How could I possible resist Sr. Santos' cabeza of pathos? The full glass of port; the longing look at the photo of a love that was once his; the snazzy cufflinks. This guy's a latin lover if there ever was one.
Santos hails from Puerto Rico, though fame found him in New York City in the 1940s, playing with many of the then-famous Latino bands.
The orchestration on all of the songs on this album are simple--light guitar, small drums, and an occasional group of background singers now and then. At times, Santos move back and forth between lyrical, pop-like crooning and confessional talk-story, spilling his heart to us.
This album illustrates to me the wonders of record bin diving: discovering history (musical but also political) that might otherwise be forgotten. Santos' story is well worth re-discovering. To the casual listener, Santos' music sounds like much of the music coming out of 1940s New York: simple orchestration, "ethnic" themes (very popular in Greenwich Village at the time), and watered-down versions of "exotic" music, made catchy for popular audiences in the US and NY music execs trying to cash in on night club successes. And there's no doubt that this album was made for that audience and that Santos courted that audience while in New York in the early 40s. Quite simply, that's where the money was. He played with a number of the popular bolero bands at the most respected clubs and was making a decent living for himself, having been invited to join the reasonably-famous Cuarteto Flores group.
And then came WWII.
Santos was drafted and did his service to his adopted country in Maui and Kentucky, far away from the world of his success and his familiarity. Away from the bohemian and ethnically-diverse world of NYC, Santos was exposed to some of the harsh racism and discrimination that characterized parts of the US in the 1940s, and he found his fellow officers particularly disdainful. When his term of service ended, rather than returning to New York, he fled to Puerto Rico and joined the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, a group that would be labelled as a terrorist organization after several of its leaders attempted to assassinate President Truman and several Congressmen.
Several years later, Santos travelled to Cuba, where he wrote "Sierra Maestra," which Fidel Castro adopted as his movement's official anthem. Take a listen: we are far, far, far from the languid tones that characterize the songs on "Delirium."
Santos spent the last thirty years of his life traveling and playing his music all throughout Latin and South America, recording over 80 record albums (and marrying at least 12 women!).
Musically, Santos was hardly revolutionary, and his music alone does not distinguish him from a number of other performers who emerged from the arrival of Latin American-influence on both Jazz and Pop music. Tito Puente counts Santos as an influence, but Puente took far more risks (and had many more skills) than Santos, even on a good night. Santos might well have been the model for the TV character of Ricky Ricardo--at least as a musician--except for the fact that there were numerous other musicians from this period who might claim this title.
But Santos' life is certainly worth noting, first to recognize that while a small sub-section of America embraced the music of Latin America, a large portion of Americans still treated Latinos as outsiders and as second-class citizens; and second, for the fascinating way that Santos' life intersects with that of Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution. Before the War, Santos was on the road to commercial success and stardom (as exemplified by the Delirium album); yet only 10 years later, his songs are used to fuel the communist revolution in Cuba (a revolution that, ironically, forced Santos to flee from Cuba years later when his highly-successful nightclub was nationalized).
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