5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Ray Barretto

Music|5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Ray Barretto

A teenage Ray Barretto was stationed abroad as a U.S. Army soldier when he first heard Dizzy Gillespie and Chano Pozo’s “Manteca” — the first recording to explicitly blend Afro-Cuban music with American jazz. Though he had no formal training as a musician, Barretto knew immediately that when he got home, he wanted to make music like that: combining the many components of his experiences, growing up in the mid-20th-century Bronx as the son of Puerto Rican parents. “I was never taught to play drums,” Barretto later told the journalist Aurora Flores. “My teacher was the street.”

In the decades ahead, Barretto would traverse the fertile territory between jazz and Latin music more creatively than perhaps any other percussionist or bandleader. He became the first-call conguero for various jazz labels — indeed, he is now known as the most-recorded hand percussionist in jazz history — while making waves in New York’s Latin music world, particularly after taking over the conga chair in Tito Puente’s band from Mongo Santamaria.

The tune that made Barretto famous as a bandleader, “El Watusi” — written to match a dance that Barretto had seen young people doing at his shows — pushed the popular charanga style of the early 1960s into more rhythmically driving, R&B-inflected territory, helping open the door to what would become known as boogaloo. But it was his work from the later 1960s to the end of the ’70s that would enshrine Barretto’s legacy. In a long string of records for the famed Fania label (where he was also a figurehead of its supergroup, the Fania All-Stars), he led eminent, propellant bands that came to epitomize the sound of so-called salsa dura.

Below you’ll find a playlist compiled by expert musicians, writers and music historians, most of whom worked with Barretto or knew him personally. You’ll also find playlists of the chosen tracks — and if your favorite Barretto tune was left out, just drop it in the comments.

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‘Manteca,’ Red Garland Trio with Ray Barretto

Joe Conzo Sr., historian

Ray Barretto was basically a jazz player — but he grew up with Latin music all around him. When he came out of the service in the late ’40s, he went to play jazz. He wanted to be like Chano Pozo, Sabu Martinez: percussionists who blended Latin music into real jazz. He admired Art Blakey and all the other jazz drummers, too. I remember Ray from back in the charanga era: Everybody was playing the charanga — Johnny Pacheco, Machito, Tito Puente — and Ray became especially famous for it, thanks to the “Watusi.” But he did a lot of other great things. I think the most classic example of his jazz playing is on “Manteca,” with the Red Garland Trio, covering the tune that first turned him onto the idea of playing Latin jazz.