Musical Mission of Mercy

At the turn of the century, Asbury Park and Sarasota Springs were the gambling meccas of the northeast. The Depression put an end to their heydays. An attempt was made to place gambling on the Jersey Shore at Long Branch. The Rumba Casino, where I worked with the Tony (Nino) Yacavino troupe, was chosen as an experiment to see if it could offer gamblers what they needed. Jimmy Pellecchia was the owner and Harry Kilby was the front man. Harry booked the shows together with his wife and daughter, who came down from New York. Jimmy was boxing commissioner of New Jersey, and Nino had been a boxer before becoming an accomplished dancer.

Similarly, in Miami Beach, Lou Tendler, a champion boxer from Philadelphia, was part owner of the Carrousel Club, with its revolving bar and air-conditioning in 1940. I caught pneumonia dancing and sweating, due to it, and my colleague Pepito became very ill as well. We were not accustomed to it, and Pepito used to stand with his back to a large fan during rehearsal breaks. I also suffered severe hearing loss partially due to the blasting trumpets just behind me as I performed night after night. We liked our music loud even then, I guess.

Gambling interests figured that Asbury Park would be a more suitable location but that didn’t take off, and of course today you have them at Atlantic City. 1952 found me on a 90-day round-the-world cruise, escorting 17 Brazilian millionaires. One of the passengers on the ship was Filipino who owned the Manila Herald and the Jai Lai Fronton. He persuaded me and my ex-wife to perform after seeing us giving dance lessons during the trip.

For the many years spent on ships, the Champagne Hour was one of my favorite evenings, when I MC’d the show. Passengers could chose their own dance selections and a bottle was awarded in each category. We did the conga line bit to begin each sailing, off with a big happy start to the cruise…and did it at the last night as well. On the S.S. Oceanic, we had four bands which were placed at intervals among the participants (which meant everyone aboard, just about). Going from salon to salon, one would hear different orchestras overlapping, as was the case in Havana at the Palacio Gallego, on different floors of the building.

In 1940, the danzon was the most played style, except at the sidewalk cafes in front of the Capitolio, where bands like Anacaona played mostly rumba. Here again, the music would overlap since the bands were adjacent to each other. In the afternoons, along the Malecon, there were small bars indoors that had 3 or 4 musicians playing on concrete floors for dancers. Rum was cheap and the dancers were poor, but happy, made so by the combination of two sweet forces at work.

Sunday mornings we went to the Bosques de Almendares to drink and dance, and some to swim, later. We also rode horses in the cool of the early morning, at El Encanto. The perfume wafted out into Calle Nettuno (or was it Calle Luna?). Havana was a rare mix, a garden of earthly delights, which was irresistible to all…a conspiracy of seductive temptations. It was as though one had been imprisoned all his life, and suddenly released in a gay and friendly world…so unlike anywhere else on earth. To bring the Cuban spirit to the rest of the world by means of its music is today a mission of mercy to a beset planet.

The Journey of a Thousand Dollars (Begins with One Box Step)

The seeds of many of the philanthropies that benefit Cuban and Portoriquen communities today were planted in Miami Beach in the 1940s. Jewish charitable organizations had been busy assisting arriving immigrants from European ghettos at the beginning of the twentieth century. They later became involved in the labor movement where many Italians worked for slave wages. After WWII, attention was turned to the blacks of the South. Today, Latino families are being favored with parks, playgrounds, pools and programs sponsored by the many Jewish philanthropies.

In 1940, vacationers from Bensonhurst and Flatbush found paradise in the sun of South Beach, where they were exposed to the delightful music of nearby Havana. Soon entranced by the rhythm of the rumba, they helped give rise to the clubs along the beach such as the Five O’Clock Club, the Carrousel and the Patio at the Roney Plaza, that featured Latin spectacles and free conga lessons. New hotels going up along Collins Avenue had to include, usually off the lobby, a dance studio that added the essential tumult. There being few professional dance teachers, those wanting to perfect their box step appealed to the nightclub performers for instruction. The five or six teachers that were taking pupils were soon overwhelmed by the dance mania that had developed seemingly overnight. Former wallflowers were seen doing tornillos by the pool with their slick-haired Latinos.

