The most magical musical performances can be exploding within a certain area, and sometimes the world stays blind to these creative miracles. Before the Internet catapulted us into the Internet age, one could attribute some of this disconnected musical knowledge to distance. It's a musician's job to know about great artists though, and one has to wonder how some oversights were made. Evidence points to the fact that some music was purposely ignored, for reasons outside of musical relevance. Now that we have access to a world of music at our fingertips, excuses for a lack of awareness simply don't exist. Unfortunately, a lack of knowledge and appreciation around some music still exists, as if things never changed.
Drummer and bandleader Bobby Sanabria experienced a blind eye to New York's amazing musical scene when he attended Berklee College Of Music in the seventies. He grew up inspired by the jazz tinged dance music that was resonating through New York streets from artists like Tito Puente, Machito, and more. When Sanabria chose to pursue his musical studies at a higher level, he expected the musical community at Berklee to share his appreciation for New York's master musicians. To his surprise, the name Tito Puente was completely unknown to his peers and teachers, and they simply lacked knowledge of Latin rhythms. His fellow students immersed themselves in the popular music of the day, such as Weather Report and Tower Of Power, building serious chops around these approaches. While Sanabria studied these artists as well, he kept his ears wrapped around Latin Jazz and salsa artists, going out of his way to build relationships with these musicians. Even at a young age, Sanabria was the expert, sharing his passion for Latin music with his peers. When a student developed an interest in Latin music, they would find themselves at Sanabria's dorm, listening and discussing the intricacies of the music. Things have changed at Berklee over the years—there's a thriving Latin music education program there now—but Sanabria's experience at the time speaks a lot to the under appreciation of Latin music at has plagued our country for years.
Sanabria has dedicated himself to making sure young people are aware of New York's Latin music legacy through his work at The Manhattan School Of Music and The New School, a fact evidenced on Tito Puente Masterworks, Live!!!. This recording, and the previous release by Sanabria and The Manhattan School Of Music's Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra, Kenya Revisited Live!!!, serve as models for the immense possibilities for Latin Jazz in education. In Part One of our interview with Sanabria, we looked at the impact of Puente upon Sanabria's early musical life, the background behind Tito Puente Masterworks, Live!!!, and details about Puente's legacy. Today, we discuss Sanabria's relationship with Puente, his experience with Latin music during his college years at Berklee, and the state of Latin Jazz in education today.
LATIN JAZZ CORNER: It's interesting that Tito was such a well-versed musician, but we have this image of him as a party musician.
BOBBY SANABRIA: Yea, and a clown. That was something that he did at the end of his life. I talked about that with him. I asked him, “Why do you do that? You don't have to do that anymore. You don't have to act like a clown." He said, “Well, a lot of that comes from Gene Krupa."
In the old days, when you soloed, especially as the drummer, you would sell the solo with facial expressions and things like that. Also, when they take a picture of you, they get a good shot. Whether he was sticking out his tongue or he had his hands twirling above him, they would get a good picture. When you look at films of the old jazz drummers, in movies and things like that, they're always twirling sticks. That still continues today with heavy metal drummers—they're twirling sticks while they're doing double bass drum patterns.
It's a form of entertainment. Beneath that entertaining that Tito would do though, is some heavy, heavy musicianship.
LJC: You knew Tito; he was on ¡New York City Aché!. . .
BS: A lot of people are asleep on that, but that's one of the reasons that that album has become a cult classic, because of those duets that we do on there.
LJC: Tell me a little bit about how you built your relationship with Tito.
BS: I met Tito when I was a freshman at the Berklee College Of Music. He was playing at a place called The Harbor House, way out in Revere, Massachusetts, which was out by the Atlantic coast shoreline. You had to take a long train ride and a bus ride. No one else wanted to go with me from the dorm. I just went.
So I got there and I was watching the band. Jose Madera was in the band, Louie Bauza was there, and all those guys. I was kind of nervous, but somehow I summoned the courage to go up there and say, “Maestro Puente, could I sit in?" He said, “Sure, what do you play?" I said, “Timbales." He goes, “Timbales?!?" Then he turned to the guys in the band and said, “Hey guys, guess what this guy plays? Timbales!" Then all in unison, they go, “Wow, timbales!" You're talking about a bunch of road weary veterans. He goes, “Sure, come on up."
They played a vamp or something like that, but I started playing and then I raised my hand with four fingers. The look on his face, you could see, he was thinking, “Wow, this kid knows what fours are." Most Latin percussionists aren't used to the idiosyncratic codes of the jazz world—trading eights, trading fours, trading twos, blues form, rhythm changes, etc . . . They're just used to playing on montunos. So when I raised my fingers to signal fours, he knew exactly what I meant. He nodded his head in agreement and we started trading fours. I don't know if it was good or not, but the crowd liked it and he liked it. Ever since then, we became friends. When I told him that I was studying at Berklee, he perked up, because it reminded him of himself when he was younger. In the audience at the time was Jose Massó, the great DJ from Boston. That's how we became friends. When he got this album in the mail, he sent me a short little e-mail—"Remember the Harbor House?"
