Yambu

Besides being equally talented as an up-tempo improvising sonero and romantic ballad singer, Pablo ‘Tito’ Rodríguez (born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, on January 4, 1923) was also a percussionist who fronted an extremely tight, professional, and creative big band. After stints with the guitar groups Cuarteto Mayari in Puerto Rico and Cuarteto Caney in pre-war New York, in 1939 he became the maraca player and vocalist for his brother Johnny’s Conjunto Siboney, for whom he made his first recording, Oye Mi Bajo, in February 1940. Early in 1941, Tito was Enric Madriguera’s vocalist but left the band in March 1942 to replace Miguelito Valdés in the Xavier Cugat Orchestra, where he spent a brief period. The next year he joined the U.S. Army, but as soon as he had received his discharge he sang with the pianist-bandleader Noro Morales, before switching to José Curbelo in 1946. After stints in various orchestras, Tito formed an eight-piece conjunto in 1948, which became known as Tito Rodríguez and the Mambo Devils – this was during the days when Perez Prado’s Mambo No. 5 had exploded on the scene, thereby kicking off the era of the mambo. It was not long before the conjunto changed its name to Tito Rodríguez y sus Lobos del Mambo, and it features here on these sessions. The eruption of the mambo coincided with the opening of the Palladium in 1949, the hip shrine par excellence of Latin Jazz on Broadway, amongst whose habitual public it was not difficult to find the likes of Allen Ginsburg, Marlene Dietrich, Sammy Davis Jr., Leroi Jones, Kim Novak or Marlon Brando, and whose posters and handbills bore such names as Machito, Tito Rodríguez and Tito Puente. To the Palladium would come Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and Charlie Parker, to stimulate and refresh their musical ideas in the torrents of the mambo, the result of which would later flower into one of the most important and dynamic musical hybrids in all the history of popular music of the 20th century. It was a tumultuous and exciting era. Tito Rodriguez made several recordings during the Fifties, besides touring and playing Las Vegas, Miami, and other major show business centers. During the 1960s he moved to Puerto Rico for a while, still recording and playing intensively, right up until his untimely death from leukemia in New York in February 1973.