¡Ecua Jei! Ismael Rivera
El Sonero Mayor (A Personal Recollection)
Written and Copyright Protected by Aurora Flores.
He walked the path of pain and suffering singing joyful, soulful, rhythmic
songs that touched hearts and inspired minds. A five-foot-ten, caramelo-colored,
Puerto Rican prophet of Boricua soul, fondly called "Maelo" by his friends and
El Sonero Mayor (the "Master Singer") by his contemporaries, Ismael Rivera was a
natural.
Maelo began to sing once he reached "the age of
reason," and reason made his voice fly, dodging in and around the clave with a
facility that could only have been a gift from God. But reality also told him he
was born in one of the poorest sectors of San Juan, one of five surviving
siblings (seven others did not make it). Very early on, his father told him
stories steeped in roots of slavery; he sang out of love for an island that
remained enslaved in her own right. Maelo wrapped this love around him for
protection during a difficult time, when he had to fight for respect and work
for survival from youth into manhood. From deep in the belly of poverty sprang a
joy and celebration of life that was infectious, a priceless potion of release
and cleansing of the soul from the daily pain of existence.
One day, six-year-old Maelo announced to his mother,
Margarita (Doña Margó), that he would learn a skill to support his family. He
ran off to play rhythms- banging on paint cans while shaking baby bottles filled
with beans. He made good on his promise. He shined shoes after school and ran
errands before becoming a skilled bricklayer and master carpenter.
Rivera explored finger-poppin' claves through the snap
of his fingers while his hands labored over bricks and mortar; Maelo's noontime
coros resounded through the cangrejero 'hood of Santurce, where he and boyhood
buddy Rafael Cortijo would hustle gigs for the tribal areitos that released the
soul at sunset. He met his partner, Rafa (Cortijo), when he was eleven years old
in elementary school. The family frowned on the friendship, quipped Doña Margó,
because "Rafa was so black he looked blue and always walked around with those
damned drums draped around him." But fate had been sealed. Rafael Cortijo and
Ismael Rivera were about to make music and history together.
Cortijo encouraged the young crooner, instilling
confidence in him as a performer even while he labored on the construction
sites. He would recommend Maelo to bands that needed singers and brought him
along to play bongos with the conjunto of Moncho Muley and many others when the
pair began playing professionally on the San Juan scene. And it was Cortijo who
brought the young Maelo to the attention of Lito Peña, at a time when the
Maestro was looking for a vocalist who could sing the native plena music of the
Island's poor for his big band, La Panamericana.
"Yo soy Maelo de la Calle Calma"
"El Charlatan," Maelo's first hit with La Panamericana,
rocked the Island. "Anoche en el baile, charlatán, le diste a mi Lola" was heard
from every radio, home, social club, and dance hall throughout Puerto Rico.
Defending the honor of his girl from an abusive charlatan was a theme that
everyone could relate to and one that catapulted the young singer into
Island-wide stardom by the mid '50s. With the money he earned from this initial
hit Maelo bought his mother a house on Calle Calma, building the facade with his
own hands.
Paving the way for Cortijo's success, composer Rafael
Hernández returned to Puerto Rico in 1947 a conquering hero at a time when
Puerto Rico was hungry for heroes of Afro-Boricua descent. By the '50s and '60s
Roberto Clemente and Peruchín Cepeda made the big leagues, representing Puerto
Ricans, particularly black Puerto Ricans, with honor. While the civil rights
movement was still a few years away from being formally signed by then President
Johnson in 1964, Puerto Rico was already brimming with black power. The feeling
among the Island's blacks was one of elation, as if a liberating explosion had
hit the island.
By the late '50s, Cortijo y Su Combo con Ismael Rivera
became the first all-black band to be featured regularly on television and radio
on El Show de Medio Día and La Taberna India. Their front line and brass section
danced and jibed to the native Island rhythms infused with brassy, jazzy lines,
and commercial instrumentation.
Cortijo incorporated Afro-Cuban montuno lines and vamps
on the piano with jazz licks on the brass over the indigenous bomba rhythms of
the Island, played on Cuban tumbadoras rather than the Island's native barriles
(drum barrels). Maelo's rapid-fire soneos (improvised vocal phrases) staccatoed
over melodies, building layers of rhythms while playing catch with the clave.
