Steve Berrios

Steve Berrios ( born February 24, 1945 in New York City; † July 25, 2013 ) was an American drummer and percussionist in the areas of Latin jazz and Cuban jazz.

Career

Steve Berrios was born in 1945 in Manhattan, NYC. His parents are from Puerto Rico and arrived in the mid -1920s in the United States; his father Steve Berrios Sr. was the drummer of the leading Latin bands of the era, as with Marcelino Guerra, Noro Morales, Miguelito Valdez and Pupi Campo. Steve Jr. first played trumpet and won some amateur competitions in the New York Apollo Theater. Finally, he moved to the drums; his major early influences were Willie Bobo and Julio Collazo, the master of batá percussion. At age 19 he had his first professional gigs when he was house drummer in a band Hotel in Manhattan; In the late 1960s he became a member of the band of Mongo Santamaria, where he remained until 1980.

Berrios soon became one of the leading Latin jazz drummer and worked throughout his career to more than 300 recordings with; he worked with the likes of Afro - Cuban jazz as Pucho & His Latin Soul Brothers, Joe Panama, Celia Cruz, Milton Cardona, Ray Mantilla, Chico O'Farrill, Hilton Ruiz, but also with artists of modern jazz, such as with David Amram, Michael Brecker, Sonny Fortune, Don Grolnick, Ron Holloway, Kenny Kirkland, Wallace Roney, Grover Washington Jr., Carla White, Randy Weston and Art Blakey, he was one of the founding members of the Fort Apache band of Jerry Gonzalez and also belonged to the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, the Mingus Big Band ( Que Viva Mingus, 1997) and Max Roach's percussion ensemble M'Boom to.

In 1994 he recorded with his band Son Bachéte that, the tenor saxophonist Peter Brainin and alto saxophonist Joe Ford belonged, among others, trumpeter Eddie Henderson, his first album under his own name, First World, on which participated as a guest singer Freddy Cole. In 1996 a second album, Steve Berrios & Son Bachéche and Then Some!, Which was nominated for a Grammy in 1996. Steve Berrios also participated in a number of film soundtracks such as Crimes and Misdemeanors ( Woody Allen, 1989), Mo ' Better Blues (1990) and Jungle Fever ( 1991) by Spike Lee, the music documentary Calle 54 (2000) by Fernando Trueba and the feature film El Cantante (2006). Berrios also published the instructional video Latin Rhythms Applied to the drum set.