I should confess that my other favorite instrument is the ukulele. So when I found this video on YouTube, I knew I had to include it on BongoFever.
Enjoy - I know I did!
Jack Costanzo performing on West Coast
20-Feb-08
From an email to the Yahoo Bongo Group:
Don’t forget… If you’re in the San Francisco-Bay Area next weekend,
you’ll want to be at the Hotel Nikko on Saturday night at 10:30 PM,
2/23, to see Jack “Mr. Bongo” Costanzo with me in concert! He’s
bringing a piece with him called “Airegin” and he says, “It’s a
show-stopper, with lot’s of bongos!” We’re also doing an arrangement
of the 1957 version of “Come Rain Or Come Shine” that Jack did with
Judy Garland! This is going to be a super-high-energy wollop of a
nightclub act and I’m really excited to have Jack with me.
And MANY THANKS to group member BRIAN MATZA in SF for hooking Jack up
with congas for the performance! What A Sweetheart!
Here are the details:
“LAST CALL!” with TERESE GENECCO
featuring Jack “Mr. Bongo” Costanzo and the *little big band!*
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008 at 10:30 PM
The Rrazz Room in the Hotel Nikko
222 Mason St (between Ellis and O’Farrell)
San Francisco, CA 94112
Tickets are $25 + 2-drink min.
CALL 888.468.3399 or online at www.theRrazzRoom.com
RESERVATIONS/ADVANCE TICKET PURCHASE HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!
PLUS!!!!!!!
If you’re in the Los Angeles area, Jack and his rhythm section will be
with me in Hollywood for another rollicking show on March 7. Here are
the details for that one:
“DRUNK WITH LOVE: THE SEQUEL!” starring TERESE GENECCO
featuring Jack “Mr. Bongo” Costanzo and the *little big band!*
Friday, March 7, 2008 at 8:00 PM
The M Bar & Restaurant
1253 N Vine (Fountain & Vine Plaza)
LA (Hollywood) CA 90038
Doors/Dinner 7:00 PM
Showtime 8:00 PM
TICKETS MUST BE PURCHASED IN ADVANCE BY CALLING:
800.838.3006 or online at www.brownpapertickets.com/event/27110
Dinner/Table Reservations must be made in advance by calling the club
directly at 323.856.0036
Tix are $25 plus $10 food/bev min.
SPECIAL AFTER PARTY with DJ MIKEY spinning tunes and dancing till the
wee hours! See the show, stay after and meet Jack and the band!
THANKS all… hope to meet some of you after the gigs! Please say hi
and introduce yourself if you make it to the shows.
XO
T
www.teresegenecco.com
www.myspace.com/TereseGenecco
~
Irving Fields article
01-Nov-07
Though not a bongo player, Irving Fields has been called the last of the great cocktail lounge pianists and the man behind “Bagels and Bongos.” Tony Sachs includes him in an article in the Huffington Post about musicians in their 90s who are still performing regularly.
“In 1959, this man recorded “Bagels And Bongos,” a fusion of traditional Jewish melodies and Latin rhythms that was so successful he did almost half a dozen follow-ups, including the immortal “Pizza And Bongos.”
Read the article here.
Bongo Fever Update
31-Oct-07
Visitors to Bongo Fever may have noticed that I haven’t posted too much since the fall started. Well, I have to confess - I started a new job and I’ve intensified my martial arts training for my upcoming exam, which is leaving me with very little spare time.
And I’ve had to decide - what’s more important, posting on Bongo Fever or actually making time to play the bongos. Well, that’s an easy choice.
I do plan to continue with Bongo Fever (I’ve got the rest of the Matthew Dubuque interview to post, among other things) but will probably update the site once every couple of weeks.
Just wanted y’all to know that I still had the Fever!
Kaman Selling Music Division
31-Oct-07
The Kaman Corp., who owns Latin Percussion and other musical instrument makers, is selling their music division.
Read about it here.
Matthew Dubuque is the founder of The BongoGroup on Yahoo Groups and the Worldwide Bongo Video Group (if you haven’t joined TheBongoGroup on Yahoo yet, stop right now, go to their web site and register. Then come right back and finish reading this post. Don’t worry, I’ll wait).
His knowledge of el bongo – both as a player and as a historian – is profound, and Matt’s instructional videos on YouTube have been a huge help to my playing.
Matt was generous enough to agree to being interviewed for Bongo Fever, so without further ado, here is part one.
How long have you been playing the bongos and how did you get started?
I have been playing percussion all my life; it seems like I must have been conceived while Xavier Cugat big band music from Cuba was playing in the background. I remember my Dad saying “Listen Matt, there’s rhythm everywhere you turn, even in the sound of the washing machine….”