Improvising street phrases and singing in unison with the percussion, tres or
cuatro solo, Maelo danced, jumped, and played the clave while holding the
audience in the palm of his hand. "Someone opened the cage and let all the
blacks loose," Doña Margo once said. Indeed, Cortijo and Maelo's performances
had a liberating fury that crescendoed into an exhaustive ecstasy. Their music
was an electrifying release.
Singer/composer Bobby Capó wrote hits for them, as did
Pedro Flores, Don Rafael Cepeda, and Doña Margó. Don Cepeda, the guardian of
Boricua bomba and plena rhythms, had been singing tunes to the duo for years,
polishing their native-born
knowledge of the genres.
Witinila, uye, uye: breaking cultural
chains
During an interview in the summer of 1976, Cortijo once
said he took the rhythm of Boricua blood, dressed her up in her Sunday best and
paraded her around the world for everyone to see. He loved her, and you could
feel it. When he was about to record his first album, Cortijo made a point of
recording his beloved bombas and plenas first, at a time in Puerto Rico when the
Afro-Cuban conjunto sound was the big seller. Bomba
and plena were seen as an exclusive, insular rhythmic mystery steeped in an
unmentionable black religious ritual of music and dance, protected by
folklorists and academics who analyzed the music to the exclusion of the pueblo.
The older folklorists were never satisfied with the genre's loss of authenticity
decade after decade; they were always critical of the dance and musical styles
of the generation after them. Yet music, like people, evolves and changes with
time, and Cortijo's vision went beyond banal criticism to encompass global
acceptance of a form of music inherited through his enslaved ancestors. The
music was capable of retaining its power of resistance while entertaining
audiences at the highest levels of professional musical acumen.
Cortijo's
replacement of barilles for congas had less to do with authenticity than with
recorded coherence.
Clearly the tauter skin over the narrower circumference
of the conga drum carried the rhythmic patterns farther than the wider skin
needed to fit the head of the larger barril. The pandero rhythms were swapped by
the congas as well with the requinto-talking pandero played out on the quinto
drum. As far as Cortijo was concerned, it is the skill and precision of the
indio and not the choice of arrow that hits the target. The bomba was now needed
for a newer insurrection, a cultural one inclusive of both black pride and
Boricua identity unifying the lighter-skinned jíbaro with his black coastal
cousin.
They hit the bulls-eye. Not only was Cortijo y su Combo
a hit from its first recording on, their daily appearances on television, radio,
festivals, dances, and concerts were testament to a popularity unprecedented at
that time. Cortijo's band played bomba, plena, mambo, guracha, cha-cha, oriza,
calypso, mozambique, merengue, samba, and bolero within a context of Puerto
Rican pride and rhythmic creativity not duplicated since. Their themes went
beyond conformist lyrics of living large and embraced local island perspective
with urban stories and current events that were global in scope. "El Satelite"
focused attention on the US/Russian space race when the Russians launched a
sputnik into the universe. "El Negro Bembon" tells the tale of a black man
killed simply because his lips were large; the song's repetitive refrain
insists, "eso no es razón" (that's no excuse). Cortijo's wake, as described in
Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá's book, El entierro de Cortijo, reflected the unifying
power and crossing of cultures, classes, races, and places that his sancocho of
music had on the pueblo. Cortijo had created a recipe with a taste, un bocaito
for everyone, and isn't that how we, as island people eat, with everything on
the plate instead of separated into neat,
American TV dinnerstyle
compartments?
One of Don Cepeda's sons, Roberto Cepeda, recalls how
proud his father was of these initial recordings. "They brought the music of the
poor out of isolation. It went from marginalized ghettos onto radio, television,
records and movies," Roberto comments. The old man would sing bombas to them,
Cortijo would then transform the various rhythms of bomba-yuba, cuembe,
cocobale, holandes and lero-into the more fast-paced bomba sica, making it
commercially appealing to a dance crowd used to a Cuban conjunto sound. Don
Cepeda and Maelo would sing the coro together while Cortijo quickened the
foundation's rhythmic pace. Maelo would start on the verses, improvising and
scatting parts of the African Congolese phrases into the improvised "mambos"
(instrumental interludes) of the tunes. During these meetings, Don Cepeda's many
children would gather around Maelo, who always had his pockets filled with candy
and trinkets for them.
