Mongo Santamaría and Willie Bobo in Havana
Two timeless albums from a trip home.
In early 1960, congero Mongo Santamaría traveled to Havana to record two albums. At his side was the Nuyorican percussionist Willie Bobo. The pair had played together in Tito Puente’s band in New York, and had since been stirring up the sauce that was the base for a new West Coast Latin jazz sound with Cal Tjader’s group in San Francisco. They flew to Cuba accompanied by several recording engineers from Fantasy Records, the label that was putting out Tjader’s albums, and which had signed Santamaria on as a solo artist.
What would become the better known of the two albums, released before Santamaria’s career-breaking success with “Watermelon Man,” was titled Our Man in Havana, crowning the Afro-Cuban musician with the moniker that Graham Greene had given the British agent in his novel set in Cuba. The movie version of that book was filmed in Havana in 1959 just after Fidel Castro took power, and was released in U.S. theaters shortly before Mongo and Bobo’s trip.
The album’s original back cover, with liner notes by jazz journalist Dick Hadlock, continues the cheeky mood by declaring that the album was “recorded under the personal supervision of the Fidel Castro regime” (a joke that probably was not too well received among Miami’s early exile community). It lists - by their first names only - the phenomenal musicians on the album as Mongo’s “Men.” Among them were tres player and composer Niño Rivera, the bassist Salvador "Bol" Vivar, bongo player "Yeyito " Iglesias and the master of the guiro (gourd) Gustavo Tamayo.
It’s worthy of note that those same supreme musicians were included in the cast of talents on Panart’s Cuban Jam Sessions albums. Although Hadlock does not mention where the album was recorded, I can logically conclude that Mongo Santamaria recorded his two Havana solo albums in the Panart studio.
Santamaria and Fantasy took a bigger risk, commerically speaking, with the second album they recorded. The tracks on Mongo in Havana: Bembé take a road that was less traveled then, contrasting with the jamming descarga style on Our Man in Havana.
“Mongo Santamaria in Havana presents Cuban music of two distinct but not unrelated kinds: religious songs from the Afro-Cuban cults, which had their origins in Africa, and traditional folk rumbas, from which the music of commercial rumbas and later Cuban dances were derived,” William Bascom wrote in the album’s notes.
A leading American folklorist and professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Bascom was the first director of the Lowie Museum of Anthropology (the Berkeley musuem later renamed for Phoebe A. Hearst). Bascom had done extensive fieldwork in Nigeria to study the culture of the Yoruba people, and in 1948, when he was teaching at Northwestern, he had gone to Cuba to document the culture of the Afro-Cuban diaspora. He was accompanied on that trip by a Havana-born Masters graduate in anthropology named Berta Montero-Sanchez y López, who would become his wife and life-long research partner.
In the Mongo in Havana text, Bascom goes on to detail the rhythms featured on each track and the role of music in the Cuban Lucumi religion.
The album features two of Cuba’s great mid-Century interpreters of Afro-Cuban sacred song: Merceditas Valdés and Carlos Embale, who was popularly known as a singer with the Conjunto Matamoros and the Septeto Nacional.
The two Mongo Santamaria albums were later released as one set under the title Our Man in Havana. The decision to bundle them together has reduced the power of each album alone unfortunately. This is the version available on streaming services.
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OUR MAN IN HAVANA: Click here to listen on Qobuz
or listen on Spotify:
The Mongo in Havana: Bembé tracks can also be found on various compilations on Youtube.