The similarity between Jewish and Latino cultures, both being family oriented, made for bonding so that the unison persisted even up into the Catskills in New York during the summer months. New clubs sprang up in New York City following the venerable Havana Madrid, named La Conga, Versailles, Yumuri and Fe Fe’s Monte Carlo, offering Saturday and Sunday rumba matinees. In such close proximity to the Garment Center, it was natural to find “our crowd”: the furriers, clothiers, milliners, cloak and suit boys with their models.

While I will always credit fully the magic of the music, I sometimes feel that my old dance studio in the lobby of the National Hotel on the beach contributed the first step that helped bring today’s descendents of my original pupils, the original rumbaniks, to center stage in the Latino-oriented Jewish philanthropies.

A Dancer Is Born

Singers want to be actors and actors want to be dancers, but none of them want to be prize fighter. But prize fighters make good dancers. With their speed, balance, endurance and courage, they are unequaled in performance before the public. Millions of dollars are paid to witness them in action and millions are wagered on the outcomes.

I was taught to dance by a prize fighter named Nino “The Great” Yacavino, but also how to be my best in managing my life with an emphasis on performance.

We were always attracted to prize fighters while growing up. All I had to do was look out my bedroom window to watch matches presented by the Bay Ridge Boxing Association, with the ring set up on the tennis court grounds that in the winter were used as a skating rink. I had a free ringside set to watch graceful boxers, ice skaters and tennis players.

My mother, who used to dance in her red dress on the top of a table at family gatherings, was a fight fan who in summer vacationed at Tony Cammonari’s training camp in the Catskills, and who took me to see Prima Carnera on stage at Loew’s Sheridan in the Village, where we lived while growing up. My dad, on the other hand, was less interested in pugilism and the fight crowd. Mom was a tough cookie, a fighter who beat the Great Depression.

Nino Yacavino was a Brooklyn fighter who wanted something better for himself than a brutal beating. He and his wife and sister-in-law organized a dance troupe that included a Latin dance teacher and his partner, and needed only one other member for his tall sister-in-law. My height got me the job, not my dancing ability, since I couldn’t even do the fox trot and had difficulty finding patent leather shoes to fit me. What I did have was a familiarity with Latin music and the rhythms of the 1938 Casino de la Playa orchestra from Havana.

Being tall for my age at 18, I tended to slouch so that when Nino contacted me, the first thing he did was teach me how to walk across the room balancing a book on my head. Since his nightclub date was fast approaching, he and his wife soon had me doing the box step and learning our routines, which included rumba, bolero and samba. To learn more, I went to the Park Plaza, where the best Latin dance team in America, Rene and Estela, taught me more basic movements so that a dancer was born!

During the ‘30s, the boxing profession was Mafia, as was horseracing and many of the nightclubs with “cut liquor,” betting parlors and gambling rooms. Nino may or may not have been involved with the Mafia but he did succeed where others failed by getting us a full summer’s gig at the Rumba Casino in West End, Long Branch, New Jersey. The place was perhaps a gambling joint but well concealed from us. It was owned by Jimmy Pellechia, boxing commissioner of New Jersey, who later served time for mortgage fraud (see the Daily News, 1938). When the club signed up a troupe called the China de Simone Dancers, there was among the girls Gloria Cook, an ex-mistress of Al Jolson with whom I did a duo act with fast rumba and lifts. When Jimmy Pellechia fell in love with my partner Gloria, he gallantly offered me a dance studio in the solarium of the Kingsley Arms Hotel in Asbury Park, which he owned. Food and board were on him for the balance of the summer season on the Jersey shore, since he broke up my act by taking Gloria to Hawaii.

Then, back in New York City, I teamed up with a dance student at Davalos Dance Studio on Broadway and 50th Street, and found myself in a Latin troupe formed by Davalos, for a performance at the Beacon Theater upstate in Beacon, New York. This led to my hanging around the Cuban Village at New York’s 1939 World’s Fair, as an understudy for the troupe that had been hired there. Whenever free, I frequented all the Latin dance spots around town: the Audubon Ballroom, the Park Plaza, the Masonic Lodge on 106th Street, the Caborojeno Workers Circle, Ben Mardes’ Riviera Club, and the more elegant nightspots such as Havana-Madrid, Versailles, Martinique and Embassy, until I was called to join Bob Conrad’s La Playa Dancers, booked into the Wonder Bar in Detroit in winter, 1939. Xavier Cugat was playing at the Statler Hotel there at the time.