De Colores
Maelo loved children. He believed that all children
should feel love and joy, no matter where they came from. He recalled a party in
his honor at the start of his career at a five-star hotel in Puerto Rico. Maelo
rented a van and gathered all the kids from the block. When the promoter of the
party saw those scruffy children in the lobby he began to chase them out. Maelo
stepped in and said, "These are my guests, and this is my party. I want them
treated just like any other visitor at this hotel." They all sat at Maelo's
table.
Maelo was the same with beggars. It didn't matter what
they wanted the money for. I watched him take desperate people to eat a meal,
peel off dollar bills to strung-out junkies with outstretched hands, and buy
groceries for the sick and elderly. I once asked him why he would throw his
money away on someone who was just going to get high with it. "If you're going
to give-don't look at where it's going-just give it away and don't look back.
That's what it's about." That's what Maelo was about.
I was a music correspondent for Billboard Magazine when
I met Maelo. He was my neighbor, but more important, he was my friend. He came
into my life at a time of loss and heartache. Maelo's fatherly warmth toward me
had a healing affect. I was a young writer searching for cultural answers while
digging for roots, and Maelo became my mentor and maestro. He lived up to the
challenge, digging out old recordings while introducing me to key musicians like
Don Rafa himself. He invited me to sing coro in his and Cortijo's band. We'd
discuss music, myth, history, and Puerto Rico, explaining rituals, defining
terms and ceremonies. He and Cortijo would work a lot on the surrounding
islands, alternating with calypso groups. He sang in English back then, and he
laughed when he told me that they didn't like his accent in English.
Maelo would school me on the bands that toured Puerto
Rico, all of them wanting to
perform wherever Cortijo was playing. The bands
included La Sonora Matancera who, being on the same label, performed with
Maelo's group around 1958. We were going through old photographs of his when he
pulled out an 8x10 black-and-white photograph of a very young Celia Cruz with
Maelo's arm around her. They both looked wery young and were dressed elegantly,
cozying up to one another. Wide-eyed, I asked, "Maelo, did you date her?" With a
sly look on his face he answered, "We dated for a little while, but she told me
she was a serious girl and wanted marriage, and you know, Aurorita, that I'm
just a títere."
Doña Margó was visiting Maelo the summer of 1978 when I
met her in the apartment he kept on 108th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. She was
such a pretty lady with strong opinions that embraced the passion and love she
had in her heart for her son, her music, and her flag. A writer and poet
herself, she gave me a poem she recited extemporaneously. It immediately brought tears to my eyes, and my
mind made a mental record that remained with me throughout the years: "Me duele
el corazon destila sangre, y un grito se me ahoga en la garganta, de no poder
gritar a cuatro vientos, que quiero libertad para me patria" [My aching heart is
dripping blood, a scream drowns in my throat, when I cannot shout to the four
winds, that I want freedom for my country].
I met, talked and hung out with friends, children, and
many of the ladies that Maelo
wooed and loved. He was a ladies' man for
sure, often comparing women to candy-
all good with different flavors-but I
met him in a introspective time in his life when
he was able to have
platonic friendships. Sometimes I felt as if he were confessing
things to me
he could not tell another man or a woman he was intimate with for fear
that
he would be judged by them. But it was tough being his chronicler. He would
bring me to the apartments of various women he knew, and at first, I could feel
the cold,
penetrating looks of suspicion piercing right through me. Not
being a street kid, many times I was terrified by the unspoken hostility, but
Maelo would always give them a look that said, "Don't even think it,"
introducing me as his student and friend. We'd all end up having dinner
together.
El Sonero Mayor, porque vacilo con la clave y tengo
sabor
Backtrack to 1955. Maelo and Cortijo were the talk of
Latin music. They tore up the Palladium, ripped up the carnavales and fired up
Colombia and Venezuela. While rehearsing at Roseland for a gig at New York's
Palladium, Beny Moré heard Cortijo y Su Combo. They were to share the stage that
night and Beny was about to rehearse with a band that was not his own. Once he
heard Cortijo, he asked the Palladium's promoter to pay the boys because he
wanted to be backed up by the Puerto Rican combo. By 1958, Beny toured Puerto
Rico with Cortijo noting Maelo's singing, he passed the torch of vocal greatness
to the young Boricua proclaiming him "El Sonero Mayor"- The Master Singer-a
moniker later used as a marketing tool when Maelo went solo.
