Puente and the Charlotte Symphony Find an Audience That Wants to Dance

by Perry Tannenbaum

June 26, 2010, Charlotte, NC: While his dad recorded 160 albums, won seven Grammys, and appeared in movies and on TV (most notably on The Bill Cosby Show), the son of “The King of Latin Music” has had a relatively diminutive musical career. But in paying tribute to his legendary father at Symphony Park with the Charlotte Symphony, Tito Puente, Jr., proved to be quite a princely bandleader in his own right. Chosen as the headliner for Symphony’s first-ever ticketed event in their traditional Summer Pops series, Puente played the titles best-recalled by Anglos familiar with the family name, “Oye Como Va” and “Ran Kan Kan.” Sporting a matched set of “Got Mambo?” tee-shirts behind their leader, who promised to sign newly released CDs by the same title after the concert, the band offered a spicy foretaste from the album with “Jr’s Mambo.”

The younger Puente stands front and center of his Orquesta like his father, emcees personably, an accent intruding only when he speaks Spanish, and plays a mean set of timbales. He certainly didn’t mistake what his audience came to hear, turning up the heat immediately on two of the Puente Sr. compositions that appear on his En los Pasos de Mi Padre tribute album, “Mambo Gozon” and “Que Sera.” Unlike the album cuts, neither of which is sustained for even four minutes, the live performances provided Puente’s flashy drumsticks and his pianist, Marlow Rosado, more time in the spotlight. It wasn’t wasted on either of these flamboyant musicians.

Disproving the record industry’s misgivings about issuing dance tracks longer than four minutes, the audience queued onto the cart path that fronts the greensward at Symphony Park and turned it into a makeshift dancehall, repeatedly going the extra distance with the Orquesta’s longer live versions. Of course, dancers deserve mercy after a couple of torrid workouts, so there was an oasis of calm in Agustin Lara’s “Noche de Ronda” and again, before the onslaught of Puente’s greatest hits, with “Cuando Calienta el Sol.”

There was also a poignant sense of Puente Sr.’s presence deep into the concert when Tito Jr. declared that the orchestrations they would be playing by his father had never been performed before he died in 2000 at the age of 77. Otherwise, it must be stated that the Charlotte Symphony, as often happens when they share the bandshell with pop stars, was woefully underutilized despite Puente’s effusive praises. When violinist Jane Hart Brendle took a solo during “Oye Como Va,” she eloquently underscored the possibilities.