JERRY GONZÁLEZ: FLAMENCOS IN THE BRONX

Ezequiel Paz

Jerry González. Café Berlín. Madrid (Photo:Leandro)

He came for one week and ended up staying six months. It was the same summer after which this trumpet-player and percussionist would become lord and master of the big screen in Fernando Trueba's Calle 54.

We met for the first time in July at the Café Berlin on Jacometrezzo street, and at that precise moment I made him promise that he would grant me this interview. Of course in those days I thought I would have to make the trip to old San Juan, or the East Bronx in order to explore the life of this legenday jazzman from New York.

We had agreed to meet in the apartment specially set up for Jerry for his visits to Spain by the manager of the Café Berlin, Erik. No sooner were we through the front door than we could glimpse suitcases spilling over with clothes, untidy piles of books and records, and various other objects strewn throughout the living room. Our suspicions were soon confirmed. Jerry lives the way he thinks: the source of divine chaos which you sense in his music, also infects his personal habits.

The conversation gets under way with the background of an Afro-Cuban rumba that Jerry picks out to receive us. His Puerto Rican roots shine through in his speech, in his gestures, in the dry rhythm of his dialogue. A street-wise guy, defender of Hispanic rights, and dilettante who could well be associated with the dark beatnik poetry of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, Jerry seems pleased to revel in his reputation for being an 'enfant terrible', and he doesn't even try to gloss over his experiences with LSD and cocaine.

You ended up staying in Spain because of Diego El Cigala, Niño Josele and Javier Limón, isn't that so?

I met "Cigala" after one of the concerts I did here in Madrid with the Fort Apache Band. They loved it, they came to the dressing-room and I told them I was returning to New York the next day. They begged me to stay, they said "you have to do something with us". Javier Limón 'kidnaped' me and put me up in his house. In the beginning we just hung out and played and had fun. Then everything started taking shape and that's how the record with Jerry González y los Piratas Flamencos came to be. I was going to stay for a week and ended up staying six months...

And that record, is it going to be released or not?

I don't know why Lola Records has it on hold, but it won't be long in coming out...

So are you staying here for now?

Well, I have a commitment to my band, the Fort Apache Band, who I have to do some

Jerry González. Café Berlín. Madrid (Photo:Leandro)

shows with, so I'll be going back and forth. All the same I have to say that the support I've received here, I never received in the United States. There's a lot of stuff here that you can't do in New York. Over there, in order to get someone to work with you, you have to go through bunch of red tape, send faxes, like you call one guy and he says, "No brother...can't right now, I'm washin' my car". Shit, that ain't no way... Over here everything is more spontaneous and I'm happy to be used for recordings and jam sessions.

Speaking of that work, tell us about your participation on records like those of Martirio, Esperanza Fernández, Diego Amador and Diego "El Cigala"...

Sure, with Martirio I was also a whole day recording the videoclip for some of the songs I'm in. Hey, she's great, she sings anything, Argentine tangos, bulerías... But I'd say my favorite thing on this record is the boleros.

Mucho Corazón

Yeah yeah...it's got to be here somewhere.... (He puts the CD in the disk-man and we listen to Torres de Arena)

On Cigala's record Corren Tiempos de Alegría, you also collaborated with one of the great Cuban pianists, Bebo Valdés...

We weren't actually recording at the same moment. I know he played a country dance and a bolero in the old Cuban style. He's part of the tradition of the great pianists of the nineteenth century. The pieces I played, those I can tell you they came out real good, the people came and said, "Hey Jerry, what's this bit with bolero and flamenco and jazz?". And I tell them I'm just screwing around with people's heads... (wild laughter).

We heard you were in New York when the attacks took place. What was that like?

I was right in Manhattan when it all happened. I know this Russian Japanese girl who's a friend of mine and lives on Wall Street and she lets me hang out at her place once in a while, so that day I woke up to the news, got dressed, went out into the street and right then and there I saw how the second plane hit. And afterwards, SHIT! the first tower collapsed and I see this cloud of dust coming my way. Shit, so I go back and get inside the apartment until the FBI comes asking for my passport and they make me get out of there. Of course, we were just four blocks from where everything was happening.