Meanwhile, Cortijo y Su Combo had broken through the
Condado color line, the black barrier in Puerto Rico that allowed only
lighter-skinned musicians to play. Cortijo increased the pay scale for black
musicians, in particular drummers, paying them equal to what "schooled"
musicians were paid. He also secured the all-black band lodging in the same
five-star hotels they played, something unheard of at that time. Singer/composer
Bobby Capó,who was light-skinned, would arrange and secure the hotel rooms for
Cortijo and his band members. Once the rooms were confirmed, there was nothing
management could do to ban the "brothers" from resting after their gig. Indeed,
Capó played a pivotal role in the success of Cortijo y su Combo. It was Capó who
had an influential position on radio and television, and it was also Capó who
took their demo to the Seeco recording label that gave the group their break. A
handsome crooner and composer, he had already felt the sting of racial exclusion
when Xavier Cugat told him he was just one shade too dark to sing with his
orchestra. He also had first-hand knowledge of America's Southern hospitality,
having toured with Katherine
Dunham. So it was with great pride that Capó
chaperoned Cortijo onto stages where all-black orchestras had never set foot
before.
Las Tumbas
After nine years of hit after musical hit, Maelo took
one of his worst hits at the San Juan airport in 1962. As Sammy Ayala, one of
Cortijo's coro singers and friend of Maelo put it, "it was a coup d'etat."
Someone informed officials at the airport that the band was carrying drugs.
Maelo, Cortijo, and some of the other band members were indeed carrying, but
Maelo stepped forward and took the rap for everyone, asserting that all the
drugs were his. He was arrested, handcuffed, and paraded for all the media and
the public to see. Owing to the large quantity of drugs found, he was charged
with trafficking, trying to smuggle drugs into the Island.
Maelo served some time in San Juan's notorious Oso
Blanco jail. After that, things were never the same. Since it was a federal
offense he was taken to and tried in the States. His lawyer was an American whom
he didn't even understand. Maelo was sentenced and sent to a penitentiary in
Lexington, Kentucky. While in prison, Maelo formed a band with other prisoners
who were into music. He composed, sang, and played, reflecting on his life on
the Island while observing the life of a black man in the South at the start of
the civil rights movement in America. Most of all, he missed his friend,
Cortijo. Back on the Island, the Cortijo Combo floundered. Puerto Rico was
outraged at the nerve of these negros, condemning their bon vivant lifestyle at
the height of their success. According to Cortijo and Maelo, pianist Rafael
Ithier bolted first, organizing El Gran Combo. Later, former members of the band
went their separate ways, starting their own combos. Maelo served about four
years in prison. He returned to the Island in 1966 to record a comeback album
with Cortijo, Bienvenidos, utilizing the Tito Puente orchestra as backup with
the King of Latin music himself on coro. But neither Maelo nor the recording
were welcome; sales were flat. Promoters did not want to hire them. Puerto Rico
would not forgive him.
El Negrito de Alabama
Maelo spoke to me about his annual pilgrimage to Panama
where he touched and felt the pain of the Black Christ of Portobelo-El Nazareno.
El Nazareno moved him, inspired him, helped him stay
away from heroin for sixteen years. He recalled the first time that he danced
with the devil: in the arrabales. In the ghetto. It was a common rite of
passage. A dare. A badge that made you into a man. In New York it got worse. At
the Palladium it was a test of musical prowess. "A macho trap," he agonized.
"How 'bad' could you be under the influence and still perform. That was the
measure of manhood, of musicianship." He knew it was a lie. He felt it deep in
his soul, and his heart ached with despair. Tears ran down his cheeks as he
recalled the torture of self-inflicted drug abuse.
The Puerto Rico rejection wounded him deeply. Maelo
returned to New York, broken-hearted and self-destructive. He recorded Lo último
en la avenida with master percussionist Kako. By 1968 he formed, Ismael Rivera y
Los Cachimbos.
The trail of hits began once more. But this time, Maelo
hit with a vengeance.
