A Mind for Congas

    It is an archetypical story of American culture – a young white man hears black music and falls in love with it. From then on, he dedicates himself to his love for rhythms that found their way to America through African slaves who were brought here from across the ocean. Ferriday, Louisiana had seen a story like this one sixty years ago. It was in this tiny hamlet that teenager Jerry Lee Lewis crept out of the house at nighttime to hang out at a "juke joint" where black bands played Boogie and Blues. Lewis had his first world hit with "Whole Lotta Shakin‘ Going On" in 1957. Around the same time, one night, teenager Martin Cohen stood in front of the jazz club "Birdland" on 52nd Street in Manhattan: "The band of Cal Tjader was playing. But I was too young to get in." Still, Cohen heard enough to fall in love. "I was simply overwhelmed by the music with its driving, complex rhythms." Soon he spent every Monday night at the "Birdland," when musicians from jazz and Latin bands got together for jam sessions.
    Martin Cohen recognized early on that he lacked the talent for a career as musician. He found other ways to take part in the Afro-Caribbean culture of Latin music. The 73-year-old Cohen recently sat down to a conversation with aufbau and described how it happened that he became the leading maker of instruments for the scene. Cohen lives half an hour's drive Northwest of New York City in a quiet suburban neighborhood, where his roomy bungalow is one among many homes under wintery bare deciduous trees lining the streets. He is stocky and of a strong build with his head shaved. He huddles in warm, dark-blue gym clothes. If at all, only his horn-rimmed glasses suggest that he spent decades with hipsters and musicians. His speech is measured, in a deep, rolling voice. He demonstrates the rigorous honesty of an engineer who faces problems head-on without giving in to illusions. Cohen explains the driving force behind his life's work had been a persistence of necessity "born purely from existential fears" – the pressure of not defaulting on his mortgage.

Making Instruments

    Cohen had acquired this sense of duty from his father, who had come to the United States as an immigrant from Romania. Working in the fur business, the family had to struggle with seasonal unemployment. "We were so poor that my mother had to help make ends meet by taking on sewing work," says Cohen. As so many other Jewish kids in New York, when he was a teenager, he went to the Catskills for the summer months to find work in one of the countless hotels: "It was a C-class property in Roscoe, New York. We had no bands come in and play. But we had a dance instructor who played cha-cha-cha-records." Although he denies having any talent as a dancer, he admits his fascination with this music that was enormously popular at the time. During the following fall he found his way to the Birdland. Cohen then became witness to a transformative period: "It was the end of the glorious big band era in Latin music. The large orchestras dissolved because they could not afford to stay together and were replaced by smaller combos, so-called charangas." The wave of immigration from Puerto Rico that had started during the Second World War had not only brought many new musicians to New York but also audiences that crowded the hundreds of clubs and concert halls. Soon Cohen was no longer satisfied with only being a fan. He photographed musicians like Tito Puente or Dizzy Gillespie and cultivated a close relationship with the great conga player Mongo Santamaria. While studying at New York City College, Cohen became a sort of general caretaker of the Cuban: "I shot photos for this posters and drove him around town." It was a lasting friendship; even after Cohen found a job as an engineer at Bendix Corporation, the technology company. Around that time he first embarked on a project that would later cost him his job: "I was so impressed especially by the bongo player Jose Mangual that I wanted to learn the bongos myself. But bongos were almost impossible to find in the early 60s."
    Artisans from Cuba had traditionally supplied New York musicians of Puerto Rican  descent with congas, bongos as well as any other drums and percussion instruments. Following preindustrial African traditions in music, ratchets (quiros) or rattle drums (quijadas, cabasas) were made of natural materials, like pumpkins or coconuts. With biblical connotations, the quijada consisted of a donkey's lower jawbone, which the percussionist brought to a rattle (a classic example for the sound is Cal Tjader's hit "Soul Sauce" from 1964). But when the revolution overtook Cuba in 1959, Washington instituted a strict embargo over the island also cutting off the import of musical instruments.
    Cohen reverted to his gifts as an engineer and tinkerer and took the constructing of bongos upon himself: "It was true detective work. I had to find out endless details on mass and material. I used to call a still sleeping Mongo occasionally early in the morning from my job asking him: And what type of wood is it? Ah, caoba wood!" Cohen found blocks of this type of mahogany wood at an art supply shop Manhattan. After some searching, he also found a foundry in New Jersey that would make the metal fittings for the small double-set of drums: "Manufacturing in the United States was already on its way down, even back then. I was lucky to find this company. The owner was a quite unpleasant and ill-tempered person. I had a great deal of trouble talking him into the project; but we still work together with his company, even today." Cohen demonstrated his prototypes to various musicians, thus gradually optimizing the design: "Latin culture does not like conflict. Therefore, it was a very tedious undertaking to get some clear answers. I had to talk with different people over and over until I was able to fabricate bongos of professional quality."
    Always trying to improve on his work, Cohen records his talks with musicians and other conversation partners even today. As a byproduct, he managed to compile an archive that probably holds the same interest for musicologists as do the tens of thousands of photos that Cohen has been taking of the Latin scene since the 1950s.
    After being forced to concede his own lack of talent on the drums, Cohen started making customized bongos for individual musicians. Then in 1964, he had to make a choice between either giving up this hobby altogether or going out all the way and dedicating himself completely to instrument building: "Bendix finally kicked me out on my ear, when I spent most of my time at the office working on bongos." The time that followed was difficult. Cohen also took up the making of congas and cowbells. But for years, he paid his mortgage and fed his small family only with great difficulty: "I worked harder than any of the other people around me." Cohen was not concerned with the cultural significance of the percussion instruments at the core of Latin culture that span a sort of umbilical cord to Africa: "I was so focused on mere survival that I had no time to ponder these questions."
    His persistence started paying off when the then 25-year-old Cohen met and got to know musicians from the bands of the large TV stations at "Jim & Andy‘s" bar (according to Cohen, Andy was bar owner Jim's cat). Their studios were close by in Midtown Manhattan: "Drummer Bob Rosengarden asked me to come up with a more stable donkey's jawbone." This is how Cohen's got his start as an innovator. With the development of the "vibra-slap" he created a metal version of the instrument that is true to the sound of the quijada. But it was also his first patent: "We still build the instrument almost unchanged, even today," says Cohen with pride. Then followed a metal cabasa rattle as well as congas made of fiberglass: "Latin musicians are committed traditionalists and very suspicious of change. But aside from the fact that my instruments are easier to hold, they are also louder than the originals and have a purer sound."

