Giovanni Hidalgo:
Unsurpassed Percussion
by Neil Leonard

Rhythm Music Magazine,
Vol. 3, Num. 6, June, 1994
Copyright 1994, Neil Leonard

Mario Luis Pino, percussionist with Havana’s jazz group Afrocuba, once described the state of Latin American percussion as follows: “Cuban percussionists are the masters of hand percussion. The way we play African rhythms on the conga is unsurpassed. There are percussionists outside of Cuba that use their instruments to play colors. Airto, for example, is a master at this. Cubans cannot play this style. But the best percussionist I ever heard was a Puerto Rican that played here with Dizzy Gillespie. He played things on the conga that we had never heard. His name is Giovanni Hidalgo.”

Hidalgo has become recognized as a leading exponent of the congas for both jazz and salsa. His show-stopping virtuosity and ability to adapt to a vast range of contemporary styles has marked him as leader of a new breed of percussionists. Few among today’s abundance of spectacular conga players have worked with such a diverse crowd of musicians without losing sight of their roots. Though just over thirty years old, he has already played with jazzmen McCoy Tyner, Eddie Palmieri, George Benson, and Dizzy Gillespie; Latin stars like Rubin Blades and Juan Luis Guerra; former Cream bassist Jack Bruce; fellow percussionists Mickey Hart, Airto Moreira, and Art Blakey; and superstars such as Carlos Santana and Paul Simon.

Giovanni Mañeguito Hidalgo was born in 1963 in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. His mother died when he was one and he was raised by his father and grandfather, two of the island’s top percussionists. His father played congas with Bobby Cruz and pianist Richie Rey, and was known by some as the “Mayor of La Perla,” the barrio in which they lived. When Giovanni was three, his father and grandfather started teaching him percussion.

His father was earning a living playing salsa, as that was where the money was; but his real passion was for the African roots, Puerto Rican Bomba, Cuban rumba and West African religious songs played for Santeria rituals. Giovanni saw his father and grandfather play the whole range of Latin American percussion, from contemporary dance music to African roots.
Hidalgo played his first professional gig at age 12, a three-day stint with trumpet player Mario Ortiz. Musicians in San Juan were on strike at the time, refusing to play in hotels and cabarets. Ortiz, whose salsa big band was considered one of the best in Puerto Rico, took his musicians to play in the street, where they were joined by dozens of others in what became a vast outdoor jam session, with up to three bassists playing in rotation. Soon afterwards, Hidalgo took a steady job with bandleader Luigi Texidor to help support the family.

Unlike most salsa and folkloric percussionists, young Giovanni was fascinated with orchestral percussion. At age thirteen, he started visiting the San Juan Conservatory of Music twice a week to watch the classical percussionists rehearse. He studied the idiosyncrasies of the snare drum, xylophone, timpani and chimes. At home, he practiced snare drum rudiments on the conga, and strove to capture the lyricism and wide dynamic and tonal range of the classical instruments.

At fourteen, Giovanni was thrilled to be chosen to work with legendary pianist Charlie Palmieri, Eddie Palmieri’s older brother, who had heard him play in San Juan clubs. Hidalgo stayed with Palmieri for several years, including an eighteen-day tour of Venezuela, the young man’s first tour abroad.

In 1980 he joined Batacumbele, which turned out to be one of the turning points of his career. Batacumbele were the first salsa group to give the percussion section center stage. The core of a typical salsa ensemble consists of horns, piano, bass, and percussion—conga, bongo, timbales and cowbells—with the the horns and piano playing most of the solos. Before Batacumbele, innovation in salsa was often based on assimilating jazz elements. Willie Colon, for example, sought to emulate Stan Kenton’s powerful big-band sound by using a three-trombone horn section. Eddie Palmieri featured extended McCoy Tyner-like piano improvisations that emphasized modal jazz harmony and crashing clusters of notes.

But instead of turning to the United States for inspiration, Batacumbele looked to Africa, seeking the roots of Caribbean music. They blended the music of Puerto Rico and Cuba as no group had done before them. They played the Puerto Rican bomba and plena drums alongside Cuban congas and bata drums. They played salsa, Puerto Rican and Cuban folkloric music, and were the first group outside of Cuba to play songo, Los Van Van’s new style.