I got my first drum set when I was four years old and started taking lessons not too long afterwards.
Then in the late 1960s a band called Santana was formed and their drummer Mike Shrieve had attended my high school. That Santana music really changed everything for me; it was a musical revolution, combining Latin music with rock and roll really for the first time in a big way. That music really moved me.
I bought their early albums and played them endlessly and when I was in college in 1974 this amazing bongo solo came out by a fellow named Armando Peraza on their Borboleta album. It was unlike anything I had ever heard. It was over 10 minutes long and it was twice as fast and twice as musical as any bongo solo I had ever heard (except for his solo on Caravanserai). The surrounding music in the background wasn’t really too good, but Armando was playing in the left channel and I used to just move the balance control so I could focus more on his incredible solo.
I used to play along with that Borboleta solo, along with Armando’s El Fuente del Ritmo solo on the Caravanserai album by rapping and slapping on my calves, doing all the rolls and trying to be spectacular for long periods of time, playing my legs in time to the music as if they were my own personal set of bongos.
Then one morning in May of 1974, I woke up and my legs and calves were all black and blue and brown and ugly and gross. I was terrified. How could that happen? I thought maybe I had cancer or something, my legs looked so horrible and it had all happened so suddenly.
I was so young and wasn’t ready to die, but I didn’t know what was wrong. My friends were all freaked out too and told me I should see a doctor right away. I was sick to my stomach just looking at them; it was pretty ugly and they grossed everyone out.
A few hours later I realized I had beaten my legs into submission the night before accompanying Armando on his great solo over and over again.
I decided it was time to buy a pair of bongos!
So I did, that very day. And ever since then my legs have thanked me for it!
Wow, that’s an awesome story! You mention that you got a drum set at four – do you still play with a trap set, or is it el bongo all the way?
Nope, I’m strictly bongo now, although I still play my leg and the steering wheel from time to time. I studied trap drums for several years and learned the rudiments and some nice techniques, which I translated to the bongo; things like stiff-arming and ratamacues and paradiddles are deeply incorporated into my playing.
Who were your biggest influences and favorite bongo players?
Well, we would have to start with Armando of course. He’s the guy that made me drop everything and go bongo nuts, catch the bongo fever 33 years ago, and that flame is still hot as a blowtorch, I’m still rappin’ about him and trying to understand his playing. I frankly don’t think another bongosero has come close to him in so many ways. Check out for example what he did last year in San Jose. Keep in mind he is probably in his 90s!:
Watch and listen what he’s doing with just his left hand at 4:00 in the video. How does he get so many notes from just one hand? His finger articulation is incredible, he gets so many different sounds from the drum and, to pull this off in his 90s, well this solo speaks for itself.
And his versatility is unparalleled. He’s recorded jazz with John McLaughlin, country/western with Willie Nelson and New Riders of the Purple Sage, rock and roll with Jerry Garcia and Merle Saunders and Santana, funk with Rick James and Aretha Franklin, and the blues with John Lee Hooker. All this in addition to so many types of Latin music that he has mastered, it’s all out there for your listen to, this versatility. It’s like Barry Bonds is a great hitter, but he isn’t the greatest baseball player, no way, because Babe Ruth not only batted .342 and hit 714 home runs, but he also won 20 games as a pitcher 3 different seasons and in one World Series won 3 games. Ruth was one of the dominant pitchers of his era and you know Barry Bonds just can’t pitch worth a hill of beans and that’s why Ruth is a better overall player.
Same with Armando in my book. How many otherwise great Latin players have been chosen to record with Charlie Parker, John Lee Hooker, Willie Nelson, John McLaughlin, Rick James, Aretha Franklin and Jerry Garcia, all masters of very different genres?
Not very many. I read an interview where Armando said he plays for the song, so if it’s not a Latin song, he doesn’t play in a Latin style. His playing transcends styles and genres.
So I’d have to put Armando first. After I got all excited about that Borboleta 10 minute bongo solo, I went out and tried to buy as much as I could that he had recorded, back from the 1940s and 1950s, the 1960s, and he’s still recording this year, he recorded with Giovanni Hidalgo a few months ago. And after about 20 years of really, really studying this guy and what he was about we had several years where we were pretty good buddies, we rapped for hundreds of hours about so many subjects, and for me this was a dream come true.
One day Armando gave me this old Panart vinyl record, the greatest hits of Duo Los Compadres, who featured this fellow named Compay Segundo before he appeared on the movie Buena Vista Social Club. And the bongosero on that record was a Cuban cat named Pedro Mena who really blew me away.
