All photos courtesy of Rita

JOHN SANTOS: John Santos

On a chilly night in November the din of clinking wine glasses, screeching chairs  and  nervous giggles swept through the packed lobby of Berkeley’s THe Jazz School. The audience was restless and getting cranky: the John Santos Quintet was 20 minutes late.  For the past decade I had watched Santos lead his 15-piece band Machete Ensemble, but tonight he’d be jamming with a much smaller combo.

I looked around the room and noticed a walnut colored North African toddler pounding furiously on a metal bistro table. Next to me a 30-ish Mexican man, checked his Tag Heuer watch and gulped down a Starbucks latte.  Behind me an elderly white woman, bellowed “So what’s up? When are we going to get this  party started?”


I turned around and saw John Santos threading his way past the eighty or so fans who were waiting to hear him play, heading for the stage.  That morning  I’d been ecstatic when I heard the concert announced on KPFA radio. I had dashed out of my office two hours early, bulldozed through Berkeley’s gridlocked streets and bought the last ticket for the show. I had been following John Santos around for so long that I knew his story by heart.  He grew up in San Francisco’s Mission District in a house steeped in Puerto Rican, Cape Verdean and Irish culture. While most kids were listening to the Beatles, John immersed himself in his grandfather’s recordings of Latin bands of the 30’s and 40’s.  By the time he was 12, he was playing congas with his grandfather’s band. “My community’s respect for musicians is what appealed to me,” he told me one day over coffee in my living room. “They were the guardians of this highly valued cultural thing that everybody loved. When they came around everybody was happy, everybody danced.“

By the time he was 30, Santos had already led three of his own bands, Conjunto Folkloric Yambu, Tipcia Cienfuegos (1976-1980) and Orquesta Batachanga which lasted from 1981 to 1985. Batachanga, the best known of the three, was the Bay Area’s first charanga band (Cuban dance music featuring flutes and violins),with a Havana vibe so authentic that you could lick the rum off your lips. “We were the first Bay Area group to play folkloric music mixed with popular music,” he told me. “We played dance music: sones, mambos, plenas but with rumba rhythms underneath it. The other salsa bands used congas and timbales but we also played cajones(wooden boxes), batas, and tambores.”

Santos started writing music too.  He (teamed up with bandmembers, John Calloway and Wayne Wallace) created lush arrangements sprinkled with shimmering violin guajeos (vamps), breathy flute riffs and slow-roasted  bata rhythms. The group jammed at street fairs, cinco de mayo parades and Delores Park. Their seductive melodies resonated more with an older crowd, musically savvy fans who clapped out “clave”, danced to their cha cha chas and wept at their boleros, as bittersweet as a lime floating in a mojito. Santos wanted the smoky timbre of the batas (drums central to the Santeria religion) in his songs to evoke the soul of Afro-caribbean culture. “The bata represents the tradition of west African spiritual music, “ he said “ It is a large part of our identity as Americans, Latin Americans, as Afro-Latinos, as carribean people. It tells the story of who we are better than anything else. The contributions that (folkloric) tradition has made to our culture, our music, our dance is of the highest order. Nothing is more important than that. So I felt that it really important to bring in the bata, to get people to understand where the music comes from.“

By 1985 Batachanga had released two albums “La Nueva Tradicion” (The New Tradition) and “Para Los Ninos” (For the Children) and cultivated a small but devoted core of fans. But this was not enough to keep the 15 man ensemble going. Their violinist, Anthony Blea, was moving to New York and other members trying to make ends meet, were tied up working for other bands. “We couldn’t get a record deal,” Santos recalled. “And we had played at all the clubs around here. It seemed like we were stagnant and without a way to grow professionally”.

Part of the problem, Santos knew was that hard-driving, high octane salsa music was what was more popular than Latin Jazz.  On Saturday nights hundreds of 20-ish dancers crowded into steamy clubs,like Cesar’s Latin Palace in the outer Mission District or Carribe in downtown Oakland—shadowy,  cavernous rooms with neon palm trees, smart mouthed barmaids and battered oak floors sticky from spilled margueritas and crushed pretzels.  Santos could have racked up more gigs and money if he had played it safe by sticking to salsa’s predictable piano montunos, repetitive rhythms and blaring trumpets. But Santos wouldn’t do it. He dished out sizzling Dominican merengues and passionate Cuban danzones, spiked with cliff hanging jazz solos. Even his lyrics stretch beyond typical dance music, saying more than “Let’s party tonight” or “Mommi, I can’t live without you”. He insists that we celebrate the daily struggles and triumph spirit of afro-carribean people portrayed in Latin music and dance..

Santos felt his music could breaking out of the nightclub circuit, and showcase his music at concert halls and international jazz festivals. In 1986 he formed John Santos and the Machete Ensemble to take him where he wanted to go. “I wanted to do something down home, more folkloric oriented, a jazz thing.” He called up some of my old collegues, Rebecca Mauleon, John Calloway and David Belove. “I got a hold of Wayne Wallace, Melicio Magdaluyo and Bill Ortiz, horn players I had worked with in Pete Escovedo’s band.”

This time he got it right. John Santos and the Machete Ensemble performed original music at hundreds of concerts, festivals  and nightclubs in  the U.S. and  Cuba. In 1998 Machete (with special guest bassist,  Cachao) was one of the first Latin Bands to play at Davies Symphony Hall as part of the San Francisco Jazz Festival.  Since their first album Africa Vol 1 in 1998, Santos has pumped out  nine, mostly self-produced albums under his label, Machete Records. His 2003 album “S.F. Bay”, packed with richly textured harmonies and dance party jams won a Grammy nomination—a huge score for Santos.

Despite these accolades, though, Machete began struggling to get gigs. Many club owners preferred shelling out  a few hundred dollars for D.J.  than several thousand for Machete’s 12-15 man ensemble. After 911 things got even worse. Cash strapped New York club owners balked at hiring pricey West Coast bands. Long lines at airport security made traveling with musical instruments a nightmare. Machete lasted for 21 years but by 2006 they played only a few times a year. By then Machete’s players, many who were fronting their own groups, couldn’t squeeze time for rehearsals and performances into their schedules.  That was why last year 2006 Santos trimmed the group down to a quintet, the ensemble that was playing tonight in the lobby.
A slate blue guayabera stretched across his broad shoulders. I could see his panama hat gliding high above the audience as he stepped on to the cramped stage, gave a thumbs up to the flautist, nodded to the timbalero (timbales player) and slapped the pianist on the back with his shovel sized hand. He winked at the bald headed bass player, took his place behind three conga drums and the group plunged into “Blues for Amado” (a tasty cha cha cha). His long fingers thacked the tawny drumheads,his broad palms thumping out a full-bodied tumbao, riding on the piano’s hard-driving vamp. I leaned forward and began bobbing my head, keeping time with the pulsing bass line, moved by the seductive groove that I and the audience knew so well.

Eventhough they were stripped down to five players, the sound was bold,vibrant, and emotionally naked—peppered with explosive solos and elegant arrangements. Santos said there were advantages and disadvantages to a smaller band “You have to fill up the void that is created by having so few musicians. On the other hand because there are half the musicians, it leaves a lot more space for us to work with, more room for each musician to express himself The music is not as dense and  has it’s own poetry …. He said that their playlist was not that different from before. “We are still using that same well of material that comes from Cuban and Puerto Rican music and jazz and we are blending that with our original compositions."

In 2007, the quintet released their first CD entitled "Papa Mambo" dedicated to the legendary Cuban bassist, Israel "Cachao" Lopez.

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