Twice, in 1981 and ’84, Hidalgo went with Batamcumbele to Cuba, where they shared billings with some of the top Cuban bands: Los Munequitos de Matanzas, Los Van Van, Son 14, Los Papines, Pello El Afrokan, Aragon, and Ritmo Oriental. Much of their music was adopted from the bands they were sharing the stage with, putting the group under immense pressure to perform their absolute best. “Let me tell you,” says Hidalgo, “when you go to Cuba, it’s like going to the university. You have to prepare! When you go to the countryside, you find young kids playing the conga incredibly well... We played the Mambi at the Tropicana night club. After we played several pieces, the audience rose to their feet shouting ‘Viva Puerto Rico! Batacumbele con bata!’ and waving their handkerchiefs in the air.” The crowd was cheering Batacumbele’s use of the bata, or main Santeria drum—not a bad endorsement from an audience that was used to masters of the art.
At Eddie Palmieri’s call Hidalgo left Batacumbele, though he still plays with them on occasion. He toured with Palmieri for three years and recorded several excellent albums. Palmieri brought Hidalgo to the United States, where he began freelancing with New York-based bands lead by Jack Bruce and Kip Hanrahan, Dave Valentin, Paquito D’Rivera and Cachao Lopez. Jazz drummer Art Blakey took him on a ten-day tour of Japan, where they were featured in the Mt. Fuji Jazz Festival.

One night, at the Wolf Trap Center in Virginia, Palmieri’s audience numbered among them one of the architects of Afro-Cuban jazz: trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Gillespie’s collaboration with Cuban conga player and composer Chano Pozo in the late forties had marked a turning point in American music. Pozo played a crucial part in the jazz masterpiece “Manteca,” not only contributing the congas, but also writing the first section, which superimposed syncopated riffs on bass, trombones and saxophones in a modal, mambo-type vamp, over which Dizzy laid some hot trumpet solos. The A section was juxtaposed with Gillespie’s bridge, which used straighter jazz changes over a walking bass line. Pozo’s combination of Latin percussion with a repeating, Afro-Cuban pattern has since become an integral part of jazz and international pop music. “Manteca” is today a mainstay of the standard jazz repertoire, widely played and quoted by soloists.

Gillespie and Pozo took the music a step further with “Cubana Be, Cubana Bop,” in which composer George Russell combined West African chanting (a call-and-response intro between Chano Pozo and the rest of the band) with bebop- and Stravinsky-influenced harmony and counterpoint. “Cubana Be, Cubana Bop” was unlike anything Gillespie’s peers, such as Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, had ever performed, anticipating the Afro-centric and avant garde developments carried out over the next forty years by Stan Kenton, John Coltrane, Sun Ra, Anthony Davis and others.

Several weeks after meeting Gillespie, Hidalgo recalls, “I was on the road and I got a call from my wife. She told me I had received a letter from a jazz trumpet player. I immediately thought of Dizzy, but then remembered that Miles and Freddie Hubbard were using conga players too.” He was elated to learn that it was Gillespie who had called, and soon left Palmieri’s band to join the famous trumpet player.
Gillespie’s United Nations Orchestra was a return to the big-band format that he had explored with Pozo, a veritable Who’s Who of jazz and Latin music with a roster that included Airto Moreira and Flora Purim, Sam Rivers, Pacquito D’Rivera, Ignacio Berroa, Monty Alexander, John Faddis, Slide Hampton, James Moody, Steve Turre, and Claudio Roditi.

Hidalgo spent the next four and a half years on the road with Gillespie. He traveled to Australia, Russia, and Europe with the UNO, and toured Africa with Gillespie’s sextet, playing in Egypt, Morocco, Senegal, Nigeria, Congo, Zaire, and Namibia. “In Nigeria,” Hidalgo remembers, “the Yoruba people made a ceremony for Dizzy, in which all of us played. The ceremony had both festive and religious parts. Two months later I received a letter in which they offered to perform the same ceremony for me if I returned.” Nigeria is the home of the Yoruba nation and the source of the Santeria religion. Hidalgo, like many Cubans and Puerto Ricans, practices Santeria, whose rituals can be virtually indistinguishable from the African source. Enslaved West Africans were still being imported to the Caribbean into the late nineteenth century and it is not difficult to find a Santeria ceremony conducted entirely in the Yoruba language, with music that is identical to the Yoruba counterpart. “It was a great experience to see where we come from, the oldest culture,” Hidalgo continues. “It was amazing to see the little kids playing drums. When I shut my eyes to listen, I felt like I was hearing the old masters, but when I opened my eyes I was stunned to see that the musicians were little children.”

