Remembering Ray
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

On several occasions, I met Ray Barretto, the conga master who passed away in February (just about a month after receiving his Jazz Masters Award from the National Endowment for the Arts).But I only enjoyed a real conversation with him once. One evening at Birdland about five years ago, someone had told him I had written a book on Frank Sinatra, and he walked up to me and asked me to guess what his favorite Sinatra song was. Of course I couldn’t. It turned out to be “Suddenly It’s Spring,” a beautiful but obscure song by Johnny Burke and Jimmy Van Heusen that Sinatra had never recorded but sang a few times on the radio in 1945.
We then proceeded to talk about songs and singers, and Sinatra. What was surprising was not that Barretto knew so much about this particular kind of music, but that he could have any space left in his capacious intellect, since he was one of the masters of two distinct forms of music that weren’t always related — or even familiar with each other. While I would bet that Barretto’s Latin listening audience knew that he also did straightahead jazz, few of his jazz listeners realized what a superstar he was in the world of mainstream salsa music.
All these aspects of Barretto’s music are showcased in two posthumous releases, the two-disc retrospective,”Que Viva la Musica (A Man and His Music)” (Fania), and “Standards Rican-ditioned” (Zoho Music).
Barretto, born in Brooklyn in 1929 to a Puerto Rican family, often said that he discovered Latin jazz for the first time as an American G. I. stationed in Germany when he heard Dizzy Gillespie’s breakthrough record of “Manteca.” As a child, he would listen to Latin stars like Machito. But at night, on his own, he would soak in American jazz and pop over the radio. It never occurred to him that the two idioms could be united, though, until he heard the legendary percussionist Chano Pozo playing with Gillespie on the breakthrough recording of “Manteca” from 1947. Within a few years, Barretto was carrying his congas all over New York to play wherever he could. As he began to gain fame as a salsa bandleader, recording mainly for Latin-owned labels, he was in demand with modern jazz musicians (mostly saxophonists such as Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis and Lou Donaldson) who wanted to add a little spice to their recording sessions.
The Fania double-disc collection, which contains 28 tracks from nearly that many different LPs, is remarkable for the breadth and scope of the music it contains: The title track, “Que Viva la Musica,” and his hit, “Indestructible,” are regulation Cuban-style big band salsa, with snazzy brass, flutes, a whole percussion section, and a male vocal trio. The opening track, the hit “El Watusi,” however, represents Barretto’s take on the more traditional form of charanga, with prominent piano and violins as part of the band he called “La Charanga Moderna.”
In the ’60s, Barretto was blending salsa rhythms with all kinds of pop sounds, from Motown-style soul to the free-form rock of Carlos Santana and Jimmy Hendrix. There’s even a trombone-driven piece called “007,” inspired by the James Bond craze. Yet all these pieces are in dance tempos, and his use of “boogaloo” and “shingaling” rhythms would have a profound influence on both the jazz and pop of the period. A number of pieces, like “Abidjan” and “Lucretia the Cat,” included improvisation and other jazz elements, and are now viewed as forerunners of New World Spirit, the hard-bop style band that Barretto led throughout the ’90s.
Even at the very end of his life, Barretto found a new avenue to explore. For “Standards Rican-ditioned,” he and the arranger-pianist Hilton Ruiz (who, like Barretto, would pass away before the album’s release) reconvened an ensemble that recaptured the essence of New World Spirit, which was somewhat like the Jazz Messengers with Latin percussion and two horns (including the tenor saxophone star David Sanchez) over a hybrid of North and Latin American rhythm sections. Yet for the repertoire, Barretto went back even further, to the Great American Standards he had loved as a youngster but rarely played.
On the album, Barretto reminisces about Harry James in “I Had the Craziest Dream” and Duke Ellington in “Something To Live For.” Songs like Hoagy Carmichael’s “Ivy” — a lesserknown hit for Jo Stafford, here with the melody eloquently stated by Mr. Sanchez — and the aforementioned “Suddenly It’s Spring,” done in a driving tempo with the trombonist Papo Vasquez starting off, show the depth of Barretto’s love and appreciation for the Great American Songbook.
Mr. Sanchez begins the final track, “Strange Music,” with an unaccompanied tenor cadenza. A more multicultural tune I can’t imagine: The melody began life as “Wedding Day at Troldhaugen,” by the 19th Norwegian classical composer Edvard Grieg. Roughly 80 years later, the tune was adapted by the songwriters Robert Wright and George Forrest into “Strange Music” as part of “Song of Norway,” a successful Broadway musical based on Grieg’s life and music. The song became a pop hit, recorded by Sinatra in 1944, which is doubtless where Barretto heard it.
Annotator George Rivera explains in the notes to “Standards Rican-ditioned” that Barretto laid down the basic conga track, but left a space where he intended to insert a solo. Instead, he wound up going to the hospital on the day that second conga part was to be recorded, and his son, Chris (who plays alto sax on two cuts) played it for him. However, the producers decided to mix in a snippet of Barretto humming and scatting the Grieg melody throughout the piece.
In a single cut, Ray Barretto managed to travel from Norwegian classical music to Broadway to pop to Latin to jazz.