After seeing all that, I was in a state of panic, so I call "Cigala" because we had a concert at the Lope de Vega for the first of October and I asked him if it was still on. He said yes, and after a while I asked him to send me my ticket because I was fed up with the United States.

Changing the subject, in Calle 54 it looks like the garage of your house in the Bronx is a musical laboratory of jazz and Afro-Caribbean music of the last sixty years.

Yes, I moved there when I turned eighteen, before we were living in a housing project. The house had two floors: my parents lived upstairs, and downstairs my brother Andy and me. That was great because we could raise hell without bothering anybody. A lot of people passed through there. Dizzy Gillespie was almost my uncle, and was in and out all the time. But also Kenny Dorham, Rashied Alí (John Coltrane's last drummer), Jackie McLean, Larry Young and Kenny Kirkland.

You introduced Kirkland to Latin jazz...

Well, he had a Puerto Rican mamma, but it was with me he got into the Cuban sound and the syncopations of Latin jazz. He learned real fast so I put him into Fort Apache. When Sting took him for his group he went to substitute for Larry Wills.

I guess your brother Andy has played an important role in your career...

I'm very proud that we've been together all these years. When he can't make it to jobs or for the recordings, I'm really screwed. I can call Ron Carter himself, he'd shit in his pants...because when the gang gets going, it gets lost. In New York I've called the best, but with rumba, they screw it all up, they start sweating, then they look at me with these panicked faces and ask for time-out, like in the NBA, but hey!, you can't do that there...

So the gang didn't make it to Berkeley University...

Listen, I didn't go to school to learn that stuff. Everything I know, I learned playing on rooftops in the Bronx, in the slums.

Jerry, you're a conga man. Tell us how you learned percussion.

When I started playing the conga I had all of Carl Tjader's records and Mongo Santamaría was playing there. He was my model. When I was eight years old I heard my first "Latin" record. It was a vinyl record and on the cover there was this guy dancing on top of a conga. I took it out and went wild. It was red and transparent, a record from the Fantasy company. I put it on the record-player and "Cubano-chá" started sounding with Armando Peraza with that kid...that got me.

And it was in the street too, wasn't it?

Yeah, in the neighborhood, you know, there was rumba everywhere. On the corner, on the rooftops...sometimes we'd play soccer first, and afterwards we'd play right on the same roof of the building. But I was twelve or thirteen when I started. I had a broken leg and a friend brought a conga to my house for me. For two years my hand was bleeding and I screwed up my fingers. In those days I was following Patato Valdés, Tito Puente, Mongo Santamaría. They were all on Southern Boulevard in the Bronx. That was where the whole movement got started that they called 'salsa' later on. The first step was the founding of the record company Alegre Records, which came before Fania. The first one of all was Al Santiago, and later he got together with Jerry Masuchi. They started out with the best of intentions and big ideas, but before long Fania turned into a bunch of crooks. They robbed all the musicians and got rich off of them....

You have a reputation for being a cursed artist...what do you have to say about that?

If you're waiting for me to tell you I tried drugs, well of course, it doesn't bother me to say it. I lived through Woodstock, the clouds of marihuana, the LSD culture, the arrival of cocaine in New York... You know who I was smoking marihuana with all night once?

No, with who?

With none other than Dizzy and Louis Armstrong, in Louis' house. Ten hours straight listening to jazz records and putting away the dope. If that's being cursed, well screw them...I am.

But the chat didn't end there. We proposed to Jerry that we go down and eat something and Jerry, a little nervous, realized that he hadn't eaten anything all day. Once we were in the restaurant Jerry demanded of the waiter, a good-looking Argentine: "Hey man, what's this codfish Franciscan nun style?". "Codfish in sauce answered the young man solicitously. "Well bring me one of them things, because later on at Javier (Limon's) house I'm having dinner again".