In 1917, Ramon Santamaria Rodriquez was born into poverty in Havana, Cuba. Nicknamed “Mongo” (a tribal chief in Senegal), he began playing the conga drum at an early age and as a teen, Mongo ...
In his column this week, Jeff Weiss talks with renowned conga player Poncho Sanchez about the unlikely gringo who put him on. Today we've got another Sanchez story about an even stranger encounter — ...
Click to open image viewer. Many Washingtonians danced to rhythms played on this Haitian conga drum. Hide stretched taut across the drum forms its head, held by ropes wound around pegs that pierce the ...
FLANKED BY HIS beloved conga drums, Ray Barretto was fondly recalled yesterday as a giant of Latin music who fused the worlds of jazz and salsa. “Ray was good, always – good as a person and good as a ...
Candido Camero, a Cuban musician who helped find new expressive directions for conga drumming, providing dynamic rhythmic accents to jazz and other forms of music, died Nov. 7 at his home in New York ...
Perhaps it was a sneak peek into what the future holds for the leader of what was once known as one of the most prosperous nations in all of Latin America. Facing mounting pressure from the ...
Click to open image viewer. Percussionist Paul Hawkins played this conga drum for Melvin Deal’s African Dance and Drumming classes at The New Thing Art and Architecture Center. The community-based ...