Bauzá, Mario

(b. 28 April 1911 in Havana, Cuba; d. 11 July 1993 in New York City), musician who was essential to the incorporation of Caribbean African and Caribbean Hispanic rhythms and melodies into jazz.

Mario Bauzá was one of six children born to Hilario and Dolores Bauzá, but Mario was raised through nearly all of his childhood by his godparents, Arturo Andrade and Sofia Domínguez Andrade. The Andrades were members of an influential Havana family, Vieta-Placencia, and were materially quite secure. Arturo Andrade was a music teacher and realized that young Mario had an innate gift for melody and rhythm. As part of Andrade’s disciplined parenting style, four-year-old Mario received weekly music lessons in solfege (melody and rhythm skills) with Modesto Fraga, conductor of the Havana Municipal Band. During that time, Mario began to play the oboe, which he did not much enjoy, saying that it “sounded Chinese” to him.

After quitting the oboe, Mario’s godfather provided the boy with a specially sized clarinet for Mario’s seven-year-old hands in order to study the clarinet with Gabriel Siam. For the next eight years, Mario studied at the Havana Conservatory of Music, winning a scholarship to La Scala in Italy in his final year. Mario declined the scholarship, refusing to go to Europe. He felt that European orchestral studies were not appropriate to Afro-Cuban musicians. Instead, at the age of fifteen, he became one of three clarinetists in the Havana Symphony Orchestra.

Mario also performed with many popular dance bands in Cuba. He performed in New York City for one month in 1926, with the Orquesta Antonio Maria Romeu. During that trip he heard the dynamic jazz ensembles of Fletcher Henderson and Charles Johnson as well as the Paul White-man Orchestra. He became fascinated by the saxophone sections in these early swing bands and bought an alto sax in New York and taught himself to play it. Back in Cuba, Bauzá began incorporating some of the jazz he had heard in New York into the music of Cuban bands. He dreamed of synthesizing Afro-American jazz and Afro-Cuban dance music, envisioning a new music that had the rich harmonies and spontaneities of jazz and the architectural rhythmic syncopations {claves, cascaras, and bombos) and complex orchestral call-and-response patterns of his beloved Cuban dance music.

In 1930 Bauzá traveled again to New York, this time with the Orquesta Don Azpiazú, and began to introduce Cuban music to the New York jazz scene. He played with Noble Sissle’s society orchestra. When Antonio Machin, a fellow Cuban musician, needed a replacement trumpet player for a recording session, Bauzá bought a $15 trumpet from a Fifty-ninth Street pawnshop and taught himself to play it in just two weeks. He modeled his trumpet playing after Louis Armstrong. His strong tone and rhythmic accuracy earned him a chair on many 1930s Cuban recordings in the United States. The jazz drummer and bandleader Chick Webb hired Bauzá as a section trumpeter in 1933 and within a year named him musical director ofthat historic group. A year later, Bauzá persuaded Webb to hire a then-unknown young singer named Ella Fitzgerald. After six years collaborating with Webb and Fitzgerald, he left to perform with the Don Redman and Fletcher Henderson jazz orchestras, helping with musical arrangements and unerringly hiring the best young players.

Bauzá returned to Cuba briefly in 1936 to marry his childhood sweetheart, Stella (Estela) Grillo. They returned to the United States and a year later sent for Stella’s brother and fellow musician, Frank Raùl Grillo, known to all as “Machito.” The visionary collaborations of Bauzá and Machito would soon change the American musical scene.

By 1938 Bauzá was performing with the Cab Calloway Orchestra at the Cotton Club in New York City. At a jam session, he heard a young trumpet player named John Birks Gillespie (though everybody called him “Dizzy”) and saw to it that Calloway hired this future giant of jazz. Bauzá resigned from Calloway’s band in 1940 and formed the Afro-Cubans with Machito. After several months of rehearsal, the band, a group of Latin and black musicians who played authentic Cuban rhythms in the big-band style, debuted at the Park Plaza, though many New York booking agents objected to the directness of the term “Afro-Cuban.”

Apparently, the crowds did not mind so much. For the next seven years, the band played at Harlem clubs and the Concord Hotel in the Catskills, recorded nearly fifty singles (the first in 1941 for Decca Records), and eventually helped open the Palladium Ballroom, “the home of the mambo.” The band flourished through Bauzá’s skills at orchestration, collaboration, band management, and spectacle. Cuban and Puerto Rican legends like Noro Morales. Marcel-lino Guerra, Chano Pozo, Tito Puente, and Bobby Rodriguez often teamed up with the jazz greats Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Buddy Rich, Herbie Mann, and Cannonball Adderley.

For thirty-five years, the Afro-Cubans worked constantly and served as a proving ground for all the talented players Bauzá hired. His arrangements were most instrumental to the group’s success, as were Machito’s singing and conducting. The Afro-Cubans opened for Thelonious Monk at the Hollywood Bowl and performed on the recording executive Norman Granz’s album Jazz at the Philharmonic. As the years passed, Bauzá put aside the trumpet and concentrated on writing and orchestrating.

By 1975 Bauzá and Machito had gone their separate musical ways. Bauzá launched the Afro-Cuban Jazz Orchestra with the singer Graciela, another of Machito’s sisters. The band took ten long years to find perfection. During this time, Stella Bauzá, his wife for forty-seven years, died. Though Mario and Stella never had children, Mario remained the proud uncle and godfather to an ever-expanding family.

Bauzá received the New York City Mayor’s Award for Art and Culture in 1984. Two years later, he recorded, along with Graciela, the critically acclaimed album Afro Cuban Jazz. Five more years of world tours ensued. In 1990 he married Lourdes Noboa. The following year, at the age of 80, Bauzá recorded the very first album on which he did not share credit or top billing, Tanga. Within two years, two more historic albums emerged, My Time Is Now and 944 Columbus. Each was recognized as the work of a master craftsman. Six months after his last album’s completion, Bauzá died at home, at the pinnacle of his writing success.

Without the pioneering artistry of Mario Bauzá, the history of Afro-Cuban music in the twentieth century would have been very different. Bauzá was essential to the early incorporation of Caribbean African and Caribbean Hispanic rhythms and melodies into jazz. He was equally essential to the incorporation of jazz harmonies and improvisation techniques into the mid-century Cuban society orchestra. Bauzá was the principal interlocutor between two previously isolated musical communities—New York jazz and Cuban dance music. The synthesis of these two styles in the 1940s was critical to the further expansion of bebop into what is called Afro-Cuban. This synthesis also paved the way for the later infusions of mambo, cha cha, samba, bossa nova, rock steady, reggae, and ska into North American dance music.

There is as yet no full-length study of Bauzá, but see John Tumpak, “Historical Impact of Webb and Bauzá,” Dancing USA 15, no. 1 (Feb/Mar. 1997), and Michael Erlewine, ed., All Music Guide to Jazz, 2d ed. (1996). An obituary by Peter Watrous is in New York Times (12 July 1993). Bauzá is interviewed in Musica (1984), a documentary film directed by John D. Wise tracing the history of Latin jazz in the United States from the 1940s to the 1970s.

James McElwaine