My next gig was to be at the Carrousel Club in Miami, where I opened two dance studios at the new National Hotel and the Royal York in 1940, as well as at the exclusive Tatum Surf Club. While attending the University of Miami, I was working nights at the Coral Gables Country Club. It was in 1940 that I first visited Havana for a weekend, then again to attend the University of Havana in 1941 [see the blog entry “An Afro-Cuban Blessing”].

While in the military during the war, I performed Latin dance for US troops in the Philippines, then returned to the US to teach Latin at Grossinger’s Hotel with the Tony and Lucille Colon Dance Studio, along with Mike Terrace and Johnny Lucchese. In 1948, I began a long career on cruise ships as cruise director. Wherever travel took me, I spoke, danced and taught conga, bolero, rumba (fast and slow), plus the beguine and the merengue, samba, tango, pachanga, mambo (“Mambo #5” was a nation-wide hit and made Perez Prado famous) and the Mexican waltz—but still stumbled over a fox trot!

Prize fights and nightclubs during the early 1940s were gang-controlled turf that exposed me to people such as Santo Trafficante in Cuba, who invited me to be a “shill” with the tourists I escorted. I asked Bugsy Siegel for permission to dance with Virginia Hill, his gal, at the Beachcomber in Miami Beach. I asked Skinny D’Amato if he knew Jimmy Pellechia, the ex-boxing commissioner of New Jersey, jailed for fraud. The Musicians Union boss Petrillo may not have been “mob,” but I shook his pinky as he demanded.

My second nightclub gig was at the Carrousel Club in 1941. It was bankrolled with some of the money belonging to champion fighter Lou Tendler from Philadelphia. The Wonder Bar in Detroit, a city riddled with unemployed ex-Prohibition mobsters, was “mob,” as was the gambling joint called Club Bali in Miami, where I lost my paycheck every week. The 1939 Rhumba Casino, as we’ve seen, was Jimmy Pellechia’s, whose mob ties and gambling debts put him behind bars.

At the MGM, Las Vegas, in 1976, I ran into a friend, Wingy Gruber, the one-armed greeter from my old Club Bali days, not to mention from the crowds at the Tropicana in Havana. In the ‘70s, the cruise industry became big-time casino business, and I quit just as I could have made my knowledge pay off. Perhaps the African gods, the orishas, were talking to me about justice and the little man.

Fighters make good dancers, but dancers don’t make good fighters, as the following incident explains. One night at the Rhumba Casino, Nino Yacavino suffered a sudden appendicitis attack. He was throwing up bile and perspiring profusely. He pushed us away when we tried to restrain him from going out on the floor to perform. Coming off stage, he went to the hospital, semiconscious.

This was something Nino couldn’t teach me: how to be a true trouper, an average fighter who gets up off the floor to be a prize fighter, like my mom—who I taught to dance the mambo.

An Afro-Cuban Blessing

Havana, 1941

In a wooden shed that was mostly an altar of some sort, with much of the open sky for a roof, lived the most highly respected Santero in all of Cuba. He lived among a jumbled botanica of wax flowers, unrelated plaster saints of various sizes, and framed deities. Small sacks with secret contents were handing from the trees…. In short, I found myself visiting an authentic sanctuary in a spiritual jungle. Nevertheless, I felt strangely at ease in this unlikely garden, in this absurd theater, in this unfamiliar makeshift environment.

All this had actually begun a few nights earlier, when after an all-night party, I had left Miami for Havana to study at the University of Havana with Professor Bustamonte. On the way to the Hotel Inglaterra with my hangover, I kept my eyes shut against the Cuban sun. Being siesta, the empty streets seemed uninteresting. Once in my room, I fell onto the bed and into the arms of Morfeo. Around seven o’clock, I was slowly awakened by an approaching musical alarm. From the balcony window came sounds from the street. Unaccustomed to balconies, I grasped the railing to steady myself. Down below ran a river of colored lanterns gyrating among ruffle-skirted and ruffle-shirted dancers. With ceremonious authority, a parade of intensely disciplined congueros passed by as if in review. When the spectators below stood on their chairs, no doubt the highlight of the spectacle was approaching. Los Dandys de Belen were strutting by, New Orleans–style, with tails, spats, twirling canes and top hats. “Sient’ un bongo, mamita me’ta llamando, sient’ un bongo…”

