Israel “Cachao” Lopez

Bassist

For the Record…

Selected discography

Sources

Film actor Andy Garcia told Lynette Rice in a Chicago Times article about Cuban bassist Israel “Cachao” Lopez, “In the music world, [Cachao is] a legend. In the … commercial world, he’s unknown.” While fame and fortune have not always been his, Lopez, who has been performing Cuban jazz for decades, has had an enormous influence on the direction this music has taken. He and the musicians he played with in the late 1930s and early 1940s in Havana developed the mambo from the more staid and traditional ballroom dance the danzón. In the mid-1950s, they applied the jazz jam session to Cuban music and created the improvised descarga.

Many members of the Lopez family were famous professional musicians. Young Israel began learning various instruments at an early age, and began playing professionally when he was only eight. While he could play guitar, trumpet, and bongos, he chose the bass as his main instrument because, as he explained to Gigi Anders of the Washington Post, “It’s the most important instrument, the foundation. There has to be a beat. An orchestra without a bass cannot speak. Just like a building, without an underlying structure, falls. It’s a rhythmic, accompanying instrument that carries the beat for all kinds of music. The ear always searches for it, and once it’s perceived, you relax.”

Lopez’s first job was in the movies, playing in an orchestra that accompanied silent films. When talkies put these musicians out of business, he moved on; by the age of 12, Israel Lopez was a full-time member of the Havana Philharmonic, as well as a number of dance bands. In 1937, he joined flautist Antonio Arcaño’s Las Maravillas. While his musical background included many types of music, Lopez preferred a distinctly Cuban music. “I was always attracted to [Cuban music] because it belonged to my country, my origins,” he told the Washington Post. “As a Latino, playing our music for Hispanic and Anglo ears is a chance to unite the Hispanic and Anglo cultures. Music is the closest way to reach all people.”

Lopez and his brother Orestes, also in the Orquesta Arcano y las Maravillas, composed and arranged most of the group’s performing repertoire of danzón, frequently more than 20 pieces in one week. The danzón, the most popular ballroom dance in Cuba in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was itself a mixture of the European contradance and the Afro-Cuban syncopated rhythms of the habanera. The Lopez brothers added riffs and swing and other jazz characteristics, and changed the danzón into the mambo. “Orestes and I wanted to give a spin to our music, turn it around a little, 180 degrees from what it was,” Lopez told the Washington Post. “So we made some

For the Record…

Born Israel Lopez, September 14, 1918, in Havana, Cuba; married, 1946; children: one daughter.

Joined the Havana Philharmonic, 1930; joined Orquesta Arcano y las Maravillas, 1937; made 16 albums in Cuba, 1945-60; left Cuba, 1962; joined the Miami Symphony, 1978; played at Alice Tully Hall in the Jazz at Lincoln Center program, 1991, and at Radio City Music Hall, 1993. Television appearances include Showbiz Today, 1994; subject of film documentary Cachao: Como Su Ritmo No Hay Dos, 1994.

Awards: Latin Music Award, Billboard, 1994; inducted into Billboard’s Latin Music Hall of Fame, 1994; Grammy Award for best tropical Latin performance, 1995, for Master Sessions, Volume 1.

Addresses: Record company —Crescent Moon/Epic, 550 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10022.

modifications, while always respecting the tradition. The idea was to give a bit more velocity to the old style.”

Lopez and his group made this new music mostly for themselves, not knowing who, if anyone, would appreciate it. Lopez said in the Washington Post: “You can never tell what will please people. When I made the mambo with Orestes, I thought ’Nobody will like this.’ It was a very explosive, spontaneous treatment. We were trying to advance our music and expected nothing to come of it. We thought people would think we were loco [crazy].” Instead, his audiences thought the new sound was marvelous, and it soon spread, quickly becoming the hottest dance worldwide. Interest in jazz by Cuban musicians kept growing in the 1940s and 1950s, and soon Lopez and his colleagues started playing and recording jam sessions—sessions of improvisation—called descarga, meaning ’discharge.’ Lopez continued to play mambas, danzón, and descarga for the next 40 years, inside and outside of Cuba.