Rivera had found El Nazareno. His career and voice
reached its peak. He performed at a Tico-Alegre All-Star concert in Carnegie
Hall headlining along with La Lupe, Yayo El Indio, Vitín Avilés, and the Alegre
All-Stars. He sang "Mi negrita me espera," a tune in tribute to his mother that
expressed her anxiety when he started playing all-night gigs. He recorded Rafael
Hernández' classic "Cumbanchero," where he underscores his musical mastery with
the words "A mi me llaman el Sonero Mayor, porque vacilo con la clave y tengo
sabor" [They call me the Master Singer because I party with the clave and I have
swing] in a rat-tat-tat, percussive, word-playing soneo, drenching audiences
with sound like hard rain falling on a hot tin roof. The Hernandez standard
became forever his. His band was tight with a sound that now expressed a Puerto
Rican/New York reality. This was a more laid-back music, with recordings such as
"Traigo de todo," "Soy feliz," and "Dime por qué." There were also tunes about
prison, "Las Tumbas" sprinkled with Spanglish street phrases that punched
through the solid wall of instrumentation like a heavyweight at a prize fight,
venía por la maceta.
Maelo was clean. He was strong. He was El Sonero Mayor.
In New York, he wrapped himself around the anonymity of
the poor, the lumpen, the forgotten. He formed a family nucleus with Gladys
Serrano, his companion of 25 years whom he called Gladiola. They had a child,
Carlito, but Maelo also raised her eldest son Rodney, whose birth father was
another great Puerto Rican vocalist, Daniel Santos. His eldest son, Ismaelito,
Jr., from his first wife Virginia (they were never divorced) would come to stay
with them in New York during summer vacations. In fact, many were the children
who called him "Papa Maelo." His apartment, was always filled with children. I
once watched him counsel a troubled teen who was self-destructing. Maelo was
emphatic about the boy returning home, finishing school, and getting a job. For
dramatic affect he pulled out an old shoeshine box from the closet and showed
him how he used to shine shoes when he was his age, emphasizing humility as
nothing to be ashamed of. He had decorated the foyer of his apartment with wood
paneling and maple banquitos where he and the boy were sitting and talking.
Maelo was proud of his carpentry skills, and talked of them to the young man,
telling him how he made his own clave sticks out of wood he found in the
streets.
I traveled with Maelo and Gladiola to Panama in 1978
for the yearly pilgrimage to Portobelo on October 21st, where he carried El
Nazareno. At the airport, we were met by Panamanian officials who treated Maelo
as an arriving dignitary: he was an ambassador gracing their country with his
presence. We were escorted to the hotel in the capital city of Colón and treated
to sumptuous dinner parties at the homes of top officials. Maelo was truly loved
there.
Despite the fanfare, Maelo was itching to get on with
the spiritual tradition. He went into detail as to how the ritual would take
place as he showed off the beautiful lilac with gold trim robe he wore for the
event. "We walk 17 kilometers to get to Porto Belo. There are no cement roads
and everyone travels into the small coastal town by foot. I wear the robe while
walking and think about how el negrito will help me. I think of his words of
love for everyone and about forgiveness for all the evil in the world. The
people gather at the Church of San Felipe. They pray, they make promises, they
cry, and they sleep there. I join the men carrying the platform that supports
the [life-size image of] El Nazareno."
I watched with Gladiola as the men carried the huge
statue around the town, three steps forward and two steps back to the beat of
the drums that prefaced the procession. The figure stood above the ocean of
people that formed the procession, seeming to walk above the heads of the crowd.
We stood transfixed in the rain, holding candles that did not go out. A
crucifixion was reenacted. Tears streamed down devout faces as the pain of
Christ washed over us like a wave. After it was over, we found Maelo near the
steps of the Church where barbers were shaving and cutting the men's hair. He
showed us the bruises on his shoulder from the platform, and I asked him why he
was cutting his hair and beard. "I grow it all year as part of my promise to El
Nazareno, and then I leave him my strength so that he can continue to help me."
Maelo carried the wooden cross bearing the black face
of Christ everywhere he went. When he was recording "Las caras lindas" for Fania
Records in 1978 I saw him make the sign of the cross, take El Nazareno from
around his neck, put it on the music stand, put the "cans" (headphones) on his
head, pick up his clave y pa'encima. Ruben Blades, Héctor LaVoe, and Yayo El
Indio (casi na') did back-up vocals watching in awe of the albañil who traded
bricks for words in the construction of songs meant to soothe the souls of the
forgotten. Maelo quoted from scriptures and prophets and I thought, if Christ
walked the earth today, Maelo would be one of his disciples. It is not what goes
into a man that defines his character, but what comes out. What came out of
Maelo was real.
