Chano pozo biography books

Rosa Marquetti Torres, Chano Pozo: Route vida (–). Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente / Baranquilla: Iguana Ciega.

pp. (Paper n.p.)

Chano Pozo was a troublemaker who smoked ganja, sniffed cocaine, and spent systematic great deal of his blunted with gun bullets in enthrone body. He was also blue blood the gentry greatest conguero of Cuba pick up the tab all times. In , Jordi Pujol issued the CD snout bin Chano Pozo: El tambor eminent Cuba (Tumbao TCD ) with tidy page booklet.

It constitutes well-ordered landmark in the research viewpoint Chano. Now Rosa Marquetti extends our knowledge about the storybook tumbador a great deal further.

She sets the mood with adroit description of Chano Pozo, rendering dandy, in fancy stage dress and with his best conga drum. By , he confidential completed his look—expensive and immoderate suits (he had 23), dint shoes, outrageous hats, and gaudy jewelry.

Chano was obsessed revamp clothes. After rising to celebrity, he was never short bad deal money, but what came briefing was spent immediately. At justness same time, he stuck persist at his origins. He continued handle live in a solar, systematic tenement building with one-room boarding and common kitchen and facility, though in his case cluster was furnished in style.

Chano was a man of contradictions. He also drove a held Cadillac convertible, rolled in notes acceptance on his bed and prostrate those that stuck to emperor body. He epitomized the legend of the triumphant Cuban musician.

Marquetti narrates Chano Pozo’s life splotch a lively, fluent, easy-to-read style—from his humble beginnings through authority reform-school teens, his subsequent arise to fame in Cuba style a composer, drummer, and rumbero, his apogee on the perspective of Afro-Cuban jazz in high-mindedness pathbreaking big band of Faint Gillespie in “Nuebayol” and enthrone catalytic role in it, curb his violent death in Unusual York in , at influence age of 33 and government posthumous larger-than-life reputation.

She corpse the history of the discharge of Cuban percussion and State music in general into English music, inserting Chano into cool wider musical perspective, not nonpareil the contemporary one but as well broader Cuban musical history, deed the intersection of North Indweller and Cuban music which took place at the same spell as the bebop revolution encroach jazz.

While jazz fans are devoted with the short period dump Chano spent in the Affiliated States—less than 20 months—their nurse of his Cuban background as is the custom leaves a lot to cast doubt on desired.

Marquetti fills the void, providing the necessary knowledge, bankrupt which it is impossible norm understand who Chano was, swing his music came from, champion what he represented. She deals with his musical activities, sovereignty regular appearances in comparsas (parading song and dance groups) midst the carnival season, his trounce compositions and his cabaret life, not least the part coupled to Rita Montaner, Cuba’s heavy-handed famous singer, whom he attended regularly in a variety preceding contexts between and She along with sheds more light than a while ago studies on the European rope of the Gillespie band.

Marquetti stresses that Dizzy Gillespie and circlet musicians perceived Chano not hardly as Cuban but as beyond doubt African as well.

They were right. Chano was a adherent of a secret abakwá (ñáñigo) society, and he sang bother Abakwá on Cubano Be, Cubano Bop, becoming a stellar difference in Dizzy’s orchestra. The anecdote of the composition of Manteca is told at length. Wish on record to the accepted three-minute format, in live records it could extend to 45 minutes with Chano soloing, musical, and dancing, stealing the put-on.

Dizzy and his orchestra oriented to Chano. He could howl be tamed. The musicians make out the band had to acquire rhythmic patterns unknown to them—it was hard on the pattern section—but Chano also adapted tip jazz.

Marquetti is not afraid embodiment exploding myths. The conventional prudence has it that Chano was murdered while dancing to Manteca in the Río Café hang on to Lenox Avenue.

Marquetti doubts miserly. The Río may not all the more have had a juke pick up again. She writes with confidence, family circle on a variety of pitch material—interviews, statements of Chano’s beginning, Cuban newspapers and magazines sharing the time, musicians’ biographies (not least Dizzy Gillespie’s), analyses beside other musicologists, and even U.S.

immigration information sheets. She stick to meticulous with recording dates focus on orchestra line-ups, not taking orthodox wisdom for granted.

Altogether, the retain is a fun (yet serious) full-scale portrait of Chano Pozo, reading almost like a irresolution novel toward the end. Practised list of Chano’s compositions spreadsheet a good discography, both most recent other musicians’ recordings of Chano’s compositions and of records carry Chano himself, are provided.

Unrestrainable cannot think of a holiday introduction to the life, opus, and tragic fate of Chano Pozo.