Dizzy was in his seventies at the time, and far from his peak as a trumpet player. But he was still an excellent leader, and had a way of making the musical tradition resonate in the players. “When I was playing with Dizzy, all my memories from [when I was] five years old, growing up in a family of percussionists, came back to me,” Hidalgo says. He looked to Gillespie as a role model, both personally and professionally; for the time being, however, he chose to stay in San Juan, surrounded by his family and culture, and commuting to New York for work. Gillespie, on his part, did everything he could to support his young percussionist. “In Puerto Rico, there is a grand musician, Giovanni Hidalgo,” he said. “By my standards, he is one of the greatest percussionists ever. He takes it from where Chano Pozo left off.” Hidalgo stayed with Gillespie’s band until the trumpeter retired, only months before he passed away.

Hidalgo did eventually move to the U.S., moving first to Fallon, a small town near Reno, Nevada, then to Malden, Massachusetts, a few miles north of Boston, where he took a position at the Berklee College of Music. Today, Hidalgo is a part-time Associate Professor in the percussion department, teaching three levels of Afro-Cuban percussion, as well as Brazilian percussion and private lessons. In his teaching, Hidalgo always seems to remember what a difference his own teachers made, and how they made themselves available to him. Unlike many teachers of his stature, who pay little attention to all but an exclusive “inner circle” of the most talented students, Hidalgo is relaxed and easy-going, inviting his students out to his house for an annual party, where he jams with them for hours. And despite his success, Hidalgo is himself a relentless student of percussion. “I practice all the time, it does not matter if I turn 90, I’m going to study. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the next life; I will continue in this way.”

Hidalgo has released two records as a leader. Unlike most successful leaders, he is neither a composer nor an arranger, though he works with the best: Marty Sheller is one of the top arrangers in Latin music, who worked with Willie Colon and Eddie Palmieri, among others. Hidalgo’s second album, Worldwide (Tropijazz/Sony), features well-known Latin musicians but mostly covers standards by Duke Ellington, Miles Davis, and George Gershwin, with only a couple of pieces by Hidalgo’s contempories. These are among the best on the album; “Exit 7,” for example, is a burning Latin-jazz piece in 7/4 by sideman Hilton Ruiz, a pianist and bandleader in his own right. In general, the best parts of the album are where you’d expect them to be: in the less jazzy, more Latinesque percussion sections, where Hidalgo gets a chance to shine.
For while Hidalgo as leader has stayed safely in the mainstream, he still delivers the most highly-charged performances in Latin jazz. In a recent concert with Danilo Perez, Hidalgo shared center stage with the Panamanian pianist. In Perez’s “Suite for Conga,” written especially for Hidalgo, the two traded salvos in a brilliant call-and-response section, highlighting Hidalgo’s remarkable ability to evoke melodic phrases from his congas. At times the exchange evolved into a two-way free improvisation, in which all distinctions between soloist and accompanist, melody and rhythm, all notions of where one bar ended and the next began, were gone.

Best of all were the moments in which all three generations of Hidalgo’s family took up the rhythm. Giovanni’s five-year-old son beat out drum patterns on a front row table and danced enthusiastically during his father’s solos, while Hidalgo, Sr., edged out from backstage to play chekere accompaniment, standing behind his famous son. Being in the audience that night was truly a privilege, watching an ancient but ever-changing rhythmic tradition seemingly pass down through three generations, right in front of our eyes.

Neil Leonard’s compositions were recently performed at the Audio Art Festival in Poland, the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York, and at Carnegie Hall. He premiered Cuban composer Juan Blanco’s “Espacios V” for saxophone and tape at the New Music Festival at Wesleyan University. Leonard teaches multi-media and music synthesis at Berklee College of Music.