The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love Read Online Free PDF

shut down and it was so cold steam oozed out of their cuticles and the musicians would roll their eyes, saying, “Who needs this shit?” But they continued because Cesar Castillo treated them well: they’d show up dead-tired from their day jobs and play their hearts out, knowing that at the end of the rehearsal they would crowd into the little kitchen: Pablo’s wife would cook up big platters of steak and pork chops—smuggled out of the meat-packing plant under shirts and long coats—rice and beans, and whatever else they wanted. Having consumed great quantities of food and beer, they’d laugh and head back into the chilly universe feeling as if Cesar Castillo and his brother had really looked out for them.
    Hands moving around in circles (after taking a sip of beer, drag of a Chesterfield), he’d explain his ideas about a song: “For this ballad, we should come in quietly like cats. Miguel, first you on the piano, the minor chords and all that business on the high notes, then, Manny, you come in with the bass, but suavecito, suavecito, and then, Nestor, you come in with the horn, talatalatalata, then the congas and the other brass. We go through one verse and then we come into the turnaround and I’ll sing the verse.”
    “We’ll play,” Manny the bassist was saying. “And you sing with that priestly expression on your face.”
    When they finally had the songs worked out, lyrics and simple chords, the melody lines memorized, he used to take them to his arranger, the elegant Miguel Montoya. Sitting down beside him, he’d whistle the melody or pick it out directly on the piano, so that it could be written down as music. Many a night, passersby on Broadway and Tiemann Place would hear these melodies being worked out by the Mambo King and his brother. People would look up and see their silhouettes in the window, heads arched back. Or sometimes they went up to the rooftop with a few bottles of beer and steak sandwiches on Italian bread, smothered in onions and salt, and set out a blanket, feasted and drank, passing the night improvising songs as if for the red-yellow-blue-and-white-lit buildings of the city.
    Jobs were hard to find at first, with so many good dance bands already out there. On his days off, Cesar did a lot of the footwork, going from club to club on Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Avenues, and to the Bronx and Brooklyn and uptown, Harlem. He was always trying to set up auditions with jaded, tan-suited Puerto Rican gangsters who owned half of the mambo singers in New York. But they did get some jobs: parish dances, grammar-school parties, weddings. Many hours of rehearsal, few dollars of pay. It would help a lot that Cesar Castillo was a white Cuban bolero singer like Desi Arnaz, what they called in those days a Latin-lover type, dark-haired and dark-featured, his skin being what was then called “swarthy.” Swarthy to Americans, but light-skinned when compared to many of his friends. Pito, a wiry Cuban from Cienfuegos, was as dark as the mahogany legs of the easy chair in their living room on La Salle. A lot of the fellows who turned up at the apartment with their squealing, guitar-shaped wives and girlfriends were dark, bony-limbed men.
    A flier from May 15, 1950:
    The Friendship Club on 79th Street and Broadway presents for your dancing pleasure a double bill of top Mambo Entertainment. Tonight and tomorrow night (Fri. and Sat.) we are proud to present the Glorious Gloria Parker and Her All-Girl Rumba Orchestra! And, sharing this bill, the Fabulous Cesar Castillo and His Mambo Kings of Cuba! Admission $1.04. Doors open at 9 P . M . No zoot suits and no jitterbugs, please.
    They started playing jobs all over the city. The Café Society on 58th Street, the Havana Madrid on Broadway and 51st, the Biltmore Ballroom on Church and Flatbush, the Club 78, the Stardust on Boston Road in the Bronx, the Pan-American Club and the Gayheart Ballroom on Nostrand Avenue, the Hotel Manhattan Towers on 76th Street and at