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 ...

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 — ...

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 ...

The bone bruises, the callouses, the cuts, even job-related kidney stones will never send Raul Rekow into early retirement. Are you kidding? While pounding on the conga drums night-after-night may ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) – What do you do when you're an NFL coach that's been suspended for an entire season? Play congas for Jimmy Buffet, obviously. Payton was a surprise guest at a Buffet concert in New ...