Lopez remained with the Havana Philharmonic for 30 years, until Communist dictator Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba. The following years were difficult for Lopez, for he was unable to achieve the same level of success outside of Cuba that he had found inside. He played in New York and Las Vegas for a number of years, finally settling down and joining the symphony orchestra in Miami, Florida. Aside from the orchestra, he played with bands in clubs, remaining in quiet obscurity until the early 1990s, when Latin jazz and descarga began to enjoy something of a renaissance.

Due in great part to the efforts of Cuban-born American film star Andy Garcia, Lopez received attention when Latin jazz began to become popular again. In the early 1990s, Garcia began to promote Lopez’s performances. In 1992, he hosted a Lopez concert as part of the Cuban Music Festival in Miami. For the next two years, Garcia produced the film documentary Cachao: Como Su Ritmo No Hay Dos (Cachao: Like His Rhythm, There Is No Other). The film takes the festival concert as its point of departure. A lot of footage is of the show, interspersed with other biographical and musical material and shots of rehearsals as well as a few interviews. The film chronicles Lopez’s career from his early days in Havana up to the 1992 concert.

In 1994 Andy Garcia also produced a new recording for Lopez, Master Sessions, Volume 1. Despite his advanced years (he made the recording when he was 75), Lopez had energy to spare. As Garcia, who played percussion on the album, told the Chicago Tribune, “It’s one thing to hear them play, but to see how they play. Cachao is like no other…. We had no overdubbing. We did it in one or two takes. Everyone was playing at the same time…. It was masterminded by Cachao. It was a historical event. The music was like a live organism of sound … and he’s the driving force of the rhythm.”

Lopez started the recording session with four arrangements, and six days later had recorded 30. He arranged one piece on a cocktail napkin during a coffee break. “He then passed the pieces of paper out, saying, ’This is your piece for the trombone,’ and so on,” Garcia related in the Chicago Tribune. “When performing, he is like a child. He has the exuberance of a teenager.”

What has given Israel Lopez the ’exuberance of a teenager’ and what has kept him going through the lean years has been a deep, abiding love for what he does. He told Anders that “with music, I’m generating happiness and good humor twenty-four hours a day.” Lopez considers himself lucky, and explained to Washington Post contributor Anders that “somewhere in Heaven there must be a star called ’Contrabass’ that guided me to my instrument.” He also told Anders that he believes that “a world without music would not be possible. It’s our spiritual artery. It lifts us, makes us feel better.”

Selected discography

Cuban Jam Session in Miniature ’Descargas,’Panart, 1957.

Jam Sessions with Feeling, Maype, 1958.

Cuban Music in Jam Session, Bonita, 1961.

Cachao y su Descarga ’77, Volume 7, Salsoul Records, 1977.

Cachao y su Descarga Dos, Volume 2, Salsoul Records, 1977.

Cuban Jazz, Gema, 1981, reissued, Palladium, 1988.

Walpataca, Tania Records, 1981.

Maestro de Maestros/Israel Lopez ’Cachao’ y su Descarga ’86, Tania Records, 1986.

Master Sessions, Volume 1, Crescent Moon/Epic, 1994.

Sources

Billboard, May 7, 1994; May 21, 1994; August 6, 1994.

Buffalo News (NY), January 16, 1993.

Chicago Tribune, August 12, 1994; September 18, 1994.

Down Beat, January 1991; February 1991.

Entertainment Weekly, August 12, 1994.

Los Angeles Times, September 15, 1993.

Montreal Gazette, September 3, 1994.

New York Times, December 20, 1991; December 23, 1991; January 21, 1993; August 19, 1994.

Wall Street Journal, August 26, 1992.

Washington Post, September 14, 1994.

Additional information for this profile was provided by the film documentary Cachao: Como Su Ritmo No Hay Dos, Epic Home Video, 1994, and Crescent Moon Records publicity materials, 1994.

—Robin Armstrong