Tito Puente Special by Raul Gutierrez & His Cuban Big Band (CD)

In Caribbean music, “El que no tiene de Mongo tiene de Tito Puente” (he who doesn’t have Mongo has Tito Puente). We will go to the bar or to the terrace smoking some very young cigars and spraying the leather with rums of any solera. In Hopper’s paintings no one dances salsa, but you might hear a bolero in the background. The Caribbean is the outdoors with the smoke of barbecues. Let’s not get exquisite either: the early morning has no heart, but salsa has its lineage. To all those centers (rums, cigars, hunting, hides, madrugada and above all lineage) travel the darts -very poisoned with good music, pardon the oxymoron- of this album.

To love Caribbean music you need an ancestral knowledge: to dance and to have taste. But that has never been too complicated. It’s true that the Caribbean dancer has always been demanding, it’s just that nobody knows how it was that “perreo” crept in. Maybe it’s just a natural evolution. The times we live in make us look like the old men in the old photo. Worse is not knowing what each one of us is missing.

I like those musicians like Raúl Gutiérrez and those who accompany him in this project understand what this is all about. This is an album that we have been waiting for to give that definitive blow on the table: pay attention to us, the ranch is going to burn. We have to start giving back to that faithful public that comes to the phono library or to their old vinyls a recognizable and contagious sonority.

That public will do what I have done since I had access to these songs: listen with fascination to the music that accompanies an essential and pleasurable journey through time. With each beat and each solo, I have wondered how it was that we lost the valuable treasure of these rhythms until we fell into a present where it seems like something from another era, made for our parents and grandparents.

Tito Puente is one of the most renowned leaders of the jazz and salsa movement of the second half of the 20th century. Percussionist, arranger and composer of the highest caliber, his legacy cannot be ignored when talking about Afro-Caribbean music. He worked with the greatest and earned the respect of all. This album reminds us that there are moments in our musical history that deserve to be revisited much more frequently.

With this recording, Raúl Gutiérrez closes a circle made of different stages and moments: his admiration for jazz, his love for Cuban music and his life cycle, which began very young in a Chile that soon became too small for him. Great musicians have a restless spirit, they are in perpetual search.

The opening is a classic, “Guaguancó Margarito”, by Silvestre Méndez, in the voice of José Lussón, a song thought out and executed with flavor and cadence, and in which the arrangements of voices and brass are handled with great care. No one will be displeased to find a very fresh version of “Oye como va”, a winning horse in Tito Puente’s repertoire, where the brass again provides more than the garnish and Ariel Enríquez’s electric guitar splits to adjust to a sonority closer to the more contemporary version left to us by Santana.

But it is the three most “descargosos” themes, “Llavimaso”, “TP Special” and “Para los rumberos”, where the magnificent ensemble that Gutiérrez has assembled is activated with special success and where the trumpeter Thommy Lovry and the percussionists Luis Valiente (Betún) and Cristóbal Rodríguez “Guatijo” shine. Also worth mentioning are the songs with a charango air: “Poinciana”, “El cayuco” and “Qué será mi China”, the latter with the contribution of the great flutist Polo Tamayo. Attention should be paid to the solos by trumpeter Robertico García and Gutiérrez himself on soprano saxophone.

By the way, for those who lived the splendor of the timba movement in the 90’s, they will be pleased to find in “Pequeña Descarga” the voice of Jorge Pentón (El Gafa), singer of a stage of NG La Banda. A magnificent version of “María Cervantes”, a classic by Noro Morales, now with an exquisite brass arrangement where Yoandy Argudín’s trombone stands out and this time with a “tumbao” on the piano that takes us back to the years when Jorge Dalto established it in the altarpiece of the great themes of Latin jazz.

All the strongest attributes of Afro-Caribbean music nest in this album, the result of the musical ambition of Raúl Gutiérrez and the musicians who accompany him in this noble effort to revisit some of the most notable milestones of the career of an immortal musician.

Fayetteville, Arkansas. March 2022