I had arrived in Havana, unaware that it was Carnival. This was not mere touristic, theatrical display. Imagine my amazement. This was more than theme floats and majorettes…this was serious universal harmony…the splendor of a joyous humanity. The fireworks were in the eyes of these people. Where did the individual begin and the rhythm begin, since they were one? Overcome, and like an espantaneo, I ran down and plunged into the delirium of it all, falling in step with the elegant/primitive fantasy. I had gone from a stupor that hot afternoon, arriving in Havana for the first time, to the sobering sudden discovery of one of life’s true amazements: a bounteous gaiety ready to be shared with the whole world. Like winning the lottery of felicity.

Several days later, I mentioned casually to a student friend that I had been having difficulty reading Dr. Fernando Ortiz and Orifiche. I was struggling with the Lukumi vocabulary and negligible Spanish. He suggested crossing over to Regla to meet Juan Beson. There may still be people who remember this most influential babalao, with his tall, thin noble stance and his solitary front tooth that, like a badge, evinced a certain sincerity.

“What is he up to?” I wondered, as I stood back watching him light some candles. “He is invoking La Virgen de Regla, asking for protection for your house,” said my friend. The babalao was responding to the answer I had given him when he asked me, “Why have you come here?” (This is the same question a psychologist asks a new patient.) I was unprepared with a reply and with Ñañigo proverbs traveling Quixote-like around my brain, I was about to confess that it was not my intention to come…that my friend had suggested it…when I stammered…“la…la música.”

At that moment, the night surrounding us seemed to physically withdraw itself in respectful silence. From this tableau of a babalao, a young American and his Cuban friend, a trinity emerged like three magi in a holy night. As I received his blessing, I felt that he knew very well why I had come to Regla. “You will carry this music around the world,” he said. Was this a prophesy, or a command of sorts? Was it an example of his psychic insight? Whatever the meaning, it has influenced me all my life…of that there is no doubt. Knowing absolutely nothing of the technicalities of music, but now much imbued with the workings of its mysterious power. Was I to go forth like a neophyte apostle, an evangelist proselytizer?

Much shaken by this truly religious experience, I wondered: Was his odd statement merely an example of lyrical rhetoric? And example of pastoral eloquence, an embellishment of a ritual, a divinely inspired assignment? A fortuitous indoctrination, a revelation that made me a propagator of this music? A step toward my greater spiritual education, a sacred covenant, an oracular portent? An inescapable aesthetic responsibility that made me involved, indebted, privileged? A canonization witnessed by invisible Orishas, an unexpected imposition that made me an instrument of the music itself? Was the santero a channeler between Yemaya and a new convert?

After this encounter, one fact emerges from the overall picture of my life. I can see that I have faithfully “carried the music around the world.” Returning from Cuba in 1941, I opened dance studios all along Miami Beach; performed with the La Playa Dancers around the United States; exhibited rumba with the USO in Samar, Phillipines; run the Champagne Dance Contests aboard cruise ships; lead the immensely popular conga lines of the 1950s; taught with Tony and Lucille Colon at Grossinger’s; lectured oral history of the music at the Smithsonian; and donated my poster collection of Latin orchestras to Boys Harbor. I was given a dream in Regla that today I see slowly materializing into reality, like a plant I have watered. Surely we make the world a better place with this happy music…a duty that is set before all mankind…is it not? So it was foretold that I would one day write this for you to read.

“Blessed is he who has found his work.” —Thomas Carlyle

Homage to the Heroes

A visit to Staten Island's Meucci-Garibaldi Museum. Livelli pere was a fan.

Vince's 88th Birthday

On April 9, 2008, Vincent gathered with friends for a "Testimonial Dinner" at the Pearl Oyster Bar in Greenwich Village, which occupies the building where the Cornelia St. Bookstore once stood. Vincent owned the shop with his good friend, the literary critic Anatole Broyard. What follows is Vince's address:

"Sixty years ago, Greenwich Village was a nice quiet neighborhood. We went to war as kids and came back as men, more mature but still unsophisticated and unpolished, in spite of our overseas exposure. Even with its bohemian background of poetry circles, speakeasies, rebellious antecedents and whispers of free love, we were young and innocent in many ways—especially where art and literature were involved.