Every time that Tito would come into town, I would try to get guys to come see him from the school. None of the students there knew anything about Tito. My roommate in my sophomore year knew about Tito; he was Italian and he was from Long Island. His father was a tenor player, and his father knew who Tito was. His father was a jazz player. So my roommate knew who Tito was, but he didn't know him as deeply as I knew him. We'd be listening in our dorm room, and he was into it. He finally came with me to a concert that Tito and Machito did with Sonny Stitt and Willie Bobo as guests at Symphony Hall in Boston in 1977. But he was the only one that came. I was going around to people in my dorm asking, “Hey, do you want to go to a Tito Puente concert?" People coming back with, “Tito Puente . . . he's a singer, right?"
I was in that milieu in Berklee, I was kind of like a stranger in a strange land. I was the only advocate for this type of music. I remember one of my teachers told me, “Can you bring me some records?" He was the head of the percussion department. So I brought him Riotby Joe Bataan, Either You Have It Or You Don't, The Sun of Latin Musicby Eddie Palmieri, The Many Moods Of Tito Puente, and Rumba Caliente by Tipica '73. It was like he had just landed on Mars, he had never heard anything like that before. He said, “Yea, this is some really cool stuff." I was looking at him, waiting for him to say something else. He said, “I don't know what the hell is going on, but this is some really cool stuff." That was it!
It was funny, it turns out that when I went to Berklee, I was the sophisticated one. Here I am the kid from the South Bronx projects, and I'm thinking, “Oh man, I don't know anything. I'm not worldly at all and I'm going to be meeting people from all different parts of the world." But they knew nothing about my culture in New York. Everybody was into Weather Report, Tower Of Power, The Mahavishnu Orchestra—I was into that too, but they knew nothing about Tipica '73, Puente, or Machito—absolutely nothing. So that was the beginning of me being an educator. It really was—people were knocking on my door asking, “Are you the guy with the Latin records?" I said, “Yea." People were asking, “Can I come in and listen to some stuff with you?" So I'd sit there and explain the music to them; in my own primitive way, I'd explain what was going on.
It just goes to show you the lack of knowledge or ignorance in the general public to the world that we took for granted in Afro-Cuban based music in New York City at the time. In New York City, there were twenty or thirty clubs in Manhattan. All the outer boroughs had clubs, catering halls, dances thrown at churches, and more. You had about a hundred bands working constantly, which is pretty amazing. Some of them were at different levels, but you're talking about bands doing three or four gigs a night, seven days a week.
I had a long extended lunch with Rene Lopez, the lay ethnomusicologist and historian, and Charlie Palmieri. I said to Charlie, “Charlie, nobody knows, the teachers, nobody; they don't know anything about you, Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri, nothing. I'm talking nothing." He looked straight at my face and said, “Listen kid, once you get past New Haven, Connecticut, on I-95, people start saying, Tito who?"
LJC: How do you see that comparing and contrasting to what you do at The Manhattan School Of Music and The New School today? People probably understand the music more now, but is there still an outsider mentality to it?
BS: Oh yea, of course. The difference now is that all the high school and college band programs are trying to get into it little by little. The problem is that the band directors don't know anything about the music. Their job is to try to get the kids into the music as fast as humanly possible, so their teaching is flawed many times in terms of the music, the understanding of clave and its mechanics. You see it with some of these high school and college bands—the rhythm sections are atrocious a lot of times, or very weak. If they're good, they lack that certain extra thing that makes them sound like a really pro rhythm section. That happens a lot too when they play straight-ahead jazz.
As each year goes by, kids today are more and more disconnected from jazz, because it isn't part of the mainstream anymore. Before, when I was a kid, if I wanted to learn how to swing, I'd go to a nightclub. I'd go to a local nightclub and see a local band play—you might be lucky and see someone like Art Farmer playing with some local guys. They would be swinging hard and taking no prisoners. Now you can't do that—you have to go to a jazz club where you have to pay a lot of money. You can go to YouTube, which can be a great teaching tool, but it's different when you actually go there. Then you can ask the musicians questions.
The thing is, on the college and high school level, if you have experienced teachers that know the history of the music—that's the key, knowing the history—then you can really get deep and get the rhythm section to sound the way that they need to in order to be the foundation for the type of ensemble it is, a small band or a big band. Once that is in place, then it's easier with the horns. The horn players have great training on the college level, but their coming from the legato bebop feel and Afro-Cuban feel is coming from that rhythmically on point staccato and marcato feel—a powerful rhythmic drive type of feel. There are certain feels between bands and styles too. That comes with learning about the history.
