The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love Read Online Free PDF Page A

in with their orchestra, and that night Montoya gave in and said he would.
    They formed a mambo band; that is, a traditional Latin dance band given balls by saxophones and horns. This orchestra consisted of a flute, violin, piano, sax, two trumpets, two drummers, one playing an American kit and the other a battery of congas. Cesar had thought up the Mambo Kings while looking through the advertising pages of the Brooklyn Herald, where half the orchestras had names like the Mambo Devils, Romero and the Hot Rumba Orchestra, Mambo Pete and His Caribbean Crooners. There was a certain Eddie Reyes King of the Bronx Mambo, Juan Valentino and His Mad Mambo Rompers, Vic Caruso and His Little Italy Mambonairs, and groups like the Havana Casino Orchestra, the Havana Melody Band, the Havana Dance Orchestra. Those same pages advertising DANCING LESSONS NOW! LEARN THE MAMBO, THE FOX-TROT, THE RUMBA. DANCE YOUR WAY INTO A GIRL’S HEART! Why not Cesar Castillo and the Mambo Kings?
    Although Cesar considered himself a singer, he was also quite talented as an instrumentalist and adept at percussion. He was blessed with tremendous energy, a surge of power from too many slaps in the face from his foul-tempered father, Pedro Castillo, and a love of melody because of his mother and the affectionate maid who had helped bring him into the world, Genebria. (Here he listens to a distant trumpeting on a Mambo King recording, “Twilight in Havana,” and sighs; it’s as if he’s a kid again running through the center of Las Piñas at carnival and the porches of the houses are lit with huge lanterns and the balconies garlanded with ribbons and tapers and flowers, and past so many musicians, musicians everywhere on the street corners, on the church steps, on the porches of the houses, and continuing on toward the plaza, where the big orchestra’s set up; that’s the trumpet he hears echoing in the arcades of his town as he passes the columns and the shadows of couples hidden behind them and charges down steps beyond a garden, through the crowds and the dancers, to the bandstand, where that trumpet player, obese in a white suit, head tilted back, blows his music into the sky, and this carries and bounces off the walls of another arcade in Havana, and Cesar’s blowing the trumpet now at three in the morning, reeling around in circles and laughing after a night out at the clubs and brothels with friends and his brother, laughing with the notes that whip into the empty dark spaces and bounce back, swirling inside him like youth.)
    He and his brother actually preferred the slower ballads and boleros, but they set out with Montoya to build a sound dance band, because that’s what the people wanted. It was Montoya who did all the arrangements of pieces like “Tu Felicidad, ” “Cachita, ” “No Te Importe Saber, ” pieces made popular by the likes of René Touzet, Noro Morales, José Fajardo. He knew how to read music, which the brothers had never really learned—though they could struggle their way through a chart, they presented their songs with simple chords and with the melodies worked out on instruments or in their heads. This sometimes annoyed the other musicians, but Cesar used to tell them, “What I’m interested in is a man who can really feel the music, instead of someone who can only play the charts.” And then he talked about the immortal conguero Chano Pozo, who was shot to death in 1948 over a drug deal * and whose ghost was already turning up in Havana mambos, and of musicians like the great Mongo Santamaría. “Just look at Mongo,” Cesar would say to Nestor. “He doesn’t read. And did Chano? No, hombre, he had the spirit, and that’s what we want, too.”
    They’d rehearse in the living room of their cousin Pablo’s apartment, on days when the walls were subject to wild fits of clanking boiler pipes and when the floors rumbled because of the subways, as if in an earthquake. They’d rehearse on days when the boiler had