In 1917, Ramon Santamaria Rodriquez was born into poverty in Havana, Cuba. Nicknamed “Mongo” (a tribal chief in Senegal), he began playing the conga drum at an early age and as a teen, Mongo ...

A true jazz giant, Ray Barretto, who died Friday at 76 in New Jersey, made his name playing conga drums on jazz and salsa records since the late 1950s. Today, he will be buried at Riverside Memorial ...

Terry "Doc" Handy discovered the congas when he was 12. Actually, it was more like he connected with them - because when he began playing the Cuban drums, he began activating the musical links woven ...

In his column this week, Jeff Weiss talks with renowned conga player Poncho Sanchez about the unlikely gringo who put him on. Today we've got another Sanchez story about an even stranger encounter — ...

He brought Afro-Cuban influences to American ensembles and dazzled audiences with his virtuosic multiple-drum technique. By Neil Genzlinger “When you talk about percussion, particularly the evolution ...

PORT JERVIS - Emedin Rivera has played conga drums and percussion around the world, whether funk and soul, jazz, Afro-Irish or background music for a wolf documentary. He has played with Larry Coryell ...

Click to open image viewer. CC0 Usage Conditions ApplyClick for more information. Many Washingtonians danced to rhythms played on this Haitian conga drum. Hide stretched taut across the drum forms its ...

Long before he became a Latin jazz legend, before he toured alongside the great Cal Tjader, Poncho Sanchez was another kid in Griffith Park carrying a conga drum and looking for someplace to play.

Don’t tell anybody, but many practitioners of Santeria, the West African religion, purchase their batas (Nigerian two-headed drums) from a Jewish artisan in Crown Heights. “It’s almost sacrilegious to ...