‘Mambo king’ Tito Puente dies in New York

Latin jazz band leader Tito Puente, a ‘Mambo King’ whose dance numbers delighted listeners over six decades, died in a New York hospital, a spokeswoman said. He was 77. Puente, who won the last of his five Grammy awards in February for his Mambo Birdland album, died at New York university medical centre last wednesday.

Born on April 20, 1923 of Puerto Rican parents, Puente’s music was rooted in Spanish Harlem and he raised the mambo and cha cha to artistic and commercial heights during the 1950s.
His early ’60s composition Oye como va, became a huge hit for rock star Carlos Santana almost ten years later, raising Puente’s profile outside a circle of tropical jazz connoisseurs. Oye como va had its debut in Puente’s 1962 descarga (Latin jam) album, El Rey Bravo.

Long-time friend and fellow composer and musician Joe Cuba said in a television interview that Puente was the reason for Latin jazz developing an up-tempo beat.

“He was flowing, it was like a whole different world, he came out of nowhere,” Cuba said. “It was like ’wow’ exciting, and then his arrangements were amazing, and his playing. Tito’s smile will live forever in my eyes.”

As a child, Puente really wanted to become a dancer but a tendon injury thwarted those ambitions. But by age 13, he had started playing in Ramon Olivero’s big band as a drummer.
Working continuously since 1937 and producing more than 100 recorded albums, Puente’s appeal crossed all ethnic and age groups over the years as evidenced by frequent stage and television appearances and a performance in the 1992 film, The Mambo Kings.

Santana, who won eight Grammy awards in February for his latest album, Supernatural, helped boost Puente’s wider appeal in the early 1970s with best-selling versions of Puente arrangements Oye como va and Para los rumberos.

Puente’s recordings included top percussion/dance mania(1957), New Cha Cha/Mambo herd and Dance Mania in (1958), The Mambo King (1991), Tito Puente, his Latin Jazz All Stars (1993) and Live at the Village Gate (1992).

One of Puente’s innovations was to move the timbales, mounted drums played with sticks, to the front of the bandstand from behind and he often played them standing up. He earned the nickname, ‘el rey de los timbales’.

Puente was a trained musician who studied at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. He was also a vibraphonist, an arranger, played piano, congas, bongos and saxophone.

He started his professional career as a drummer in Noromorales’ orchestra and then briefly with machito’s afro-Cubans before being drafted into the U.S. Navy. After world war II, Puente took advantage of the G.I. Bill to study at Juilliard, while also working with a variety of Latin bands.

During the 1950s, he helped popularise the Cha Cha and the Mambo as a resident of New York’s Palladium with Tito Rodriguez and machito groups.

He was mostly known in the 1950s and 1960s to Latins and connoisseurs of tropical jazz.

In the ’70s, Puente moved to Salsa and recorded several albums with Celia Cruz, the ‘queen of Salsa’ and by the early 1980s, he had moved into more traditional Latin jazz.