You see el bongo was always supposed to be an instrument of freedom, but there are some exceptionally rigid thinkers that are squeezing the creativity out of the instrument, they say that you always have to play this rhythm based on what’s called the martillo and if you aren’t playing that, you aren’t playing bongo.
Now I know the martillo pretty well and have even made my own sincere contributions to the genre, for example my “Cookin’ With the Martillo”…
…has been well received and has some techniques which are uniquely mine such as “Strollin’” and “Around the World” that I developed which I have some fun playing around with and there is a little bit of me showing how this fits with Tupac Shakur and Ja Rule which was fun.
I’ve played along with that video a number of times. It’s helped me with learning how to apply the martillo into other contexts.
I’ve played easily 30,000 martillos in my life, I know how to do it just fine, but the bongo is a neutral instrument, it can play any variety of things and yet so much of what was available was only martillo-based playing and that seemed stifling, limiting, and I wanted to explore new frontiers and push the envelope.
So here was this Pedro Mena guy, back in the 1950s and he was just JAMMIN and rockin’ and it really had very, very little to do with the martillo, it was just a completely different creature, the bongo playing was just from another planet it seemed. So I got pretty deep into Mena, who was just an awesome player and then I stumbled into this cat named Joaquin Solorzano who played the same hillbilly country bumpkin bluegrass farm boy Cuban music, not at all like rumba, completely different, the kind of music that you play at my wife’s farm roasting a suckling pig under a palm tree drinking rum and laughing so hard at the old guateque, as they say.
Joaquin played with this group called Cuarteto Patria, led at the time by this great tres player named Eliades Ochoa who, together with Compay Segundo from Los Compadres that I previously mentioned, both became world famous in the Buena Vista Social Club movie. But this was all before the movie came out.
So I went deep back into the roots of son montuno and studied all the Joaquin Solorzano I could and it was not martillo based for the most part, Joaquin calls it “singing bongo” and it was MELODIC playing, not so focused on the rhythm but much more focused on the melody.
I was playing this music outside one day and Armando comes by and says, “Man, you got to go to Cuba, you play that shit perfectly, you should go right away”
You must have bought your plane ticket immediately!
And this was wonderful to hear, not only because it was from Armando but because there is hardly anybody I know who can play this music. Lots of people claim that they have mastered it, and they will shout at you that they know it, but they are just dead wrong and any campesino Cuban farm boy can tell you that.
So yes, I went to Cuba the next month after the maestro told me to go and I studied with Joaquin and here is a video I made based on what I learned from my study with him and of Pedro Mena:
And you can see that it has almost nothing to do with the martillo and although that’s deeply controversial in some bongo circles, it’s what the music is actually all about from that eastern part of Cuba and the campesinos love the heck out of it and dance and ask where I learned to play like that, so I’m not really going to sweat what some cats in New York or some self-styled intellectuals say about it.
Like you said previously, el bongo is about freedom.
It is. Freedom and Independence and dignity. So I’d have to say that Armando, Pedro Mena and Joaquin Solorzano have been my 3 greatest inspirations, in that order.
Stay tuned for Part 2…
Beach style bongos
22-Sep-07
There was a recent thread on the Worldwide Bongo Group on “beach style” bongos. It appears to have been an extension of the bongo craze of the 50s. It brings to mind visions of bikini-clad beauties twisting away in the sand, accompanied by a goateed skin slapping hipster.
Like this:
Bongos appear to have played a part in the surf music of the time. Preston Epps “Bongo Rock” was essentially a surf instrumental - in fact, it was even covered by the Ventures.
Technique-wise, beach style favored open strokes over the martillo. It seems to have been an entry-point to the world of el bongo for a lot of players. I’m loving the fact that, as I learn more about the bongos, I’m discovering just how varied and rich the history is.
Viva el bongo!
Check out this YouTube video of Marcel Rodriguez-Lopez of Mars Volta in concert with the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I’m thrilled to see el bongo getting more exposure!
YouTube Video: Mini-Bongos
08-Sep-07
Matt Dubuque posted a link of this video in the Worldwide Bongo Group and I enjoyed it so much I thought I’d share it here at Bongo Fever.
On a side note, I recently started a new job, so you may have noticed that the last two weeks have been a bit sparse in new postings. Fear not - once I get settled in a bit, we’ll be back with renewed vigor.
Jack Costanzo tonight at M Bar & Grill
30-Aug-07
Jack Costanzo will be appearing tonight with Terese Genecco at the M Bar & Grill in Hollywood, CA. Show starts at 8 p.m.
Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend due to a work-related emergency but I’d love to hear from anyone who does!
For more information, click here.