One man’s dream, a bookstore, put a roof over what went on and became a kind of family kitchen for the cultural nourishment of young local artists and writers who came in to sit around a potbellied stove talking of Proust, Celine and Kafka well into the dark hours of a cold winter night.

The Cornelia Street Bookstore, even though it failed after only eight months, had made us take notice of our vacuous knowledge of good literature. The idea of upgrading the level of our taste and familiarity with good reading was based on offering, not trashy pulp fiction, but the avant-garde, unknown authors such as Henri Michaux, European intellectuals, first editions, out-of-prints, signed copies, books of collectible value, rarities.

Anatole soon created a class of readers whose hunger now demanded quality. People were seen reading and carrying books or talking books on Washington Square Park benches. The bookshop failed, not for lack of funds, demand or location (Cornelia is rather hidden away, as streets go). It failed because Anatole was unable to provide the merchandise to stock his shelves that began to look like bare cupboards. In other words, the demand outgrew the supply of suitable books. To make things worse, Anatole was reluctant to part with his favorite tomes and became a serious collector rather than a dealer.

With the bookstore gone, he stored his precious collection in Sheri Martinelli’s apartment on Jones Street. When she discovered his other girlfriends, she vengefully shipped his books to Somers, New Jersey, until he would change his ways, she hoped. Such desperate holding hostage of his soul may have been resolved some way or other, but I never learned how.

Anatole’s customers followed him into the San Remo restaurant where we set up a literary salon as a replacement for the back room of the bookstore, When the Santini brothers heard us talking about d’Annunzio and Pirandello, Lorca and Boccaccio, we were made welcome. The new cultural impact we originated was to be usurped by the arrival of drugs. In Kafka Was the Rage, Anatole wrote “Books were our drugs.” He and I witnessed and bemoaned this detour of our country’s cultural history.

Today, with technology, you have the equivalent of the printing press. Use it to recapture the healthier, friendlier, freer universal societal climate that we earlier guys and gals installed sixty years ago here at number 18 Cornelia Street, before there was a national awareness for it, before Channel 13, Arthur C. and Catherine T., PBS, WGBH, NEA or the artists and writers colonies.

When my friend José Mangual’s birthday cake was set before him, he reversed the plastic “54,” making it “45” and making himself ten years younger. I can’t do that, at 88, nor would I do so if I could."

Eulogy for Julio

...part two of a tribute to Julio Andino

Before there was an Ernesto Antonio “Tito” Puente, there was Julio Andino. While Tito even has the 1979 Sugar Hill hip-hop to his many credits, Julio has no mention as a musician who brought the entire Latino music world before the public, the global public. While Tito introduced the xylophone’s power, and Cugat popularized rumba, Ignacio Piniero the son, and Arsenio the Afro-Cuban element, Julio brought into play a whole body of mainly repressed Latin music that was ignored while he himself was ignored.

Many give credit to Azpiazu’s “El Manisero,” but Julio did more than make people dance. He made them stop and listen and think and in doing so they heard the soul of the music calling to them. It was a sad, tough world of “no job, no heat, no hot water”—the years of the Great Depression that Julio navigated. It was one that Tito never knew the way Julio did. Tito is here forever while it is as though Julio never was, even though Tito, with admirable compassion in a heartless industry, was gratefully acknowledging Julio’s influence, an influence initiated by Julio that brought out the pride in Puerto Rican communities everywhere.

For forty years, Joe Conzo Jr. spoke for Tito as his manager while Julio was surrounded by those who would silence him. He never heard the screaming adherents that followed Tito, for himself; but he does have what Hindus consider sainthood. Like a mahatma, Julio was that one man alone who sent out the message of this music of the streets to the four corners of the world by prying open the door that closeted El Barrio musicians. He pioneered for them both the white and black dominated turfs of the late 1930s. He made possible the one trustworthy source of joy in a beset world—one that sings a child to sleep and one whose thunder and lightning can blow you away.

Tito’s popularity, for one, is Julio’s legacy.