Somehow, this seems appropriate today.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
They are making a movie about Miles Davis now. Apparently they have turned it into a Hollywood shoot-em-up as the only way they could raise enough money to produce a major film. Like there wasn’t enough drama in his life.
This clip? Ditto. It was filmed at the Corso (or a set doctored up to look the the Corso), the premiere latin dance club of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s. I played there literally 100s of time with bands like Tito, Larry Harlow, Willie Colon and many others. I played for 15 years with Tito Puente, starting about a year after this movie was made. Absolutely nothing about it is real except for the virtuosity of Tito and the band, and even that’s overdubbed.
He never, ever played that piece that fast. Ever.
And…e never, ever would have invited someone to come up and sit in off of the dance floor. Ever. Sit in? Sure. Talk to him first. In fact, anybody even remotely good enough to play with him would have paid him the respect of asking first.
I only saw a gun one time at the Corso and never a knife. The gun was in the hands of the owner as he told a musician’s union rep that he’d be a dead man if he ever came back to the club. Rough guys running a clean club.
If there was a fight there, I never saw it. The bouncers..it was mob-owned and run as were every other music and strip club in NYC at the time …were fearsome and what would have happened to the fighters would have been very bad. The people there knew that, number one, and even more importantly, they were there to dance, not fight!!!
I have a close cop friend. One of the few real good ones. He won’t go to a movie about police because they’re all bullshit. I guess it’s the same with any real-life speciality.
You want to hear the real Tito Puente?
Go buy one of his hundreds of recordings. The stuff from the mid-’50s through the late ’80s is consistently good. He was a complete musician, not just a fast drummer. Composer, arranger, bandleader…the works. Play it on a good sound system. Sit down, close your eyes and LISTEN!!!
Please.
AG
P.S. One good thing about Hollywood bullshit movies…once in a while somebody who deserves it makes some real money. Celia Cruz and Tito Puente were ghetto stars before the movie. Not a bad thing…in fact in some respects an even better place in life than what happened afterward…but their part in that movie made them worldwide stars. I literally couldn’t afford to play regularly w/Tito before that movie. I simply couldn’t turn down other work that paid much better. After? He was traveling the world instead of a few Puerto Rican ghettos in the continental U.S. and Puerto Rico proper. and he was making millions instead of thousands. GOOD on him!!! Celia too. They are part of a group of a very few late-in-life successful artists who didn’t allow their success to compromise their music. Bet on it. They stayed real. Both of them.
P.P.S. Tito in the navy.
My favorite shot of him. A nascent genius in uniform. Priceless.
In ’71 I had a girlfriend who thought the sun rose and set on Tito. When I first heard him, I thought that if I practiced for weeks on end maybe I’d be good enough to carry his sticks back and forth from the bus, she told me that I’d never be that good.
She was right.