The Sublime Steadiness of Armando Peraza

From Record Store Day, a terrific previously unreleased slice of Peraza with Cal Tjader

The percussionist and the timbalero are going in. Nobody’s playing a “solo,” they’re just conversing, exchanging ideas using the interlocking elements that define Afro-Cuban music. The chipper pulse of “Maramoor Mambo” is steady and dancefloor-aware, exact and stretchy at the same time.

But there is no dancefloor – this music unfolded at the Seattle jazz club known as the Penthouse, in the mid 1960s. It’s part of an interesting Record Store Day release from Jazz Detective Records, Catch the Groove, that gathers highlights from vibraphonist Cal Tjader’s visits to the club in 1963, 1965, 1966 and 1967. The band is not a ripping mambo orchestra – it’s a quintet that features conga master Armando Peraza and drummer Johnny Rae, who switched between kit and timbales depending on the tune.

So it’s a jazz gig, or a jazz gig that glances at boogaloo and mambo – with bursts of syncopated brilliance lurking in the margins. In the Afro-Cuban dance orchestras like the ones that played New York’s famed Palladium, the foundational interlock is usually handled by four percussionists. In a quintet, the key traits of the clave pulse can quickly get lost. Two players typically can’t approximate even the rough outline of the groove. Unless one of them is Armando Peraza.

You know the Cuba-born Peraza even if you don’t know it – starting in 1972 he was part of the ferocious (and, crucially, pan-Latin) rhythm section of Santana. His first recorded contribution came on Caravanserai, the expansive fourth Santana album that was not among Columbia Records president Clive Davis’ favorites; according to legend he told guitarist Carlos Santana that the improvisational work was “career suicide.” (No comment needed.)

After that, Peraza brought his shape-shifting repertoire of congo and bongo patterns to a series of remarkable Santana creations – among them Love Devotion Surrender with John McLaughlin (1973), Illuminations (1974) and Amigos (1976).

Peraza toured with Santana for thirty years. In his last years he was celebrated as a legend, and with good reason: Peraza, who died in 2014, was one of the few direct links between the early days of Afro-Cuban jazz in the 1950s (he played with Machito, Mario Bauza and Mongo Santamaria, among others) and the later evolutionary turns into rock and funk pioneered by Santana, Malo, etc. Weird discographical side note: Peraza was also part of the percussion crew on Rick James’ 1981 megahit Street Songs, which we’ve omitted from the above playlist due to overexposure.

In between those peaks, Peraza played a pivotal, underappreciated role in translating son and mambo rhythms to a jazz context. His timing was characteristically perfect: Pop music from the mid 1950s to the mid ‘60s saw a series of crazes (see cha-cha, tiki exotica, bossa nova) that swept through the charts and created waves of copycats.

As a particular dance rhythm got hot, the labels would march their singing stars and instrumentalists into the studio to do hastily scored covers of the hits. Some (OK, many) were instantly forgettable exercises in opportunism. Some, like the series of “Latin”-themed records by the George Shearing Quintet, were sublime creations, works that honored and extended the source material. Peraza made a bunch of records with Shearing; almost all of them are beautifully recorded and suffused with an enchanting, low-key lyricism. In other contexts, Shearing could wander into impressively floral decorative excess. With Peraza, he’s all business, articulating the repetitive tumboa piano phrases in a way that reinforces the percussionist’s crisp and unwavering pulse.

Then Peraza and Cal Tjader cranked things up a few notches. After recording with Tjader several times in the ‘50s, Peraza joined the vibraphonist’s band for the 1961 Verve release In a Latin Bag. This group, also a quintet, leaned into rhythm more assertively than Shearing’s did; its book included mambos taken at breakneck tempos and swaggering son montuno grooves that anticipate New York salsa of the later ‘60s (not to mention Santana’s hit “Oye Como Va”). Tjader’s penchant for offroad exploration meshed well with Peraza’s commitment to rhythmic detail; check the consistently great studio date Soul Sauce (1965) to hear that balance of elements in action.

That record features Peraza in a three-man percussion section along with several guests. But when Tjader toured in this era, it was with a quintet, vibes, piano, bass, drums/timbales and percussion. That basic configuration is heard throughout Catch the Groove, with slight personnel changes from one engagement to the next. The first five tracks, from 1963, feature the amazingly under-known pianist Clare Fischer, with Bill Fitch handling percussion instead of Peraza. On the 1965 shows, the tandem of Peraza and Rae moves from foreground to background effortlessly, supporting Tjader with elegantly unruffled swing pulses (“On Green Dolphin Street”) as well as animated, seriously upbeat Afro-Cuban grooves (“Maramoor Mambo,” written by Peraza).

The sound is fairly uniform from one visit to the next (one quibble: I wanted to hear a bit more vibes, and at closer proximity). Listening to sets from different years, you get the sense that space was at a premium on the Penthouse stage, especially given the amount of room needed for vibes and piano and both trap kit and timbale kit. The physical closeness helps the rhythmic lock between Peraza and drummer Carl Burnett, who appears starting in 1966: Check how united the group is on the stoptime sections of “Cuban Fantasy,” and the enchanting, open-ended looseness the percussionists bring to Jobim’s “O Morro Nao Tem Vez.”

The music landscape, and the jazz landscape, changed significantly by 1967 – if you listen in chronological order to this set, it’s possible to detect a widening of the beat and a corresponding widening of possibilities. The players are growing more comfortable with each other and therefore inclined to take more risks. Among musicians and audiences there’s growing awareness that music reflects the cultural moment, and this music, this urban hybrid of ancient Afro Cuban forms and soul backbeats and jazz improvisation, seems to rise to that moment. The risk-taking becomes infectious. The interplay happens faster. The leaps go farther. There’s more tumult, more sauce, more crosstalk.

Driving that, literally pushing it onward one meticulous resonant slap after another, is Armando Peraza. We’ll close with a sliver from a 1988 concert featuring Carlos Santana, Patrice Rushen and Wayne Shorter, anchored with characteristic precision by Peraza: