Jazz Legend Tito Puente: He Relishes Show-And-Tell
Listen, how it goes.
That's the opening line to Latin jazz percussionist Tito Puente's tune, translated into English.
Oye, como va, mi ritmo: Listen, how it goes, the rhythm. Bueno pa bailar, mulata: Good for dancing.
Many people don't know Puente wrote the song. What's your guess? Rock legend Carlos Santana, tal vez?
During his guest lecture in a packed Shoreline Community College band room yesterday, Puente recounted the story he had told the previous night at Jazz Alley, where his band performs through Sunday.
There's nothing like listening to a jazz legend tell a tale, particularly Puente, who has the timing and rubber-faced delivery of a comic.
"Tito," Puente said, mimicking the English pronunciation of his name, " `Tito, could you play that Santana tune?' We don't play Santana music. We play Puente music!" Puente retorts, feigning a haute huff.
Puente, 74, said he was surprised when he first heard Santana's version of his tune, 12 years after Puente recorded it in 1963. Once he received the first royalty check: "Damn! I is a composer now!," Puente clowns. "Since that day, all we play is Santana music!" In 1977, Puente joined Santana in New York City's Roseland Ballroom for a one-time concert. Guess whose tune they played?
Instructor Sonny Masso invited Puente to speak to Shoreline band members and jazz history students about Puente's Latin influence of jazz. Puente credits the late, great jazz trumpeter
Dizzy Gillespie as the godfather of Latin jazz in New York in the 1940s, for collaborating with Latin musicians and combining Latin and jazz styles in his tunes such as "Manteca," and "Night in Tunisia."
Puente is a consummate showman. With two claves the size of jumbo crayons and his effervescent persona, Puente induced the 120 students and faculty to clap a spontaneous accompaniment as he tapped the syncopated Latin rhythm of alternating three and two beats: "blen, blen, blen (pause) blen, blen."
Puente punctuated his stories with the importance of studying the basics and practice, practice: "Once you get the basics down it becomes more interesting to play. As the years go by, your creativity - what God gave you - always comes out."
Masso and Puente go back nearly 20 years, to when conga great Jose Ramon "Mongo" Santamaria urged Puente to look up Masso during his first gig in Seattle. In Latin jazz circles, Masso, 49, is known as "el profesor." He earned University of Washington degrees in ethnomusicology and education and has taught Shoreline courses in the history of jazz and rock and roll since 1971. Masso is also the disc jockey of the longest running, 20-plus year Latin music show in the Northwest. It airs at 10 p.m. on KSER-FM (90.7) in Everett.
Masso views the role of a mentor as a serious and potentially life-changing one. Masso is an academic now because of his mentor, Roberto Garfias, a pioneer in the UW ethnomusicology program. Masso, a guitarist, toured with bands as a teenager and expected to be a musician. Garfias showed him he had a knowledge and talent for peeling apart the entwined roots - the European-influenced melody versus African-based drum and bass exchange, for example - of jazz and rock music.
"For all the people I had met, all the music I had gone through, this was something I knew very well," Masso said. "But I took it for granted because it was always there."
Masso's students appreciate this:
"He teaches with passion because it relates to his culture and where he comes from," said Vakhtang Airapetou, 22, a Russian who credits Masso with expanding his musical tastes beyond techno pop.
Masso and Puente share a knowledge and passion for Latin jazz as well as a common Puerto Rican ancestry and language.
Puente also has:
-- Recorded 116 CDs, including four Grammy Award winners.
-- Received the 1997 National Medal of the Arts from President Bill Clinton for outstanding contribution.
-- Celebrated his 50th year as a bandleader. Bill Cosby called Puente to congratulate him, "and to remind me he loves my album 86."
Album 86? Why, it was the Grammy Award-winning "Homenaje a Beny More', Volume 1, tribute to the late Beny More': "One of the top singers in Cuba," Puente said.
So what does a living legend do to top career highlights such as these?
"I want to be the first band in the year 2000 to play on the moon," Puente said. "What, you think I'm crazy, right? You get on a rocket. Then you go up," he said thumping a cowbell for his own Latin drumroll.