Maelo's recordings were punctuated with references to
saints and sinners- San Miguel Arcángel and El Nazareno- and underscored with
calls to the deities of African spirits, ¡Ecua Jei!, for empowerment. He did not
enjoy pretense or suffer fools gladly; he was strong yet sincere about his
weaknesses and compassionate about humanity. He was never sarcastic or arrogant
with his public, demanding and getting respect in return. Although he had many
women, they all knew about each other and not one would even think of making a
public scene. At gigs, he was usually accompanied by an entourage of friends
from the 'hood who, he quickly informed club owners, managers and promoters,
would have to be treated with the same regard afforded other patrons, or else
he'd leave. And though his circle of compadres were mostly people who shared the
same pain of poverty he had known so well, he was able to hobnob with powerful,
celebrated, and influential people as well as an inexperienced little kid like
me. In an interview with a television reporter, he was asked whether he was
anxious about winning a Grammy now that Palmieri had won one, to which he
replied, "Grammy, Hammy, what's important is the music." He was genuine,
expressing the joy and pain of life on a very real level.
Piedras en mi camino
Maelo's voice had dropped several keys by the time he
recorded De todas maneras
rosas in 1976. The phrasing was still driving, the
flirtation with the clave was impeccable, but the range was fading. Margarita's
boy didn't know it then, but polyps were beginning to take hold of his vocal
chords. His 1978 tribute concert at Madison Square Garden was a musical
disappointment. He began to indulge in vices with a drive that on some deeper
level numbed the reality of his failing voice.
At the end of 1982, Cortijo died of cancer. The
visionary who brought black musicians into the limelight of stardom had passed.
Cortijo, the maestro who marked a new trail of fusion in Puerto Rican music; the
maestro who incorporated the native bombas and plenas of Puerto Rico into the
Afro-Cuban mix; the same maestro who later, with the early '70s recording of
Time Machine, was to fuse elements of rock, jazz, and nueva trova in a mixture
celebrated from Cuba to Spain (that remains unrecognized today)-Cortijo would no
longer be seen at the race tracks or clubs of New York and Puerto Rico. He would
no longer be seen at his timbales with his bottom bemba pouting in concern.
Cortijo was gone.
The Island was shocked. Maelo was devastated. He went
to Puerto Rico to mourn his brother and say goodbye. Tears flowed as he spoke to
his compadre in what seemed to be a secret language of Spanish, English, and
African. He carried his buddy's coffin as he carried El Nazareno but this time,
in pain and penance through the streets of San Juan to the cemetery. Once there,
he knelt, made the sign of the cross and prayed before the masses at the San
José cemetery in Villas Palmeras. He returned to New York destroyed, his spirit
broken. He abandoned the words of El Nazareno and began to dance with Satan once
more. His voice was never the same.
El Incomprendido
Two tumultuous New York years passed, with Maelo
literally lost in the streets of El Barrio. He went barefoot; he was crazed and
confused. The once mighty warrior of Puerto Rican soul was seen picking from
garbage, looking for quarters in phone booths, and searching for solace in a
lonely basement. I ran into his timbalero, Rigo during this time. I was a mother
by now, but I still was looking for my mentor. Rigo took me to the basement
where Maelo was staying, but as I waited outside I had a sinking feeling that I
would not get to see him again. A few slow minutes went by before Rigo came out
to tell me that Maelo did not want me to see him the way he was. Hot tears ran
down my cheeks, and I went home.
After several dark incidences, Maelo ran into a
preacher friend who took him to his farm in Connecticut, where Maelo found the
words of El Nazareno once more. His tocayo and friend, vocalist Ismael Miranda,
sent for him to clean up at his ranch and return to the home of his mother,
Margarita.
Juntos, Otra Vez
Maelo found comfort in the bosom of the mother who was
his muse. He began throat
treatments in 1985 in a heartbreaking and hopeless
quest to find his voice. But in his
heart of hearts, he knew it was futile.
He would often say, "Cortijo had the key and when he died, he took it with him."
