Walfredo de los Reyes Sr. and the Invention of the Cuban Drum Kit
An interview + a playlist.
Walfredo de los Reyes, Sr.’s experiences living in both Havana and New York during his youth coincided with a crucial encounter between Cuban and American music. It’s not a surprise for Cuban music fans to see a drummer onstage rigged with timbales and a cowbell, bongos or a cajón, and of course one or more conga drums. But although the drum kit turned up in some Cuban orchestras as early as the 1930s, it would they would establish a central role in Cuban music.
De los Reyes, one of the pioneers of the Cuban-style drum set, told me how it happened:
"The moment of change came in the 1950s; that's when the drums started to sound more in Cuban music," de los Reyes, who was then in his eighties (he will turn 92 in June), told me during a couple of long and for me very memorable conversations. "All the Cuban bands already had drums, but they weren't played when it was a Cuban song." Havana dance orchestras then reserved the drums to accompany popular dance rhythms adopted from American big bands, he explained.
De los Reyes didn't see the point of this, and together with other progressive musicians he set out to break down the barriers between American drums and Cuban percussion.
"Some of us - like me and Guillermo Barreto - started experimenting with the same thing, the hi-hats, the tom-toms. I added timbales to my drums and played the two together. That was in the fifties. I had my drums and the big cymbals and all the equipment, and I incorporated it into Cuban music."
What was a natural progression for de los Reyes was seen by some as an act of rebellion.
"I was criticized a lot," de los Reyes recalls. "A lot of people didn't even know what a cymbal was. I remember playing a show at the Teatro Martí [in Havana]. I started playing. I was playing the highest cymbal, the 20-inch one, and a guy in the audience yelled at me, 'Hey, this is Cuban music, not Chinese music'!"
But the Cuban drum kit had already been born, and the set up surrounding de los Reyes on stage continued to grow.
"I was playing the congas with my left hand, and the drums with my right. Using four timbales. I had a style of playing with the Cuban rhythms of conga and timbales and all that incorporated with the drum set."
Both heir and progenitor of a family musical dynasty, Walfredo de los Reyes III (his given name) was born in Havana in 1933, and spent his teenage years studying at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan. By night, he continued his education on the big band stages, following in the footsteps of jazzmen to the clubs of Harlem.
"It was a time when everything was changing," he recalls. "Especially in New York City. Latin rhythms were being incorporated into jazz bands. You had the Cuban musicians like Mario Bauzá playing in the big bands, and Machito, and a lot of Cubans who were living in New York in the 1940s. You even have to look at the musicians who came before Chano Pozo left Cuba and joined Dizzy Gillespie. That was the big change, having a conga in a jazz band."
"But Chano wasn't the first and he wasn't the only one," he continues. "Cuban musicians were going to New York and meeting the musicians, and adopting the jazz that was being played there. And I was part of all that. As a kid, when I was 12, 13, 14, 15 years old, I was watching all that growing up."
De los Reyes was also known as Walfredo de los Reyes, Jr. (as his name appeared in album credits). It was his father's career that brought the family to New York: the then Walfredo de los Reyes, Sr., former trumpeter and singer of the Casino de la Playa orchestra in Cuba, had moved to the Big Apple to work in the orchestra of pianist Anselmo Sacasas, another member of the Casino. In 1950, the family returned to Havana. The younger Walfredo added the Sr. to his name after his father retired.
"The fifties was an incredible era because the war was over in the forties - it was in '46, '47, '48, '49 that it all started. Musicians came back who had been in different countries playing in military bands, doing their service in Europe or Asia. And when they came back to the United States their heads were full of music that they had heard, music that was very different than the music that was then being heard in the United States."
"And the same thing happened in Cuba, and in South America, in countries like Brazil and Venezuela. All the young musicians at that time were looking for something new. And I was part of that. That's why I say that the fifties was a glorious time for all countries. Because every musician was experimenting with his music, with his folklore, and also with the folk music of the United States, which is jazz. And the blues. So we were combining. USA was listening to Cuba and Cuba was listening to USA".
For de los Reyes, the fifties was a decade of playing almost 24 hours a day, "where every day you heard a different rhythm or style," created by musicians like him, who marked the vanguard of Cuban music, and at the same time turning the history of jazz into his own.
"There were always people recording and recording and recording and recording, every day," de los Reyes recalls. "I was making like four records a week with different musicians. A lot of times I'd be hanging out there and they'd say, Walfredo, come play. And I would play."
De los Reyes played in the evenings with a succession of orchestras: with his father, with the various groups of pianist and composer Julio Gutiérrez, and with his own bands. Among many other vocalists, including Nat King Cole and La Lupe, de los Reyes accompanied Eartha Kitt when she traveled to Havana in 1956 to open the Café Parisien at the Hotel Nacional.
Among numerous other records on which de los Reyes appears - with or without credit - he participated in three of the five Cuban Jam Session albums on the Panart label. It was on the album Cuban Jam Session Vol. 5 led by José Fajardo that he stood out as a soloist.
Playlist: Cuban Drum Set
A playlist spotlighting the evolution of the Cuban drum kit, featuring Walfredo de los Reyes Sr., Guillermo Barreto, Dafnis Prieto, Changuito, Enrique Pla, Oscarito Valdés, Jimmy Branley, Horacio "El Negro" Hernández and more.
“You can hear a different way of playing when you listen ot “Pa’ Coco Solo” or “Junaiquita. It’s different from when you hear someone just playing timbales.”
In 1960 he released Cuban Jazz, a fierce album of American tunes mixed with Cuban rhythms featuring Cachao, Luis Escalante, Paquito Hechavarría and the great Afro-Cuban percussionists Los Papines.
"That album was incredible," says de los Reyes, who regrets that it has not been given the importance it deserves and has been practically forgotten. He also confesses that he doesn't know who currently owns the rights to the album. Like most of his pre-revolutionary recordings, he does not know where his royalties have gone.
In 1962, de los Reyes left Cuba: "I left Cuba, but of course the music continued," he says. He returned to New York, where he began recording albums in tune with the decade, such as Latin Twist with Tito Rodríguez.
After spending several years in Puerto Rico, in 1970 he went to Las Vegas, where he worked for a decade performing with a continuous parade of Vegas stars such as Sammy Davis Jr, Tony Bennett and Rita Moreno.
De los Reyes’ album Ecué: Ritmos Cubanos with American jazz drummer Louie Bellson, released in 1976 on Pablo Records, is a monster summit of progressive Cuban music and jazz that also features the bassist Cachao and conga player Francsico Aguabella.
That album also features de lor Reyes’ son, Walfredo "Wally" Reyes, Jr., known as drummer of the rock groups Santana and Chicago. The artistic legacy of the de los Reyes family has also been cemented by the sons of Walfredo Sr. percussionist Daniel de los Reyes and the late actor Kamar de los Reyes.
