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 ...

Marcos Odara has been playing the conga drums for 39 years and teaching for the last 20. Odara hails from Salvador da Bahia, Brazil and now calls Oakland home. The drum master teaches Brazilian ...

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 ...

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 ...

For nearly 40 years, conguero (conga drummer) and bandleader Ray Barretto has been one of the leading forces in Latin jazz, and is widely credited for being the first U.S.-born percussionist to ...