In 1917, Ramon Santamaria Rodriquez was born into poverty in Havana, Cuba. Nicknamed “Mongo” (a tribal chief in Senegal), he began playing the conga drum at an early age and as a teen, Mongo ...
“It is hard to imagine contemporary Afro-Cuban percussion minus these three legendary congueros... The Conga Kings bears repeated listening just to comprehend the nuanced interplay of this unrivaled ...
On many levels, The Conga Kings’ Jazz Descargas is authentic Afro-Cuban jazz. For starters, Carlos “Patato” Valdes and Candido Camero have been Afro-Cuban music pioneers for decades. Patato is ...
Carlos Valdes, 81, a legendary conga player and a leading figure in Latin jazz in Cuba and the United States, died Tuesday in Cleveland of respiratory failure, according to the New York Times. Valdes ...
NGOMA HERITAGE Local Congolese-American drummer Kiazi Malonga is the son of Malonga Casquelourd, founder of Fua Dia Congo, the Oakland-based dance-and-drum group that introduced Congolese music and ...
In June, trombonist and bandleader Delfeayo Marsalis wanted to plan a livestreaming concert with his Uptown Jazz Orchestra for a Juneteenth celebration. But by the time the idea came together, it was ...
This year has seen the untimely deaths of two of the world’s most important cultural ambassadors. The Congolese rumba composer and TPOK Jazz singer Pepe Ndombe Opetum passed on around the same time we ...
He brought Afro-Cuban influences to American ensembles and dazzled audiences with his virtuosic multiple-drum technique. By Neil Genzlinger “When you talk about percussion, particularly the evolution ...
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