Ismael Rivera

Ismael Rivera, affectionately remembered as 'Maelo', ranks among the foundational voices of Puerto Rican popular music and of the salsa idiom that later carried Afro-Caribbean rhythm across the Americas.^[1] Born in the San Juan district of Santurce and active until his death in the late 1980s, he came of age in the working-class milieu of the postwar island, where street-corner singing and percussion shaped a generation of musicians.^[2] The eldest of five children of a carpenter, Rivera trained in the same trade and shined shoes as a boy, harmonising on neighbourhood corners with his lifelong companion Rafael Cortijo before the two joined the percussion section of El Conjunto Monterrey in 1948.^[3]

Rivera's professional rise owed as much to chance as to gift.^[4] A short enlistment in the United States Army during 1952 ended in his discharge, since he lacked command of English, after which Cortijo's recommendation won him the lead-vocal post in Orquesta Panamericana, where early recordings such as 'El charlatán' and 'Ya yo sé' first carried his name.^[4] By 1954 he had moved to the Combo directed by Cortijo, a partnership that elevated both men across the Caribbean dance circuit.^[5] During these years the Cuban impresario Ángel Maceda, owner of the Bronx Casino club in New York, conferred upon Rivera the honorific 'sonero mayor', and the band shared the storied Palladium Ballroom with ensembles led by Tito Puente, Tito Rodríguez and Charlie Palmieri.^[5]

The Combo's influence reached well past the ballroom.^[6] In 1959 Rivera appeared with the group in the European film 'Calipso', fronted by Harry Belafonte, and travelled through Europe and Latin America in its company.^[6] That trajectory faltered when he was arrested on a drug-possession charge after a Panamanian tour; by later accounts he accepted the blame to shield his colleagues, an episode that dissolved Cortijo's Combo and from whose surviving members Rafael Ithier built El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico.^[7] Following his imprisonment Rivera re-emerged as a bandleader with Ismael Rivera y sus Cachimbos, a venture sustained for eight years, before he reunited briefly with Cortijo on 'Juntos otra vez' and then turned to a solo career that produced his enduring anthem 'Las caras lindas (de mi gente negra)', composed by Tite Curet Alonso.^[8] Among his solo readings was 'Volare', the standard descended from Domenico Modugno's 1958 Italian song 'Nel blu, dipinto di blu'.^[9]

Rivera's later career intertwined recognition with personal hardship.^[10] He performed at a Carnegie Hall concert captured live in 1974, interpreting Bobby Capó's 'Dormir contigo', and as late as 1978 opened in Paris for Bob Marley.^[10] A devoted pilgrim to the procession of the Black Christ at Portobelo in Panama between 1975 and 1985, he composed 'El Nazareno' in its honour and earned there the sobriquet 'El Brujo de Borinquen', while the loss of his childhood friend Cortijo in 1982 wounded him profoundly.^[11] Salsa reference literature continues to seat Rivera within the genre's canon, cataloguing him among its defining interpreters beside Celia Cruz, Eddie Palmieri and Willie Colón.^[12]