New CD revives Hialeah, Fla.‘s, forgotten musical past
[4 September 2007]
By Amy Driscoll
HIALEAH, Fla.—Before the Miami Sound Machine hit it big and the Buena Vista Social Club became an international sensation, the future of
Cuban music was being shaped in a place not generally known for its cultural contributions.
Hialeah.
The music recorded back then, in the late `60s and early `70s, is almost forgotten today, buried by time and the onslaught of disco, salsa
and reggaeton. But it’s still remembered by a generation of Cuban-American kids who grew up mixing Latin rhythms with American rock, pop
and funk for the first time. For them, it was the soundtrack of 1970s Miami.
It was music that vaulted a wide-eyed Miami High senior named Peter Fernandez to local stardom as lead singer of a popular Cuban
funkadelic band called Coke. Music that moved a young wannabe drummer and future mayor of Miami to host high school dances that
showcased the local bands.
And music that sent a young producer named Manolo Mato scrambling to record the first wave of Cuban-American artists at his tiny M & M
Records in Hialeah, capturing the raw beauty of the emerging sound on his Sound Triangle label.
Now Mato has put a sampling of the songs on a new CD called “Hialeah Social Club,” a compilation that follows the progress of young Cuban
Americans learning for the first time to blend musical styles—and cultures.
“It’s the story of Miami, the story of Hialeah and the music of the exiles,” Mato proclaims. “A beautiful story.”
Much of the music had its origins at bailes, or open houses, that drew hundreds of immigrant kids—and their exile chaperones—to dances
that featured a slate of local bands. Band members were often high schoolers, or a little older, navigating two worlds at once.
“It was the simplest form of true biculturalism. You had kids for the first time tuning into radio here—who had no real sense of American music
until that time—and then combining that with their DNA, their roots, the stuff they grew up listening to in Cuba,” said Raul Murciano Jr., who
teaches “Introduction to Cuban Music” at the University of Miami.
Murciano was a founding member of The Latin Boys and then Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine. He remembers the rawness of
the early music, part Santana, part Sly & the Family Stone, mixed with a traditional Cuban bolero.
“It’s an unadulterated, first generation of bicultural mixing,” he said. “You can hear a mishmash of things within the same album, this huge
dichotomy of styles that seems very rough around the edges.”
And it’s that music that Mato captured in his warehouse studio in Hialeah between 1970 and 1986. A producer in Cuba, Mato fled to Miami in
1960, spiriting out a stack of master recordings from his Havana studio. For 16 years, he operated M & M Records, a musical meeting point
between traditional Cuban crooners and the kids who loved electric guitars and wah-wah pedals. Hialeah’s music industry flourished, with
record distribution companies, recording studios and factories clustered in the area.
At M & M, there were now-famous names mixing with the younger bands. Singer Willy Chirino and bassist Israel “Cachao” Lopez recorded
there. (Cachao worked for $15 a session, Mato said.) The “azucar” queen herself, Celia Cruz, recorded a jingle for Ronald Reagan’s
reelection, a song that never saw the light of day when the Hialeah event was called off.
Mato, 71, flips through a stack of the old albums—some of them sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay, he notes with a smile—vinyl slices of
Miami’s past. The covers scream `70s, with Peter Max-style lettering, white pants, tinted aviators and droopy mustaches. The names, too, are
vintage: Pearly Queen, Coke, Los Jovenes del Hierro, The Antiques.
The “Hialeah Social Club” CD is a compilation of that music—and something of a riposte to the popular, Ry Cooder-produced “Buena Vista”
CD, which featured little-known Cuban musicians on the island. In Mato’s version, the exiles finally go back to their homeland, only to
discover they now belong in two places.
“The story is about living in Miami and hoping that the return to Cuba will come. How they long to go back and then imagining the return,”
Mato said. “When they get there, oh the parties! But then, at the end, they long to go back again—to Miami. Miami para mi.”
He sings the last line, the refrain from a sweetly boosterish song on the CD by a group called Adams Apple. It is preceded by the ballad, “Y
Volvere” (And I Will Return), by Heaven, a group that had a strong local following. Chirino’s track, “Yo No Bailo Con Lola,” is one of the
oldest, recorded in the late `60s.
