Luciano Pozo González

Cuban percussionist of son montuno and Afro-Cuban jazz, brother of trumpeter Félix Chapotín. Also known as El Tambor de Cuba, he was a revolutionary among jazz drummers, grafting new and vigorous energy into North American jazz.

He shined shoes and sold newspapers, played music in many places. He was a dancer and drummer for the comparsa groups El Barracón, La Mexicana, La Colombiana, La Sultana, La Jardinera and Los Dandys. He began his artistic career at the radio station RHC Cadena Azul, where he founded the Conjunto Azul, of which trumpeter Félix Chappottín was a member.

In 1940 he worked with Mongo Santamaría in the Congo Pantera show at the Cabaret Tropicana. He was a member of the Hermanos Palau orchestra.

In 1946 he moved to the United States, where he recorded with singers Miguelito Valdés and Frank Grillo (Machito); he was a dancer for Katherine Dunham.

He belonged to the Abakuá Secret Society, which explains the perfect mastery he had of the drums specific to the ritual. He had the habit of playing sacred rhythms on his congas, as well as singing Abakuá and Yoruba themes.

He worked in the public broadcasts of the Cadena Azul radio station, alongside figures of the caliber of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and it was with Dizzy that he popularized the well-known piece "Manteca".

In 1942 he went to New York, United States, joining the Machito Orchestra that same year, leaving that orchestra to join the "Jack Cole Dancers" ensemble in Chicago.

His most famous piece, "Manteca", became known in the jazz world in 1947, during a bigband presentation under the name of Pozo and Gillespie, although it was not recorded until 1948. At that concert, pianist John Lewis and drummer Kenny Clarke performed.

In "Caliente", another of Chano Pozo's great compositions, Chano's style gradually led Gillespie to take increasingly greater musical risks, which resulted in a perfect fusion: that of a genius of jazz harmony with a genius of Afro-Cuban rhythms.

That same year of his arrival in New York, Chano Pozo opened a Latin club at the Palladium that was named after one of his songs, "Blen Blem", a piece that has been used in several literary and musical texts by Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

It was the opinion and influence of Mario Bauzá that inclined Dizzy Gillespie to hire Chano Pozo, thus deepening his approach to cubop.

Supported by the acrid sound of a young and hungry band, Pozo crouched in the center of the stage and struck a many-voiced conga drum with his callused, blistered hands. He held the audience in a silence of awestruck respect for thirty minutes, singing in a West African dialect, while he raised and lowered his voice from a murmur to a shout and brought it back to its starting point. "The greatest drummer I've ever heard in my life," Gillespie would say. The regular drummer of Gillespie's band at the time of the Town Hall concert was Teddy Stewart, who said that Chano was far ahead of all the percussionists of his time.

After Pozo there were no limits to rhythm. Pozo collaborated with vibraphonist Milt Jackson and with James Moody and his Modernistas. For his part, Joachim E. Berendt affirms that:
The father of all the drummers who occupy the current stage of jazz is Chano Pozo, from Cuba [...].

He infused Cuban rhythms into Dizzy Gillespie's big band from 1947 to 1948, thus becoming the great catalyst of the so-called "Cubop" [...]. Some of the tunes that Gillespie's band recorded with Chano Pozo—for example Cubana Be-Cubana Bop or Manteca, Woody'n You, Afro Cubano Suite or Algo Bueno—, are revels of rhythmic differentiation [...].

The rhythmic power of this mysterious Cuban conga musician is illuminated by the fact that Gillespie, although he often employed various Latin American percussionists at times, was never able to achieve the effects he had reached with Chano Pozo alone.»

On December 3, 1948, Pozo died in a bar fight in Harlem. The argument began over a bag of fake marijuana that the murderer had sold him.

The famous Cuban musician Beny Moré, lamented his death in the song "Rumberos de ayer": "Oh, oh Chano, Chano Pozo died / without Chano I don't want to dance."