Rafael Ithier of El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico arrives on the Lifetime Success and Trustees Awards presentation in Las Vegas in 2015. Ithier has died at age 99.
Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
disguise caption
toggle caption
Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP
Rafael Ithier, founding father of the emblematic salsa team El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, has died at age 99. The pianist, composer and arranger — who served because the orchestra’s longtime musical director — spent greater than six a long time turning El Gran Combo into one of the crucial premier salsa establishments of Latin The usa and past.
“Nowadays we bid farewell not to simplest a super musician, however the architect of a legitimate that marked generations,” reads a remark shared at the orchestra’s social media accounts on Sunday. “A pace-setter whose self-discipline, imaginative and prescient and love for salsa solid the historical past of El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico and of Latin track on the earth.”
Born in San Juan in 1926, Ithier started taking part in guitar when he was once 10 years previous. Consistent with the Puerto Rican nonprofit Fundación Nacional Para Los angeles Cultura Common, Ithier was once compelled to drop out of faculty at 14 with a view to financially make stronger his circle of relatives. However he persevered selecting up new tools: the Cuban tres, the double bass and ultimately the piano, which might grow to be his signature software for the rest of his profession.
In 1952, Ithier was once drafted through the U.S. Military and stationed in Korea. In a 2016 interview with the newspaper Primera Hora, he remembered how a lot he to begin with struggled there.
“I’ve to admit that I cried when I used to be sworn in as a soldier, as a result of I didn’t wish to be a soldier,” he instructed the newspaper. “It was once mandatory provider. Each time I take into account, I consider how incorrect I used to be. I am perpetually thankful as a result of I realized the self-discipline of the Military; I realized to be a person and to obey an order. That self-discipline is what I observe to my existence, and what I base my existence on.”
Ithier by no means left track some distance at the back of. After his provider, he joined a New York Town team known as The Borinqueneers Mambo Kings — named after the segregated, all-Hispanic unit of the U.S. Military — and later moved again to his house island, the place he started taking part in with Cortijo y Su Combo. The salsa orchestra, led through percussionist Rafael Cortijio, just about imploded when famend lead singer Ismael Rivera was once arrested for drug ownership in 1962. However El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico rose as a substitute, with Ithier on the helm.
As salsa was once attaining its golden age into the Seventies — combining parts of mambo, Afro-Cuban rumba and jazz in New York Town studios and golf equipment — El Gran Combo changed into the voice of the style in Puerto Rico. The 1975 tune “Un Verano en Nueva York” paid tribute to the flourishing Nuyorican diaspora at the mainland (and would get a 2d existence in Unhealthy Bunny‘s 2025 hit “NUEVAYoL”). At the 1979 vintage “Brujeria,” a booming brass segment merges with the rhythmic texture of the congas and timbales as vocalist Charlie Aponte cheekily accuses a lover of the use of witchcraft on him.
For many years, El Combo served as a casual coaching floor for dozens of salsa musicians, resulting in the nickname “los angeles universidad de los angeles salsa” (the college of salsa), which was once additionally the identify of a 1983 album. However at the same time as the crowd’s lineup modified, Ithier remained its devoted chief, recording dozens of albums and functioning on phases all over the world. In 2015, El Gran Combo won a Lifetime Success Award on the Latin Grammys.
Following information of Ithier’s dying, musicians, collaborators and politicians took to social media to proportion their condolences. “Ithier leaves at the back of an everlasting legacy in salsa,” wrote the Latin Recording Academy. “Thanks, maestro, for a existence devoted to track.”
