Mongo Santamaría

Freddie King getting a good workout today.

And for the close-up, John McLaughlin, Alvin Jones and Joey DeFrancesco doing the instrumental Afro Blue, which was the song Mongo Santa Maria recorded.

in 1959, and it was first recorded on the 20th of April of that year at the Sunset Auditorium in Carmel, California, with Santa Maria on percussion.

Afro Blue was the first jazz standard built on a typical African 3-2 cross rhythm or hemi-ola.

And, of course, Afro Blue featured this week's Bullfrogs Roadhouse Hammond B3 player, Joey DeFrancesco.

You can't get more jazz and more bebop than one of its founders, Dizzy Gillespie.

That's from the album Summertime with Tillman's chromatic harmonica and also includes the famed percussionist Mongo Santa Maria.

The album was recorded live at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Montreux, Switzerland, one of the most important jazz festivals in the world, in this case on July 19, 1980.

What you heard was the title track, Summertime, the jazz standard written by George Gershwin from the folk musical Porgy and Bess.

First of all, in the 60s, when Georgie had his first hit with this song, Yeah Yeah, which was these very hip lyrics written by John Hendricks and...

It wasn't Mongo Santamaria, it was...

It was a Mongo Santamaria song, yes.

It was, okay.

We heard that, and part of what jumped out at us back then in the early 60s is he was playing a Hammond B3 organ, which wasn't that common in the early 60s, and it certainly wasn't common for a young white kid.

Just a couple more.

Um, Mongo Santamaria.

Well, yes, and he came through the bigger label as well.

Particular kind of sound, the Latin American sound that, that I wasn't doing with anybody else made it possible for us to make some pretty cool records with him.

Talk about Celia Cruz and Patato and you name it, bro.

Stories of Mongo Santa Maria.

So check out the podcast episode with sax player Mitch Froman.

A few more people show up there.

He told Les about it, and Tom decided he would produce it, so he organized this big concert at Caesar's Palace in San Francisco, the big Latin dance hall, emceed by Bill Graham, the musicians Pete and Sheila Escobedo.

There was Patato, Candido, Armando Peraza, Mongo Santamaria, this whole slew of drummers.

My name is Gregory Nava.

I first met Tom Luddy when I was a student at the University of California at Berkeley.

So for me, when people say, "What are you gonna do tonight?" I says, "Man, it's hard to decide.

I'm gonna go to the Both/And Club and, and see, uh, Miles Davis, or I'm gonna go see Mongo Santamaría, or Wes Montgomery, or the Grateful Dead, or Sly Stone," you know? And it's all, like, right there, you know? And, and so what makes it more delicious is that you can actually understand what they're doing.

You know? It's not out of the realm of, of your understanding capabilities.

And it's like if you, if you keep looking at it and hearing it from your inner ear, you can see what, what they're doing, you know? It's just a matter of, like, going home and articulating getting close to the facility.