The funky timbalero, Henry Lee "Pucho" Brown is one of the hippest, heppest cats in music. Born in Harlem in 1938, he is an acknowledged founding father of acid jazz - a term invented by a DJ some 20 years after the event.
Ultimately, the expression acid jazz (which was initially used to describe a specific track, Psychedelic Pucho) became a very effective marketing strategy in the happening London clubs. It also helped to bring Pucho and others out of the shadows for an unexpected (and welcome) second go. All that funky Latin boogaloo was suddenly back - and Pucho and his Latin Soul Brothers were able to re-introduce decades of groove experience to the coolest dance floors.
"I grew up on 113th Street. Back then, in the 1950s, all the cats were hanging out on the corner singing doo-wop and I was the only one playing the conga drums. It was just something about the music. I had never heard Spanish music before, but when I heard it, it just took me by storm - and it took a lot of other people by storm too. So when Latin music first came into Harlem, cats like me were groovin' to it. We danced to it and we played it just like a Latin cat would. It took over. What we were doing was the mambo. Today they call it salsa."
The New York home of the mambo was The Palladium. Birdland was just up the street, and between the two venues something exciting began to happen. Jazzers had always been interested in Latin rhythms. Back in the 1930s, Duke Ellington was experimenting with the rumba, and of course many Latin musicians such as the Cuban, Mario Bauza, were already settling and playing in the US. All of it eventually led to inevitable cross-fertilisations - the most spectacular perhaps being the collision between the be-boppers such as Dizzy Gillespie and the Latin band leaders such as Machito. And it all happened somewhere between The Palladium and Birdland.
"They also had Latin bands in the Apollo Theatre," Pucho recalls. "That's how popular it was in the black community. The Apollo is where I saw all the black acts like Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Dinah Washington but I also saw Tito Puente and Machito. When I saw Tito Puente and the drums he was playing, it was very exciting for me. That was it. When I saw him, I said: `Hey, this is what I want to do'."
And so Pucho took up the timbales (a pair of single-headed drums, a key instrument in Afro-Cuban jazz) and, without lessons of any kind, began to emulate his hero, Puente. He played his first professional gig at 14 at the A1 Club in Astoria, Queens, and he remembers it was a pretty good band - with vibes, congas, bongos and timbales. In 1956, he joined Joe Panama's Band and when Panama later fired the whole group, Pucho took them over as his Latin Soul Brothers.
As the years went by, Pucho was to have personnel problems of his own, having considerable trouble holding onto his extraordinary musicians - something which still annoys him. Such was the rivalry between his Latin Soul Brothers and the other big bands of Mongo Santamaria and Willie Bobo that musicians were constantly being poached - or "raided", as he puts it - most notably when Mongo swiped Pucho's pianist, Chick Chorea.
Meanwhile, the mambo craze kept on growing and soon it even entered the mainstream pop arena - as it has again at the turn of this century. Everyone was singing their own particular mambo song. There were rock 'n' roll mambos, pop mambos, comic mambos and even an Irish mambo. It was pop-mambo mania and it might well have been a problem for the likes of Pucho.
"Well, that was commercial and I didn't mess with that stuff. It just popularised it with the people who didn't know what the mambo was. There was Rosemary Clooney and Perry Como and people like that. But although I didn't mess with commercial, I had to hang in there, and I was listening to all the other music of the day - like Motown and The Beatles. So I recorded their music. I recorded And I Love Her and Yesterday because I had to put that into the music. What happened was that Mongo Santamaria changed things when he recorded Watermelon Man. He took that kind of music and put it with the Latin, so I went even further and started doing things like Mustang Sally and In The Midnight Hour.
And still the crowds of black, white and Latino teenagers came to places like The Village Gate to hear Pucho's rhythmic assault on the hits of the day. His secret was that he wasn't really playing authentic Latin music at all. The rhythms were certainly (for the most part) Latin, but the rest of it was basically funk and jazz. What people tended to forget (and still forget) is that Pucho was not Hispanic - and neither were the Latin Soul Brothers. In fact, during the 1960s there was only one Latin musician among them: what they were actually playing was boogaloo. Then, when the Latin bands started doing something similar, they called it Latin boogaloo, donating yet another label to Pucho's eclectic music.
Eventually, however, the boogaloo craze died out, and musicians such as Pucho needed to think again. He put a small group together and went to work on what was known as the matzoh-ball circuit - the hotel resorts of the Catskills. He spent 20 years there, playing a pared-down music in a place which today conjures up images of ballrooms packed with elderly ladies with purple hair. Surely not the place for Pucho to spend 20 years?
"It was fun! Yeah, it's like that now, but not then. Back then it was fun. The women were young and beautiful! When I was playing there the fast jet-set was Las Vegas, Miami Beach and the Catskills. That was fun. And I was with all the stars - people like Robert Goulet and Milton Berle. I mixed the music up - a little Latin without the full rhythm section, a little George Gershwin, Cole Porter, a little rock 'n' roll. It was good. The work was easy and, anyway, I was tired of the `chitlin circuit' - and all those musicians buggin' me out. Only thing was, after 20 years, when I came back to New York, nobody knew who I was. The old crowd were either dead or in jail. You know, we used to play for a lot of hustlers and pimps."
But there was one more twist for Pucho. British DJs such as Gilles Peterson and Russ Dewbury were playing Pucho's music in clubs. Tracks like Got Myself a Good Man were huge dancefloor hits and Pucho's jazzfunk (now called acid jazz) was the in thing. The problem was that nobody, not even in New York, had the slightest idea where Pucho was - he was last heard of somewhere in the Catskills. But Pucho, hearing that he was hot in Europe, decided to investigate what was going on.
"I had to do a little detective work. So I called up Ace Records and I talked to Russ Dewbury and he said: `Come on over, we've been looking for you'. So I walked on that stage in England with about 2,000 people there, and it was like hell broke loose. And there was a guy called Galliano and he had sampled Freddy's Dead. Well, I thought he had taken just a little bit, but I got hold of a copy and he had taken the whole damn thing! It was my music and he was talking all over it, I was honoured. After that, I went to Japan and South America and I hadn't travelled like that even in my heyday. And now they call it acid jazz. The DJs picked it up and I would say all those musicians are pleased about it because it brought them out of the grave."
Pucho plays the Galway Arts Festival on July 27th and Vicar Street, Dublin on July 28th