Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Chano Pozo: La vida (1915–1948), by Rosa Marquetti Torres

2019; Brill; Volume: 93; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1163/22134360-09303023

2213-4360

Mats Lundahl,

Cuban History and Society

Chano Pozo was a troublemaker who smoked marihuana, sniffed cocaine, and spent a great deal of his life with gun bullets in his body.He was also the greatest conguero of Cuba of all times.In 2001, Jordi Pujol issued the CD box Chano Pozo: El tambor de Cuba (Tumbao TCD 305) with a 143-page booklet.It constitutes a landmark in the research on Chano.Now Rosa Marquetti extends our knowledge about the legendary tumbador a great deal further.She sets the mood with a description of Chano Pozo, the dandy, in fancy stage clothes and with his best conga drum.By 1942, he had completed his look-expensive and extravagant suits (he had 23), fancy shoes, outrageous hats, and flashy jewelry.Chano was obsessed with clothes.After rising to fame, he was never short of money, but what came in was spent immediately.At the same time, he stuck to his origins.He continued to live in a solar, a tenement building with one-room apartments and common kitchen and toilet, though in his case it was furnished in style.Chano was a man of contradictions.He also drove a red Cadillac convertible, rolled in bills on his bed and spent those that stuck to his body.He epitomized the myth of the triumphant Cuban musician.Marquetti narrates Chano Pozo's life in a lively, fluent, easy-to-read stylefrom his humble beginnings through his reform-school teens, his subsequent rise to fame in Cuba as a composer, drummer, and rumbero, his apogee on the vanguard of Afro-Cuban jazz in the pathbreaking big band of Dizzy Gillespie in "Nuebayol" and his catalytic role in it, to his violent death in New York in 1948, at the age of 33 and his posthumous larger-than-life reputation.She traces the history of the introduction of Cuban percussion and Cuban music in general into American music, inserting Chano into a wider musical perspective, not only the contemporary one but also broader Cuban musical history, and the intersection of North American and Cuban music which took place at the same time as the bebop revolution in jazz.While jazz fans are familiar with the short period that Chano spent in the United States-less than 20 months-their knowledge of his Cuban background usually leaves a lot to be desired.Marquetti fills the gap, providing the necessary knowledge, without which it is impossible to understand who Chano was, where his music came from, and what he represented.She deals with his musical activities, his regular appearances in comparsas (parading song and dance groups) during the carnival season, his hit compositions and his cabaret career, not least the part related to Rita Montaner, Cuba's most famous singer, whom he accompanied regularly in a variety of contexts between 1942 and 1946.