Celebrity

The Bassist Carlos Henriquez Covers All the Latin and Jazz Bases

Over a bowl of rice at a Japanese restaurant near Columbus Circle in Manhattan on a recent afternoon, the bassist, composer and arranger Carlos Henriquez It reflects the long history of Latino musicians in the jazz world.

“In the 1920s, there was a bassist and tuba player named Ralph Escudero who played with WC Handy and Fletcher Henderson,” he said, raising a manicured eyebrow to emphasize. “We’ve always been into this. So I’m going to say, hey, I’m from the South Bronx, I’m Puerto Rican and I love jazz.”

Henriquez, who will lead an all-star band to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Mambo Kings Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez at the Jazz at Lincoln Center on May 5-6, was about to attend the facility’s annual gala rehearsal. Dressed in gray plaid flannel his shirt and dark his blue his jeans, he sat in the centrally positioned bassist’s chair as the orchestra practiced standards. A bridge over rough water. “

“I’ve always visualized Bass as the catcher on a baseball team. We’re all watching the whole game,” he said. “That catcher deals with everything that comes in and calls plays. We bassists can really decide where the music is going, where the concept is going.”

Over nearly 25 years as a professional musician, Henriquez has built a reputation as a down-to-earth but highly imaginative composer and performer. In a telephone interview from his home in Colorado, Timbalero’s Jose Madera said, “Carlos became a master of his instrument and composition.” is.”

Henriquez’ journey from the streets of 1980s Mott Haven in the Bronx to the stage of the Jazz at Lincoln Center began in part when he met the organization’s director, Wynton Marsalis, as a teenager. “When I was a kid, the Jazzmobile was the Betancise, where I grew up, and I used to come to St. Mary’s Park across from the House,” says Henriquez, the portable that brought jazz to the New York neighborhood. I mentioned the stage. “I remember Clark Terry and David Murray playing, Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri and Larry Harlow.”

Henriquez said his father, who worked at a veterans hospital, received the cassette from an African-American friend. “One day he gave me a tape of Bill Evans, Eddie Gomez and Paul Chambers. I was stunned — I was like, man, this is killing.”

Henriquez first played the piano, then switched to classical guitar, attending LaGuardia, a performing arts high school, while attending the Juilliard School’s Advanced Music Program. He turned to bass in his second year at Juilliard and Lincoln Center’s Essential for High School Band He won his first place in the jazz division at the Ellington competition. At 19, he joined the Wynton Marsalis Septet and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.

“I began attending Winton’s home religiously and exchanged information about Latin music, which I still do to this day,” says Henriquez. “And vice versa. If you need help with classical music or something, he’s there to help.”

During a question and answer session at Essentially Ellington in 2019, Marsalis praised his protégé. “He taught me a completely different way of understanding music,” added Marsalis. Describing a moment when Henriquez made a critique of a song Marsalis had written, the trumpeter recalled saying the bassist was “all on the wrong beat.”

For Henriquez, the key to fusing Afro-Cuban rhythms with jazz is finding ways to match the swing feel to the five-beat clave rhythms. “It’s not just about imagining ‘Peanut Bender’ played by John Coltrane. I recognize it as a “leader”.

As a session bassist, Henriquez has performed with Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Lenny Kravitz, Natalie Merchant, the bachata group Aventura, Cuban jazz pianists Chucho Valdes and Gonzalo Rubalcaba. He also toured Nuyorican His Soul, a dance music project led by DJs Little Louie Vega and Kenny (Dope) Gonzalez. “DJ Jazzy Jeff was spinning records on stage while we were playing Latin grooves,” he said.

Henriquez has been fully involved in the group’s Latin Jazz programming since 2010, when Henriquez served as Jazz Musical Director at the Lincoln Center’s Cultural Exchange with the Cuban Conservatory of Music. Over the past decade, he has helmed Ruben Blades’ jazz and salsa standards, Dizzy’s Latin adaptation of Gillespie’s productions, and last year’s tribute to Thelonious Monk, “Monk con Clave.” I was.

“I was telling them, look, there’s a bigger picture in this,” Henriquez said of his message to orchestra leaders. is “uncredited”, i.e. has no chance of being played. “We need to hire these people to at least let them know we haven’t forgotten about them.”

In this week’s Puente and Rodriguez tribute, Enriquez, who played in the Tito Puente Orchestra in his late teens, assembled and combined a set list of longtime Puente collaborators like bongo player Johnny (Dandy) Rodriguez Jr. and Madera. is created. Both famous and somewhat obscure tracks from two notables.

Part of Henriquez’s appeal is his ability to improvise nuggets of Latin music and jazz history between songs with irony that lands somewhere between stand-up comedy and TED Talk. Asked over lunch about the rumored rivalry between Puente and Rodriguez, who battled for the top prize at shows at the Palladium and other venues. “Rodriguez was beating up guys,” Henriquez said.

Puente’s 100th anniversary also included a tribute and art exhibition at Hostos Community College in the Bronx. Puente’s vinyl from Kraft’s recordings of his 1985 jazz album Manbo Diablo includes “Rush Life” and other jazz standards.and events at Lehman Center for the Performing Arts But as much as the Mambo era burns brightly in the spirit of Latin New York, Henriquez is embracing the truce between 1970s widespread arson and street gangs with his 2021 solo album, The South Bronx Story. and continue to delve deeper into other eras… neglected histories.

“I’m working on my next album, and we find ourselves in the middle of this neighborhood that used to be called San Juan Hill,” he said of the area being demolished to make way for Lincoln Center. “And we lived here with African Americans, and Benny Carter wrote a suite called Echoes in San Juan Hill, and Thelonious Monk used to play here.” Eager to find a connection to jazz, I realized how valuable this neighborhood was.

“It’s the spirit of our ancestors, they call it, right?”

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