Contact Broken Off

    From a historical perspective, Cohen stands at the point of transition from traditional Cuban and Puerto Rican music forms to urban Latin styles like salsa that celebrated great international successes around 1970 under the Fania label. As a builder, Cohen almost had a monopoly at the time and was able to expand his sales by clever marketing. For example, in 1978, he sent a quintet to Europe and Japan to popularize the instruments that he was offering through his company "Latin Percussion" (LP) abroad. Although Cohen sold his company in 2002, he is still tied to "LP" as a consultant. During all this, Cohen has always been keenly aware of his role as an outsider. Even though his second wife is a Latina, Cohen never learned to speak Spanish: "I didn't have time to worry about my role in the scene. Some people have looked at me as an interloper, or as the Jew who takes advantage of the lack of instruments in order to make money. But without me, none of these musicians would have been able to play at all."
    He suffered a shock when Mongo Santamaria unexpectedly cut off contact with him, without warning. Even today, Cohen has a hard time coming up with an explanation: "Perhaps Mongo wanted a share of my profits." The black-skinned Cuban may have felt cheated by the white-skinned fan whom he had helped initially getting into the starting blocks. But Cohen also formed close friendships with the conga player Carlos "Patato" Valdez and other greats of Latin music. Together with the late Valdez, who passed in 2007, Cohen collaborated on the development of a successful conga for "LP."
    Today, Cohen offers the scene a rare opportunity to vie for public attention. The formerly vibrant club scene has all but disappeared: "In those days, a good conga player could easily feed his family by playing the club scene. But today, even excellent musicians have trouble keeping their heads above water – most young people no longer know how to do the dances, and people sit in front of their television sets instead of being out on the town at night." This is why Cohen set up a studio at his house where he lets singers and bands perform for his YouTube channel "martincongahead." Some of the clips had hundreds of thousands of hits.
    At the end of our conversation Cohen mentions his son Matt who started the blog "BongoBoy"(http://itsbongoboy.com) in 2009. Matt interviews young musicians for his blog who are for the most part from the hip hop scene. Shaking his head, Cohen remarks that nowadays white kids from suburban neighborhoods in New Jersey like his own attract attention as rappers. Among them are young Jews like Mac Miller and Asher Roth: "They never had any contact with life in black inner city ghettos, but they feel that hip hop urgently speaks to them." In fact, this is not really surprising – the same happened to Cohen, he lived this story  more than 55 years ago. In the meantime, Matt "Bongo Boy" Cohen follows in the footsteps of this father. On the day of our interview, the 21-year old was busy in Brooklyn introducing Mac Miller to young hip hop fashion designers.

Andreas Mink is the U.S. correspondent of Jüdische Medien AG.