In 1917, Ramon Santamaria Rodriquez was born into poverty in Havana, Cuba. Nicknamed “Mongo” (a tribal chief in Senegal), he began playing the conga drum at an early age and as a teen, Mongo ...
In his column this week, Jeff Weiss talks with renowned conga player Poncho Sanchez about the unlikely gringo who put him on. Today we've got another Sanchez story about an even stranger encounter — ...
Click to open image viewer. Many Washingtonians danced to rhythms played on this Haitian conga drum. Hide stretched taut across the drum forms its head, held by ropes wound around pegs that pierce the ...
Candido Camero, a Cuban musician who helped find new expressive directions for conga drumming, providing dynamic rhythmic accents to jazz and other forms of music, died Nov. 7 at his home in New York ...
Marcos Odara has been playing the conga drums for 39 years and teaching for the last 20. Odara hails from Salvador da Bahia, Brazil and now calls Oakland home. The drum master teaches Brazilian ...
It was 1967 and, according to Raul Rekow, "everyone in the Bay area of San Francisco was buying a conga and in any park you had 20 or 30 conga players, nobody really knowing how to play. We all would ...
These additions reveal a dedication to innovation and the level of quality that LP have become known for, while keeping the finished article reasonably affordable to most serious players. So now there ...
Oluwatayo Oluwadamilare Ajayi, widely known as Tayo Conga, is a living testament to the power of rhythm as a cultural force. Born in Ikogosi, Ekiti State, he has spent over a decade championing ...
Click to open image viewer. Percussionist Paul Hawkins played this conga drum for Melvin Deal’s African Dance and Drumming classes at The New Thing Art and Architecture Center. The community-based ...