You've got to get deep inside the music and really study it, really have the rhythm section on point. That was why the Kenya Revisited Live!!!album sounded so good. It took me years to get those guys to sound like that.
Drummer and bandleader Bobby Sanabria experienced a blind eye to New York's amazing musical scene when he attended Berklee College Of Music in the seventies. He grew up inspired by the jazz tinged dance music that was resonating through New York streets from artists like Tito Puente, Machito, and more. When Sanabria chose to pursue his musical studies at a higher level, he expected the musical community at Berklee to share his appreciation for New York's master musicians. To his surprise, the name Tito Puente was completely unknown to his peers and teachers, and they simply lacked knowledge of Latin rhythms. His fellow students immersed themselves in the popular music of the day, such as Weather Report and Tower Of Power, building serious chops around these approaches. While Sanabria studied these artists as well, he kept his ears wrapped around Latin Jazz and salsa artists, going out of his way to build relationships with these musicians. Even at a young age, Sanabria was the expert, sharing his passion for Latin music with his peers. When a student developed an interest in Latin music, they would find themselves at Sanabria's dorm, listening and discussing the intricacies of the music. Things have changed at Berklee over the years—there's a thriving Latin music education program there now—but Sanabria's experience at the time speaks a lot to the under appreciation of Latin music at has plagued our country for years.
Sanabria has dedicated himself to making sure young people are aware of New York's Latin music legacy through his work at The Manhattan School Of Music and The New School, a fact evidenced on Tito Puente Masterworks, Live!!!. This recording, and the previous release by Sanabria and The Manhattan School Of Music's Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra, Kenya Revisited Live!!!, serve as models for the immense possibilities for Latin Jazz in education. In Part One of our interview with Sanabria, we looked at the impact of Puente upon Sanabria's early musical life, the background behind Tito Puente Masterworks, Live!!!, and details about Puente's legacy. Today, we discuss Sanabria's relationship with Puente, his experience with Latin music during his college years at Berklee, and the state of Latin Jazz in education today.
LATIN JAZZ CORNER: It's interesting that Tito was such a well-versed musician, but we have this image of him as a party musician.
BOBBY SANABRIA: Yea, and a clown. That was something that he did at the end of his life. I talked about that with him. I asked him, “Why do you do that? You don't have to do that anymore. You don't have to act like a clown." He said, “Well, a lot of that comes from Gene Krupa."
In the old days, when you soloed, especially as the drummer, you would sell the solo with facial expressions and things like that. Also, when they take a picture of you, they get a good shot. Whether he was sticking out his tongue or he had his hands twirling above him, they would get a good picture. When you look at films of the old jazz drummers, in movies and things like that, they're always twirling sticks. That still continues today with heavy metal drummers—they're twirling sticks while they're doing double bass drum patterns.
It's a form of entertainment. Beneath that entertaining that Tito would do though, is some heavy, heavy musicianship.
LJC: You knew Tito; he was on ¡New York City Aché!. . .
BS: A lot of people are asleep on that, but that's one of the reasons that that album has become a cult classic, because of those duets that we do on there.
LJC: Tell me a little bit about how you built your relationship with Tito.
BS: I met Tito when I was a freshman at the Berklee College Of Music. He was playing at a place called The Harbor House, way out in Revere, Massachusetts, which was out by the Atlantic coast shoreline. You had to take a long train ride and a bus ride. No one else wanted to go with me from the dorm. I just went.
So I got there and I was watching the band. Jose Madera was in the band, Louie Bauza was there, and all those guys. I was kind of nervous, but somehow I summoned the courage to go up there and say, “Maestro Puente, could I sit in?" He said, “Sure, what do you play?" I said, “Timbales." He goes, “Timbales?!?" Then he turned to the guys in the band and said, “Hey guys, guess what this guy plays? Timbales!" Then all in unison, they go, “Wow, timbales!" You're talking about a bunch of road weary veterans. He goes, “Sure, come on up."
They played a vamp or something like that, but I started playing and then I raised my hand with four fingers. The look on his face, you could see, he was thinking, “Wow, this kid knows what fours are." Most Latin percussionists aren't used to the idiosyncratic codes of the jazz world—trading eights, trading fours, trading twos, blues form, rhythm changes, etc . . . They're just used to playing on montunos. So when I raised my fingers to signal fours, he knew exactly what I meant. He nodded his head in agreement and we started trading fours. I don't know if it was good or not, but the crowd liked it and he liked it. Ever since then, we became friends. When I told him that I was studying at Berklee, he perked up, because it reminded him of himself when he was younger. In the audience at the time was Jose Massó, the great DJ from Boston. That's how we became friends. When he got this album in the mail, he sent me a short little e-mail—"Remember the Harbor House?"
