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Posted on Sat, Sep. 22, 2007

Party for Cachao, master of `danzón'

Israel ''Cachao'' López, Cuba's most revered living musician, began thumping his bass professionally at age 9.

Saturday night, Cachao, 89, celebrates the 80th anniversary of his career with a concert at the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts, accompanied by a roster of guest artists, from Willy Chirino to ex-Santana percussionist Orestes Vilató.

Cachao is a seasoned trouper. For 80 years, he has been plucking his bass at venues as varied as opera and ballet halls, movie palaces, seedy bars, recording studios, and, a couple of nights ago, a free concert in Medellín for 10,000 fans of all ages.

Tuesday morning, the master bassist and composer looked surprisingly spry for having arrived the night before from two concerts in Colombia. Only a week before, he'd been playing in Spain. He was mourning a friend, trombonist Generoso Jiménez, who died the previous Saturday, but the stress wasn't apparent as he recalled his life in music.

''When I was 8, I joined a septet where the oldest was vocalist Roberto Faz,'' Cachao says. Faz would achieve his share of fame in Cuban music. A year later, Cachao joined the young Ignacio Villa, who would become the great cabaret artist Bola de Nieve, providing the music at a Havana movie palace before talkies.

''Our drummer was a nervous man who kept a bottle of rum by his side to calm him down. When a Western called for him to bang out the shots on the drum he'd hit it 90 times instead of the six bullets in a revolver,'' Cachao recalls, laughing.

In 1935, he joined the band of a ''dance academy'' where men paid five cents to dance with the ''teachers.'' He moved from band to band, in an era when Cuban popular music was flourishing.

In 1937, he was a founding member of the great ensemble Arcaño y sus Maravillas. Their forte was the danzón, a genre that had evolved from the French contredanse, introduced in Cuba by French colonists fleeing the Haitian slave revolt of 1804. The danzón wasn't syncopated, Cachao says, and it was slow. But Cachao and his brother Ignacio would change all that.

''We syncopated it just to do something new,'' he says. That something new was the mambo, which Cachao admits ``would not be known internationally if it weren't for [Dámaso] Pérez Prado [Patricia, Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White].''

Though much is made of the López brothers' inventing the mambo, Latin music aficionados are in greater awe of Cachao'sdescargas, the famed ''Cuban jam sessions.'' In the mid '50s, following the improvisational style of American jazz, Cachao led a combo of brilliant artists who sat down in a Havana studio to record freewheeling sessions of solos and call-and-response around a basic groove. Cuban music and its progeny, like salsa, was never the same again.

All the while, the hot bassist of Cuban popular music was pursuing the career for which his parents, both classical musicians, trained him for at home and later sent him to the conservatory. ''I played contrabass with the Havana Philharmonic for 30 years,'' says Cachao, who first joined the orchestra at the age of 13.

Cachao played ballet suites for a young Alicia Alonso (former dancer and longtime artistic director of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba) and for the tenors and sopranos who visited Cuba to sing Aida and Rigoletto. He also played for musical reviews and for Norwegian ice-skating idol Sonja Henie, on a frozen stage at the new Blanquita theater (today Carlos Marx).

Then he would rush off to play the clubs, after changing from tails and white-tie. ''If I showed up dressed like a penguin, they would've killed me,'' he says.

In 1962, Cachao joined the exodus from the island, eventually landing in Las Vegas. Why Las Vegas? ''Simple,'' Cachao said in an earlier interview, ``I was a gambler.''

Today Cachao says he's a cured compulsive gambler, but in Vegas he went through his family's life savings in three months and his wife forced him to move on. To Miami.

Although this city did not fully acknowledge his talent until homeboy movie star Andy García became his producer in the '90s, Cachao never dropped out of the limelight. New York, not Miami, was the capital of Cuban-inspired music, and among that city's Puerto Rican salseros, Cachao was a god.

But in '80s Miami, the classic Cuban artist was just one more sideman. Still, he had his local fans.

'One day, I was going too cautiously for a young girl behind me. She called me `¡Viejo!', passed me and blocked my way, and then she got out holding a machine gun,'' Cachao recalls.

``She recognized me. And from then on, she'd come hear me at Papá Grande (a bar on SW 37th Avenue and Coral Way) every night. She made me get photographed with her, machine gun and all!''

If Cachao's memory for anecdotes from the past is prodigious, he is just as clear about the present. As he sits at the Versailles coffee shop in Little Havana, associates drop by to discuss details of his busy schedule. One of them is Uruguayan jazz violinist Federico Britos, who played with Cachao on his recent tour and will join Cachao at tonight's concert, leading a big string session.

''The first half will be all danzones,'' says Cachao, a tribute to his early roots. Later he will perform some Afro-Cuban music, backed by rarely heard ritual drums called mula and yuca.

''Danzón is now forgotten,'' says Cachao, wistfully. ``Back then, every one danced romantically.''