Mambo, From Miami To The Mountains

New release from Idelsohn Society traces the roots of the Latin-Jewish musical story.

George Robinson; Special To The Jewish Week

Although it flourished most brightly in the post-World War II era, the Jewish-Latin connection in American pop music probably goes back as far as the history of recordings will take us. Even the authors of the entertaining liner notes for “It’s a Scream How Levine Does the Rhumba: The Latin-Jewish Musical Story: 1940-1980s” admit that the origins of this musical marriage are shrouded in mystery. But as the two-CD set, issued this month by the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation, richly documents, it has been a fruitful, if occasionally dopey relationship. (As if none of us have been in one of those, right?)

As the dates of the set suggest, the high-water mark of the intermingling of Jewish and Latino music takes place with the suburb-bound Jews ceding their old ghettos, soon to be barrios, first to Puerto Ricans, then later to more variegated Hispanic-American waves of immigration. That literally common ground — think East Harlem — undoubtedly was one source of the linkage. Another, amply documented in set by Xavier Cugat’s “Miami Beach Mambo” and the Barry Sisters “Channah from Havanna [sic],” was the steady trickle of Cubans to Miami, which turned into a small tsunami when the 1960 revolution deposed Fulgencio Batista.

The Idelsohn Society mavens cheerfully acknowledge that this river flowed both ways, with the Catskills hotels becoming a genial nesting ground for Latin bands, producing such little delights as Machito’s “Mambo La Concord” and Tito Puente’s “Grossinger’s Cha Cha Cha.” The presence of Machito and a cut that pairs Candido with tenor sax great Al Cohn (on Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek,” no less), underlines another shared heritage — the advent of Afro-Cuban jazz as one of the streams of the bebop revolution.

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