“That Day” (Spanish version), sung with throaty defiance by young singer-songwriter Marisela Verena, feels a bit like a Latina version of the
Nancy Sinatra hit, “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.”
“It was my first record. It was like a virgin type of thing,” Verena said. “I was always grateful to Mato. He saw the potential. He met me at a
party and I was singing with my guitar and he said, `Do you want to record it?’ I wanted it bad. I was hungry.”
Mato recorded them all, from traditional Cuban to rock `n’ roll—but he won’t be entitled to any money from sales of the new CD. He sold the
recording rights in 1998 to EMG of North Miami. He worked with the new company to pick the songs for the CD, which he sees as a chance to
bring new recognition to artists who have been largely ignored.
Back in his recording heyday, Mato’s best-known group was Coke, a garage band whose members were still attending Miami Senior High.
“Na Na,” the song on the CD, came out of a jam session at the school when the band had run out of things to play.
“We were the kings of the open houses,” said lead singer Peter Fernandez. “I remember driving by a toll booth once and hearing my song
coming out of it and thinking, wow, we were really something.”
Groups playing at the open houses, he said, would rent the fireman’s hall or the Dupont Plaza hotel ballroom. “We charged $3 or $4, and
chaperones were free. This was old school.”
Mato would sign bands like Coke knowing they already had a following from the dances. “They’d hear the band on Saturday night and then
see the album in the stores the next week,” he said.
Coke was eventually sidelined by its name; the Coca-Cola company sent a cease-and-desist letter. Fernandez now performs mostly on
cruise lines, lives in South Florida and sometimes performs in Miami. Once in a while, he hears the band’s hit, “Sabor a Mi,” on the radio.
“Those were wonderful times,” he said. “The open houses were a big part of Miami in those days. A lot of people got their starts there.”
Among them: Manny Diaz, long before he became Miami mayor, who was already dabbling in music promotion at the open houses.
“Not only did I go to them, I actually hosted them,” said Diaz. He helped coordinate the dances at his high school, Belen Jesuit Preparatory
School.
“Those were the early Miami Sound Machines, the beginnings of our local homegrown talent,” he said. “We’d book a top band like Coke and
then a lesser-known one. People would come from all over. I’d love to do a big reunion of those groups.”
Reunions, returning, going back in time—the theme is central to much of Cuban-influenced music. And so the last song on the CD, “Yo Soy
de Yara,” by Sergio Fiallo in 1973 or 1974, is about revisiting the island. “It’s not purely nostalgia,” Fiallo said. “It also has a commitment of
my wanting to go back there and planning to go back.”
Mato hopes the new CD will return something else to the Cuban-American musicians, singers and, particularly, the composers: respect.
“The music is very serious,” he said. “People think it is something frivolous, but it’s very important. With this CD I am trying to prove that, that
music is a powerful messenger ... For the musicians who suffered, who are forgotten, I want to set the record straight.”
[4 September 2007]
By Amy Driscoll
HIALEAH, Fla.—Before the Miami Sound Machine hit it big and the Buena Vista Social Club became an international sensation, the future of
Cuban music was being shaped in a place not generally known for its cultural contributions.
Hialeah.
The music recorded back then, in the late `60s and early `70s, is almost forgotten today, buried by time and the onslaught of disco, salsa
and reggaeton. But it’s still remembered by a generation of Cuban-American kids who grew up mixing Latin rhythms with American rock, pop
and funk for the first time. For them, it was the soundtrack of 1970s Miami.
It was music that vaulted a wide-eyed Miami High senior named Peter Fernandez to local stardom as lead singer of a popular Cuban
funkadelic band called Coke. Music that moved a young wannabe drummer and future mayor of Miami to host high school dances that
showcased the local bands.
And music that sent a young producer named Manolo Mato scrambling to record the first wave of Cuban-American artists at his tiny M & M
Records in Hialeah, capturing the raw beauty of the emerging sound on his Sound Triangle label.
Now Mato has put a sampling of the songs on a new CD called “Hialeah Social Club,” a compilation that follows the progress of young Cuban
Americans learning for the first time to blend musical styles—and cultures.
“It’s the story of Miami, the story of Hialeah and the music of the exiles,” Mato proclaims. “A beautiful story.”
Much of the music had its origins at bailes, or open houses, that drew hundreds of immigrant kids—and their exile chaperones—to dances
that featured a slate of local bands. Band members were often high schoolers, or a little older, navigating two worlds at once.
“It was the simplest form of true biculturalism. You had kids for the first time tuning into radio here—who had no real sense of American music
until that time—and then combining that with their DNA, their roots, the stuff they grew up listening to in Cuba,” said Raul Murciano Jr., who
teaches “Introduction to Cuban Music” at the University of Miami.
Murciano was a founding member of The Latin Boys and then Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine. He remembers the rawness of
the early music, part Santana, part Sly & the Family Stone, mixed with a traditional Cuban bolero.
“It’s an unadulterated, first generation of bicultural mixing,” he said. “You can hear a mishmash of things within the same album, this huge
dichotomy of styles that seems very rough around the edges.”
And it’s that music that Mato captured in his warehouse studio in Hialeah between 1970 and 1986. A producer in Cuba, Mato fled to Miami in
1960, spiriting out a stack of master recordings from his Havana studio. For 16 years, he operated M & M Records, a musical meeting point
between traditional Cuban crooners and the kids who loved electric guitars and wah-wah pedals. Hialeah’s music industry flourished, with
record distribution companies, recording studios and factories clustered in the area.
At M & M, there were now-famous names mixing with the younger bands. Singer Willy Chirino and bassist Israel “Cachao” Lopez recorded
there. (Cachao worked for $15 a session, Mato said.) The “azucar” queen herself, Celia Cruz, recorded a jingle for Ronald Reagan’s
reelection, a song that never saw the light of day when the Hialeah event was called off.
Mato, 71, flips through a stack of the old albums—some of them sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay, he notes with a smile—vinyl slices of
Miami’s past. The covers scream `70s, with Peter Max-style lettering, white pants, tinted aviators and droopy mustaches. The names, too, are
vintage: Pearly Queen, Coke, Los Jovenes del Hierro, The Antiques.
The “Hialeah Social Club” CD is a compilation of that music—and something of a riposte to the popular, Ry Cooder-produced “Buena Vista”
CD, which featured little-known Cuban musicians on the island. In Mato’s version, the exiles finally go back to their homeland, only to
discover they now belong in two places.
“The story is about living in Miami and hoping that the return to Cuba will come. How they long to go back and then imagining the return,”
Mato said. “When they get there, oh the parties! But then, at the end, they long to go back again—to Miami. Miami para mi.”
He sings the last line, the refrain from a sweetly boosterish song on the CD by a group called Adams Apple. It is preceded by the ballad, “Y
Volvere” (And I Will Return), by Heaven, a group that had a strong local following. Chirino’s track, “Yo No Bailo Con Lola,” is one of the
oldest, recorded in the late `60s.
“That Day” (Spanish version), sung with throaty defiance by young singer-songwriter Marisela Verena, feels a bit like a Latina version of the
Nancy Sinatra hit, “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.”
“It was my first record. It was like a virgin type of thing,” Verena said. “I was always grateful to Mato. He saw the potential. He met me at a
party and I was singing with my guitar and he said, `Do you want to record it?’ I wanted it bad. I was hungry.”
Mato recorded them all, from traditional Cuban to rock `n’ roll—but he won’t be entitled to any money from sales of the new CD. He sold the
recording rights in 1998 to EMG of North Miami. He worked with the new company to pick the songs for the CD, which he sees as a chance to
bring new recognition to artists who have been largely ignored.
Back in his recording heyday, Mato’s best-known group was Coke, a garage band whose members were still attending Miami Senior High.
“Na Na,” the song on the CD, came out of a jam session at the school when the band had run out of things to play.
“We were the kings of the open houses,” said lead singer Peter Fernandez. “I remember driving by a toll booth once and hearing my song
coming out of it and thinking, wow, we were really something.”
Groups playing at the open houses, he said, would rent the fireman’s hall or the Dupont Plaza hotel ballroom. “We charged $3 or $4, and
chaperones were free. This was old school.”
Mato would sign bands like Coke knowing they already had a following from the dances. “They’d hear the band on Saturday night and then
see the album in the stores the next week,” he said.
Coke was eventually sidelined by its name; the Coca-Cola company sent a cease-and-desist letter. Fernandez now performs mostly on
cruise lines, lives in South Florida and sometimes performs in Miami. Once in a while, he hears the band’s hit, “Sabor a Mi,” on the radio.