Every time that Tito would come into town, I would try to get guys to come see him from the school. None of the students there knew anything about Tito. My roommate in my sophomore year knew about Tito; he was Italian and he was from Long Island. His father was a tenor player, and his father knew who Tito was. His father was a jazz player. So my roommate knew who Tito was, but he didn't know him as deeply as I knew him. We'd be listening in our dorm room, and he was into it. He finally came with me to a concert that Tito and Machito did with Sonny Stitt and Willie Bobo as guests at Symphony Hall in Boston in 1977. But he was the only one that came. I was going around to people in my dorm asking, “Hey, do you want to go to a Tito Puente concert?" People coming back with, “Tito Puente . . . he's a singer, right?"
I was in that milieu in Berklee, I was kind of like a stranger in a strange land. I was the only advocate for this type of music. I remember one of my teachers told me, “Can you bring me some records?" He was the head of the percussion department. So I brought him Riotby Joe Bataan, Either You Have It Or You Don't, The Sun of Latin Musicby Eddie Palmieri, The Many Moods Of Tito Puente, and Rumba Caliente by Tipica '73. It was like he had just landed on Mars, he had never heard anything like that before. He said, “Yea, this is some really cool stuff." I was looking at him, waiting for him to say something else. He said, “I don't know what the hell is going on, but this is some really cool stuff." That was it!
It was funny, it turns out that when I went to Berklee, I was the sophisticated one. Here I am the kid from the South Bronx projects, and I'm thinking, “Oh man, I don't know anything. I'm not worldly at all and I'm going to be meeting people from all different parts of the world." But they knew nothing about my culture in New York. Everybody was into Weather Report, Tower Of Power, The Mahavishnu Orchestra—I was into that too, but they knew nothing about Tipica '73, Puente, or Machito—absolutely nothing. So that was the beginning of me being an educator. It really was—people were knocking on my door asking, “Are you the guy with the Latin records?" I said, “Yea." People were asking, “Can I come in and listen to some stuff with you?" So I'd sit there and explain the music to them; in my own primitive way, I'd explain what was going on.
It just goes to show you the lack of knowledge or ignorance in the general public to the world that we took for granted in Afro-Cuban based music in New York City at the time. In New York City, there were twenty or thirty clubs in Manhattan. All the outer boroughs had clubs, catering halls, dances thrown at churches, and more. You had about a hundred bands working constantly, which is pretty amazing. Some of them were at different levels, but you're talking about bands doing three or four gigs a night, seven days a week.
I had a long extended lunch with Rene Lopez, the lay ethnomusicologist and historian, and Charlie Palmieri. I said to Charlie, “Charlie, nobody knows, the teachers, nobody; they don't know anything about you, Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri, nothing. I'm talking nothing." He looked straight at my face and said, “Listen kid, once you get past New Haven, Connecticut, on I-95, people start saying, Tito who?"
LJC: How do you see that comparing and contrasting to what you do at The Manhattan School Of Music and The New School today? People probably understand the music more now, but is there still an outsider mentality to it?
BS: Oh yea, of course. The difference now is that all the high school and college band programs are trying to get into it little by little. The problem is that the band directors don't know anything about the music. Their job is to try to get the kids into the music as fast as humanly possible, so their teaching is flawed many times in terms of the music, the understanding of clave and its mechanics. You see it with some of these high school and college bands—the rhythm sections are atrocious a lot of times, or very weak. If they're good, they lack that certain extra thing that makes them sound like a really pro rhythm section. That happens a lot too when they play straight-ahead jazz.
As each year goes by, kids today are more and more disconnected from jazz, because it isn't part of the mainstream anymore. Before, when I was a kid, if I wanted to learn how to swing, I'd go to a nightclub. I'd go to a local nightclub and see a local band play—you might be lucky and see someone like Art Farmer playing with some local guys. They would be swinging hard and taking no prisoners. Now you can't do that—you have to go to a jazz club where you have to pay a lot of money. You can go to YouTube, which can be a great teaching tool, but it's different when you actually go there. Then you can ask the musicians questions.
The thing is, on the college and high school level, if you have experienced teachers that know the history of the music—that's the key, knowing the history—then you can really get deep and get the rhythm section to sound the way that they need to in order to be the foundation for the type of ensemble it is, a small band or a big band. Once that is in place, then it's easier with the horns. The horn players have great training on the college level, but their coming from the legato bebop feel and Afro-Cuban feel is coming from that rhythmically on point staccato and marcato feel—a powerful rhythmic drive type of feel. There are certain feels between bands and styles too. That comes with learning about the history.
You've got to get deep inside the music and really study it, really have the rhythm section on point. That was why the Kenya Revisited Live!!!album sounded so good. It took me years to get those guys to sound like that.
