(1950-2022)

Salsa music bass and percussion, 2005-2007

Obituary by Shannon Dudley

Joe Santiago, el bajista con Timba, passed away in Miami on March 28^th, 2022. The cause of death was cancer. Jose Santiago was born in Naranjito, Puerto Rico, and raised in the South Bronx, NY, where he learned music in public schools. He went on to become one of the most sought-after bass players in salsa and Latin jazz, playing and recording with influential Latin dance bands and musicians of the 1960s through the 1990s, including Machito, Mario Bauzá, Carlos “Patato” Valdés, Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri, Celia Cruz, Joe Quijano, Willie Colón, Rubén Blades, Héctor Lavoe and La Sonora Ponceña, to name just a few.

From 2005 to 2007, Joe served as a visiting artist in Ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, Seattle. In 2007 he was interviewed by Dr. Marisol Berríos-Miranda, ethnomusicologist and curator for the museum exhibit, American Sabor: Latinos and Latinas in U.S. Popular Music. In Joe’s memory I share here some of the stories he told to Marisol in that interview, in a combination of Joe’s words and my own.  

Shannon Dudley

Head of Ethnomusicology

University of Washington School of Music

*****

Joe Santiago’s first instrument was viola, which he played in his junior high school string ensemble at Public School 139 in the Bronx. One day he came upon a classmate named Willie Colón who was playing trumpet, along with another student drumming on a waste can. Colón laughed when Joe told him he played viola:

   ‘Viola, that’s a girl’s instrument!’ So ever since then, I wanted to start playing trumpet or something else … I bought a trumpet. I shined some shoes, I started hustling, … We tried to get some money together delivering supermarket, you know, we would go to the supermarket and pack things in for the people and then take it in the cart and deliver them, and they would give us like five, ten cents…. And then shoe shining, and with that, I accumulated like $15….

   Willie Colon, now we’re playing.  Now we got two trumpets. I bought this trumpet, the cornet. So we started making this little group together.

Willie Colón put together a band of teenagers who began to play at community venues. One of the places where they got important professional experience and exposure was the Hunts Point Palace in the Bronx, where impresario Federico Pagani hired young bands as warm-up acts for big name headliners like Tito Puente and Eddie Palmieri.

   So economically, for him it was really convenient, and then for us, we just wanted to play, to get the exposure …. So now we’re playing for audiences, live audiences, dancing, and we have to play good! We have to really actually get better. So we start rehearsing more. Bands start competing against each other. On Sundays they would have like 13 bands for the price of $2.50, and from 12:00 noon ’til about 12:00 midnight Sunday, you can hear 13, 14 bands for $2.50. Young bands would open up, Johnny Colón, Willie Colón, Joe Bataan, Orlando Marin, you name ’em, they had ’em.

To hone their craft, Joe and other young musicians soaked up all the musical knowledge they could from local resources like record collector and historian René Lopez.

   We used to meet up with René every Tuesday in his house and just pick his brain, and he had this wonderful collection of music, of Cuban music. Arsenio Rodriguez, the early, the roots of our music. And so we started getting into that roots stuff, you know, going back, and going back, and researching, going back further.

The young bands also tried new things that the older musicians weren’t doing, like the Latin boogaloo, a style that was popular in the mid-1960s when Joe began playing professionally.

   I think musically, the older musicians didn’t like the boogaloo. They really didn’t dig it, you know. But it was the same thing they were playing!  It was the same changes of son montuno!  It was just putting lyrics, English lyrics, and just a little backbeat to it.

The boogaloo was just part of a changing Latin music scene in New York in the 1960s. One record label that supported the new sounds was Alegre, run by Al Santiago out of his father’s record store in the Bronx, Alegre Records. Among his soon-to-be-famous clients were Johnny Pacheco, Charlie Palmieri and Eddie Palmieri. In 1961 Al Santiago put together the first Latin all star band, Alegre All Stars, and among his up-and-coming recording artists was Willie Colón. When Santiago ran into business troubles, though, Colón ended up releasing his album on the new Fania label founded by Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci. Joe Santiago played trombone on Willia Colón’s first two albums with Fania, El Malo (1967) and The Hustler (1968), before joining the navy.

Upon leaving the military in 1971, Joe turned his attention to learning the bass, the instrument for which he became famous. He began to gig with top bands, including Machito and Tito Puente. During the same time he used the GI Bill to acquire more professional skills.

   I started going to school under the GI Bill…. I went to Manhattan School of Music, studied classical there, and I went to some of the city colleges, SUNY, Hunter College. I also studied in Berklee School of Music, arranging, jazz composition, orchestration. In those days I did it in correspondence, ’cause I was working with the band, with Tito Puente, Machito. Then I started studying classical bass, jazz bass…. Now I started playing as I got better and better, and I was one of the better sight-readers, and I was being contracted a lot for recordings… The best orchestras started calling me. I started substituting for Bobby Rodriguez, Cachao. Machito started calling me. These were the names that I grew up with, you know, they were like my dream come true kind of thing. 

Joe’s career as a bass player flourished alongside the rise of salsa music in New York and internationally. As with the boogaloo, Joe understdood how salsa music was connected to Afro-Cuban roots. He had a special musical relationship with Cuban conguero Carlos “Patato” Valdes, and he earned the nickname “Timba”—a reference to the deep groove he kept, like a drummer. With all due respect to its Cuban roots, though, Joe saw salsa music as a creative space to do new things.

   Yes, salsa comes from Cuba. Yes, the Cubans have, and they use salsa, and it’s great!  They use comino, and they use, you know, recao and they use cilantro, and they use cebolla, and they use pimiento, and we do, too, the Puerto Ricans. We have our own little flavors, they have their own little flavors. The Dominicans cook their way, we cook our way. That’s what salsa is, you see. It has different seasonings, condimentos, condiments. So you can create your own salsa.  Same thing, we were doing it with the music.

Joe used the same cullinary metaphor to talk about what made his style, his sabor, distinctive.

   I don’t play the same way all the time. I try to look for something else, too, because I already know how to taste that way all the time, you know. And I might want it that day the same way, but maybe I don’t, maybe I feel different. I want to taste a little bit hotter today or, you know, a little bit of mustard. Let me try this, let me see how this would taste …

Rest in Power, Joe Santiago