“Those were wonderful times,” he said. “The open houses were a big part of Miami in those days. A lot of people got their starts there.”
Among them: Manny Diaz, long before he became Miami mayor, who was already dabbling in music promotion at the open houses.
“Not only did I go to them, I actually hosted them,” said Diaz. He helped coordinate the dances at his high school, Belen Jesuit Preparatory
School.
“Those were the early Miami Sound Machines, the beginnings of our local homegrown talent,” he said. “We’d book a top band like Coke and
then a lesser-known one. People would come from all over. I’d love to do a big reunion of those groups.”
Reunions, returning, going back in time—the theme is central to much of Cuban-influenced music. And so the last song on the CD, “Yo Soy
de Yara,” by Sergio Fiallo in 1973 or 1974, is about revisiting the island. “It’s not purely nostalgia,” Fiallo said. “It also has a commitment of
my wanting to go back there and planning to go back.”
Mato hopes the new CD will return something else to the Cuban-American musicians, singers and, particularly, the composers: respect.
“The music is very serious,” he said. “People think it is something frivolous, but it’s very important. With this CD I am trying to prove that, that
music is a powerful messenger ... For the musicians who suffered, who are forgotten, I want to set the record straight.”
| Manuel Mato hugs a vintage RCA 44 microphone inside the studio he used to own, July 25, 2007, in Hialeah, Florida. Mato was a record producer in Cuba who fled in 1960 carrying master recordings from his studio. (Al Diaz/Miami Herald/MCT) |
SOUND TRIANGLE DISCOGRAPHY
LPs:
ST-7772 Conjunto Cosmopolita: Tremendo Fieston
ST-7773 Coke: Coke
ST-7774 [Orquesta] La Suprema: La Suprema
ST-7775 Los Jovenes Del Hierro Por Tierra Y Por Mar
ST-7776
ST-7777 La Suprema: Voy Pa' Borinquen
ST-7778 Ray [Fernandez] and His Court: Ray and His Court
ST-7779 Opus: Opus
ST-7780 Wild Wind: Wild Wind
ST-7781 Signs of the Zodiac: Signs of the Zodiac
ST-7784 Orquesta Suprema: The Salsa Family
ST-7785 Pearly Queen: Treasure Hunt
ST-7788 Los Jovenes Del Hierro El Bilingue
ST-7789 Luis Santi Y Su Conjunto: Abran Paso
ST-7791 Orquesta Sensacion : Tomado Del Sensacional
ST-7793 Clockwork: Clockwork
ST-7794 Various Artists: De La Salsa Lo Mejor
ST-7795 Ray Fernandez Y Su Corte : Salsa Y Estilo
ST-7797 Mantrap: Mantrap
ST-7798 Continental Brass: A La Orden
ST-7799 Various Artists: Miami's Greatest Rock Bands
ST-8000 Luis Santi Y Su Conjunto: El Bigote
ST-8005 Luis Santi Con El Cuchilla El La Boca
ST-???? Mantrap: Mantrap II
45s:
ST-7774 Coke "Bun Bun Bun / Got to Touch Your Face"
smrs -45078 Mantrap Disco Fantasy
ST-7775 Orquesta Suprema "Vive Tu Vida / "Los Tiemps Del Pasodoble"
ST-7780 Ray & His Court "Cookie Crumbs / Soul Freedom"
ST-7790 Pearly Queen "Quit Jive' In / Jungle Walk"
ST-7795 Pedro Espina Y Su Guaguanco "Coexistencia No / Liborio Esta Cansado"
ST-7796 Luis Santi Y Su Conjunto "Cambia El Paso / La Chancleta"
ST-7799 Orquesta Suprema "Voy Pa' Borinquen / Esta Navidad"
ST-45055 Orquesta Sensacion "El Negro Sexy / No Soy Tu Esclava"
ST-45067 Peter Fernandez "Cuando Vuelva A Tu Lado / Beware..."
| THE SINGER OF THE SONG MIENTEME WHICH IS THE PEARLY QUEEN SINGLE WAS SUNG BY JORGE SANTANA. IT IS THE ONLY SONG IN THE ALBUM THAT IS NOT SANG BY THE PEARLY QUEEN SINGER. |
| Manuel shows me his extensive record collection , most which he has produced |