Carlos Valdes, 81, a legendary conga player and a leading figure in Latin jazz in Cuba and the United States, died Tuesday in Cleveland of respiratory failure, according to the New York Times. Valdes ...

The Beatles kept up a very prolific recording pace throughout their time together in the ’60s. Even when they gave themselves a little breathing room between records, they pushed the pedal to the ...

In 1917, Ramon Santamaria Rodriquez was born into poverty in Havana, Cuba. Nicknamed “Mongo” (a tribal chief in Senegal), he began playing the conga drum at an early age and as a teen, Mongo ...

PORT JERVIS - Emedin Rivera has played conga drums and percussion around the world, whether funk and soul, jazz, Afro-Irish or background music for a wolf documentary. He has played with Larry Coryell ...

Not that many people know that Marlon Brando was a huge tropical latin music fan. Herman Leonard, the great jazz photographer knew that, and he and Brando became close because they were both ...

While hanging out with Harry Sepulveda last week, I had to interrupt him mid-sentence. Pointing to the speakers high up on the walls of his Latin-jazz record store, I said, “Hold it, who's this ...

Previously I have written about the differences between Afro-Cuban jazz and American jazz and examined the reasons why the descendants of the same African ancestors, living only 90 miles apart in the ...