Tito Matos, a grasp percussionist, revered educator and lifelong champion of the Puerto Rican type of music often called plena, died on Jan. 18 in San Juan, P.R. He was 53.
His spouse, Mariana Reyes Angleró, stated the trigger was a coronary heart assault.
Mr. Matos was a virtuoso of the requinto, the smallest and highest-pitched hand-held drum, or pandereta, utilized in plena. Rooted in African tune traditions, plena emerged within the early twentieth century on the southern coast of Puerto Rico and got here to be often called “el periódico cantado,” or “the sung newspaper.” In street-corner type, it narrated tales, some gossipy, about love and the considerations of on a regular basis working-class and Black Puerto Ricans. In its early years, rich elites maligned the style.
Mr. Matos was a member of a number of plena teams however first gained broad recognition with the band Viento de Agua, based in New York in 1996. It reimagined plena and bomba, one other Afro-Puerto Rican type of music and dance, by infusing them with jazz textures, exuberant horn sections and Cuban batá rhythms.
For Mr. Matos, the band’s first album, “De Puerto Rico al Mundo” (1998), opened the door to a dynamic profession that reworked him into one of many foremost plena practitioners of his era.
Héctor René Matos Otero was born on June 15, 1968, within the Río Piedras district of San Juan, considered one of three youngsters of Héctor Matos Gámbaro and Hilda I. Otero Maldonado. His father was an accountant and a salsa fanatic; his mom is a homemaker.
Raised in Villa Palmeras, a barrio of the Santurce part that’s thought of a nexus of bomba and plena, Héctor embraced plena as an 8-year-old when his grandfather gave him his first pandereta, for the Three Kings Day vacation. Héctor had no formal musical coaching and couldn’t learn sheet music, however his love for plena was planted.
He moved to New York in 1994 and finally accomplished a level in panorama structure at Metropolis Faculty. He entered a brand new diasporic neighborhood of musicians, becoming a member of Los Pleneros de la 21, an intergenerational East Harlem ensemble, and studying from plena masters who had migrated to New York within the Nineteen Forties and ’50s.
In New York, he met Ricardo Pons and Alberto Toro, two saxophonist-arrangers. “Tito was hooked on plena,” Mr. Pons stated in a telephone interview. “Un fiebrú,” he added, laughing, “like he had a fever.”
Traditionally, solely sure households have been custodians of plena, charged with conserving its traditions and rhythms alive. “It was an issue, as a result of they have been very restrictive,” Mr. Matos stated in an interview in 2010.
As a substitute, Viento de Agua sought innovation. “It was not about conserving plena or bomba,” Mr. Pons stated; “it was about doing no matter we needed with it.”
The group’s album “De Puerto Rico al Mundo” was infused with an irreverent, imaginative spirit. Writing in The New York Occasions, Peter Watrous praised it as “exuberant and raucous.”
The group carried out in Mexico, Cuba and throughout the USA, generally accompanied by a full jazz band.
“Tito was tremendous, tremendous gregarious and charismatic,” Ed Morales, a journalist, creator and buddy of Mr. Matos, stated in a telephone interview. Mr. Matos, he added, had a particular potential to achieve Puerto Ricans each on the island and within the diaspora and instill in them a way of communion — significantly when he carried out at a biennial live performance at Hostos Group Faculty within the Bronx.
“You actually obtained to really feel the connection between individuals in Puerto Rico and other people in New York greater than nearly some other place,” Mr. Morales stated.
Within the early 2000s Mr. Matos returned to Puerto Rico, the place he turned an educator and cultural advocate. He co-founded Plenazos Callejeros, a month-to-month initiative that gathered musicians throughout Puerto Rico for spontaneous plena performances on avenue corners.
“He obtained numerous younger individuals to only decide up a pandereta,” Mr. Morales stated — “individuals who weren’t essentially occupied with plena, as a result of perhaps they thought it sounded corny or one thing, or it wasn’t like salsa or hip-hop or reggaeton.”
As we speak, plena is present process a cultural renaissance; in recent times it has performed a central position in progressive political gatherings and protests in Puerto Rico, together with these in the summertime of 2019 that led to the resignation of Gov. Ricardo Rosselló.
Subsequent initiatives led Mr. Matos to collaborate with stars like Eddie Palmieri, Ricky Martin and the jazz saxophonist and composer Miguel Zenón. Mr. Matos later based the band La Máquina Insular, which targeted on returning plena again to its roots.
In 2015, he and his spouse based La Junta, a bar and efficiency area in Santurce, the place they hosted dwell music and plena workshops. Hurricane Maria destroyed the area in 2017, however its spirit was revived in “La Casa de la Plena,” a historic exhibition, curated by the couple, that opened in Could 2021 on the Taller Comunidad La Goyco, a neighborhood heart they established in an deserted Santurce college constructing they’d renovated.
Along with his mom and his spouse, whom he married in 2013, Mr. Matos is survived by their son, Marcelo; two youngsters from earlier marriages that led to divorce, Celiana and Héctor; a brother, Yan Matos Otero; and a sister, Glennis Matos Otero.
On Jan. 21, Mr. Matos was honored with an immense procession in Santurce. Associates, members of the family and dozens of followers walked the streets, drumming on panderetas and singing phrases of gratitude. “Muchas gracias, te amamos,” they chanted — “Thanks very a lot. We love you.”
