian mrdangam (a two-headed barrel drum) with Ramnad Rhagavan, who accidentally introduced Velez to his new career when he took a tambourine off the wall at a lesson and played it kanjira style. Velez liked it immediately. “That was the first time I had ever seen anyone play the tambourine outside an orchestra or a rock group. I was very excited by it.” South Indian tambourine technique is quite evolved and the syllabic notation, known as solkattu, is something Velez still incorporates in some of his compositions and teaching.

An Ever-Expanding Collection. This new interest developed and expanded into his other frame drum studies. After three or four years he began interchanging the instruments and their techniques. While experimenting with the sounds, he began accumulating a varied instrument collection. It has taken over his small Manhattan apartment and now fills a large storage space as well.

The depths of the frames are shallow and the diameters of the heads range from 6" to 30". Although some frame drums are played with a stick -- such as in the shamanic traditions of Native Americans and Central Asians -- Velez usually plays with his hands. He’s been likened to a shaman by both Paul Winter (with whom he has worked for over a decade) and Jamey Haddad, who produced the Velez recording, Rhythmcolor Exotica.

The album, with its accompanying hard-cover 20-page booklet, is a good introduction to both the instruments -- including history and symbolism -- as well as his band, Handance. The ensemble includes percussionists Eva Atsalis, Glen Fittin, Jan Hagiwara, and Yousif Sheronick. The new recording also features guest artist Art Baron on trombone, conch shell, didgeridoo, and tin whistle. It showcases Velez’s preference for odd meters, with pieces in 5, 7, and even a 41-beat cycle. In addition to highlighting the newest Velez compositions, it also links the ancient traditions of frame drumming to the modern world.

Giving Energy, Getting Energy. Over the years Velez has created his own frame drum style that, in the same sense as an Indian gharana (literally “extended family”) or school, he is passing on to his students. His teaching activities range from a series of masterclasses at schools such as Juilliard, Manhattan School Of Music, and Hart School Of Music to private and group lessons for professionals and enthusiastic students with no drumming background. His international touring schedule allows for drum workshops throughout North America and Europe, and this year he did residencies at Simon Frazier University in Vancouver, Canada, and at the Marktoberdorf Academy in Germany.

Unlike many seasoned professionals, Velez enjoys working with non-musicians. “A lot of the teaching I do is with people who haven’t played drums,” he says. “This led me to use walking and talking with drumming. It gives awareness to pulse flow from the beginning. To have it all meshed together from the beginning is very powerful.

“With students who are professional players, I ask a lot of questions about what they want from me. Sometimes people hear one of my recordings and want to know how a specific sound was made. I get into it specifically with them.

“At this stage I seem to learn a lot from students who don’t know how to play. It forces me to simplify and to find the vocabulary to communicate. There is so much unspoken between percussionists. With other percussionists you only have to say one sentence instead of ten. But teaching non-percussionists requires a simplified communication. It spurs creativity because there are so many challenges.”

It was this work that led to two new instructional videos. Velez’s Handance Method is a participatory video in which the audience is asked to combine stepping and singing drum patterns as they play. The coordination of the whole body requires new challenges, even for drum set players. The intention is to develop both inner rhythms and hand drumming skills. “The videos rely heavily on the experience of stepping and vocalization,” Velez says. “Voice activates memory and focuses attention on breath. The body movements activate large body movements. It’s easy to lose sight of the whole body. It’s not just about the fingers. The walking helps awareness of steadiness in pulse. Steadiness of pulse is the number one issue for all drummers.”

Over the years a number of musicians/students have tried to pattern themselves after Velez. Sometimes it is difficult for them to know when to imitate and when to explore a new path. Velez offers this advice: “The most important thing is paying attention to your personal version of what sounds good. Trust yourself within the discipline. Creativity always needs to be encouraged and nurtured. You never suspend that. The main issue is a personal voice and key sound -- a sound that is reflective of that personal taste. Our personal reservoir is constantly changing.”

Drummer, Heal Thyself. Velez believes his particular strength comes from speed and clarity being allied and experiencing several different time flows and synchronization. “I like that feeling internally. It’s about density.” But no matter how virtuosic Velez sounds, he is always working on new techniques. “All of drumming is about pulse awareness. When I experience plateaus, I switch to other techniques. It’s very energizing to go back and refine something else.” At the moment his “something else” is a snapping technique found in Azerbajani, Arabic, and Persian music. Velez is also inspired by non-musical interests including yoga, meditation, color therapy, and bird watching. “Color therapy is about using the properties of color to heal body, mind, and spirit,” he says.

Velez credits his work with color as part of his personal expansion, creating a closer connection between his emotions and sounds. He is inspired by the Aura-Soma system, which uses 95 bottles of colors created from plant and mineral sources. Each bottle has two colors and is chosen intuitively for self-healing.

In the past he has mentioned Frank Zappa and James Brown as important musical influences, but recently he has been enjoying listening to the music of pygmies and experimental homemade instruments on the impressive new Ellipsis Arts CD and book, Gravikords, Whirlies and Pyrophones by Bart Hopkin. But his long-standing musical love is bird song. Ten years ago Velez went on a rafting trip in the Grand Canyon with Paul Winter, and the accompanying naturalist, Peter Warshall, pointed out nests and different habitats along the way. This sparked a growing interest. “Just the act of bird watching is meditative and humbling,” he says. “The experience of listening to the variables of their songs encourages humility. The beauty, grace and knowledge of their environment is awe-inspiring.”

Irizarry Takes The Show On The Road

By Andy Doerschuk Published July 20, 2009

It's a summer of reunions, and one of the most hotly anticipated will be when timbalero Ralph Irizarry takes the stage with his former bandmates from the '80s outfit, the Seis Del Solar band, including Latin music star Ruben Blades. The reunited band will also include Robby Ameen on traps; Oscar Hernandez on keys; Richie Marrero on keys, vibraphone, and percussion; Eddy Montalvo on trombone, tumbadora and percussion; bonguero Louis Rivera; and Mike Vinas on acoustic and electric guitar and banjo.

In a preview from the upcoming interview slated for the October 2009 issue of DRUM! Magazine, Irizarry told writer J. Poet, "Seis de Solar was the most innovative project I¹ve ever been involved with. When the band was formed in 1983, we had a series of meetings before we played one note of music. We discussed what we wanted to wear, what we wanted to get paid, what we wanted to play, and how we were going to play it." You don't want to miss this exclusive hand-drumming feature. Subscribe to DRUM! today.

Hailed as one of the brightest stars in Latin music, Irizarry has performed and recorded with many of the most renowned and respected musicians in the world, including Ray Barretto, Harry Belafonte, Celia Cruz, Paquito D’Rivera, Wynton Marsalis and Paul Simon. Irizarry. Irizarry’s own group, Son Café, is based in New York City.

On the road, Irizarry will play Ralph Irizarry Signature Series timbales (pictured above), which were designed in conjunction with the master drum crafters at Tycoon Percussion. The 14" and 15" Signature timbales provide the sound and power of high-quality, stainless steel shells and heavy-gauge, die-cast counterhoops finished in a durable, black gloss.