Ignacio Piñeiro
photo: lezamian76 · cc by-sa 3.0 ↗By sixteen, Ignacio Piñeiro was already directing a Havana clave choir called El Timbre de Oro, and no one had formally taught him a note of it. Raised in Pueblo Nuevo by an Afro-Cuban mother and an Asturian father who never married her, he worked docks and coal carts between rehearsals. The choirs of his youth ran on collective ear alone: "todo era trasmitido de boca en boca," one biographer writes, mouth to mouth, "la escuela era ellos mismos" — the school was themselves. Piñeiro carried that self-taught instinct through Los Roncos, the rumba choir he led until 1912, until 1926, when a touring sexteto needed a bassist. He founded his own Septeto Nacional the following year and spent four decades writing roughly three hundred sones, among them "Échale Salsita," whose chorus gave Cuban music the word salsa.
When bandleader María Teresa Vera needed a bassist for her Sexteto Occidente in 1926, Piñeiro didn't own the instrument, let alone play it. Vera taught him herself; one biographer's account puts it plainly, calling her "su mayor ayuda para aprender a tocar el contrabajo" — "his biggest help in learning to play the double bass." He recorded with her that year on the group's Columbia session in New York, then spent a year on her bandstand before founding his own Septeto Nacional in 1927, carrying the bass with him as its director for the next four decades.
listen forListen to the double bass on Sexteto Occidente's "No me engañes," cut in 1926, the year Vera taught Piñeiro the instrument: it holds a steady, unhurried walk beneath the guitar and voices, never soloing, always anchoring. Three years later on the Septeto Nacional's "Suavecito," that same patient walk is the floor Piñeiro's own band builds its call-and-response coro on — the hands are his now, but the method is still hers, driving a group he leads himself.