Doña Margó would say her son sang for her, for the
artist that she could never be
because she was black and a woman. And indeed
it was some of her tunes that shook
the hit parade in Puerto Rico and New
York in the early years: "Ingratitudes," "Máquino landera," and "Bombón de
canela" among others. But Maelo sang for everyone, especially the poor of his
barrio. When he belts out "Yo soy Maelo de la Calle Calma cantando pa' ti linda
musica," he brings the song back to the block he grew up in. He and Cortijo took
the music of the slaves of Puerto Rico, slaves who jumped ships from Haiti,
Cuba, and other islands and who played the bomba music with its roots in the
Congo and made it a commercial hit in the New World. He was working on a final
recording (that would be finished by his eldest, Ismaelo Jr.) "Carabalí y
Congolia," in May 1987 when a heart attack struck, jolting him into his
mother's arms ("Mi negrita me espera") on the patio he built for her with
the money from his first hit.
In New York, I left my five-year-old son with my mother
so I could attend the funeral. I had to see Papa Maelo once more. When I reached
the community center at the housing project of the Llorens Torres complex, the
area was packed with fans and mourners.
Drummers Giovanni Hidalgo, Cachete Maldonado, Roberto
Roena, and many others played tribute to El Sonero. Inside, the Center was
brimming with people, family, women and children. He always told me not to be
afraid when I walked with him and so I walked alone and made my way through the
humid heat and crowd.
I approached the coffin, kneeled and talked to my
teacher and mentor who taught me so much about life. I remembered walking in
Panama through El Chorillo with him. I asked him why the women's arms had
eruptions as if the skin were bursting through. "Ay bendito Aurorita," he
answered. "Those women are prostitutes, and if they don't make enough money,
their pimps cut up their arms. They never go to hospitals." He explained that
many of those women had no formal education, and this was the only way they knew
to support their children and families. He told me I should never judge the
plight of another human being. At that point, a dusty old man with no teeth
yelled out, "¡Salsa!". Maelo and I stopped. The skinny old Black man hugged and
kissed him. Maelo introduced me as his niece. The old man began to snap his
fingers in clave and to sing a coro. Maelo harmonized with the coro lifting his
voice in full song, finishing the tune with improvised phrases. He told the old
man he would use it in his next recording.
I remembered jogging around Central Park's reservoir
with him. I was young and lazy and he would push me to finish around the track
shaming me into running by saying, "You're only 26, I'm 49-if I can do it so can
you." Then he'd break into song. After the run, we'd go to his Panamanian
girlfriend's apartment on West End Avenue. La Janet would make us fresh juices
from carrots, oranges, and watercress. I remember the smell of the hot farina he
loved to eat and the many discussions he held in his apartment and in the vest
pocket park on 105th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. Somehow, the rumberos would
always know when he was there, and they'd come out to jam with him. Maelo never
refused. But when the rumba was over, he'd play a bomba, a plena, and tell them
they had to know their roots first. They had to preserve the music that held the
life source of the people of the earth. They had to conserve it, maintain it,
and never forget it.
I cried as I knelt and prayed over him. He had made
millions throughout his career, and he gave it all away just as he gave
everything to his public and to his music. As the casket was closed, I spotted
Sammy Ayala. I asked him to let me carry the coffin with the other men. Being a
Nuyorican, I was aware that this was a traditional guy thing and that he might
get offended, but I didn't care. I was there for Maelo, but I really didn't know
which side of the place I belonged since there were the women from Puerto Rico
on one side and the women from outside of Puerto Rico on the other side. He
moved over and gave me a little space and said, "Seguro Aurorita si tu eres
familia." We carried him outside to where the crowd and the hearse waited.
We never made it to the hearse. The throngs of people
and pleneros took him on their shoulders, parading him the same way he carried
El Nazareno. Even the governor of Puerto Rico showed up in a guayabera and took
his turn carrying Maelo to the cemetery. Thousands gathered and I could barely
see the final rites when I spotted Kako coming through the crowd of colors,
ages, races, nations, and professions that packed the burial grounds. It was all
a blur to me. I just wanted to say my last farewell to a man who treated me with
more respect and equality than any corporate president, lawyer, or "educated"
fool. I felt the look of pain on Kako's face and opened my arms to him. He
cried, "Aye, Aurorita," sobbing something inaudible in that cuembe Spanish they
spoke, before weeping inconsolably in my arms. Rigo also stood next to me, along
with Roberto Roena, and we all watched and wept as he was laid to rest beside
his longtime friend and brother, Rafa Cortijo.
¡Que descansen en paz, ecua-jei!
