Customer Reviews

Essential Tito Puente

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This is by far the best Tito Puente Complation I have ever heard. It captures the Master Timbalero at his prime. The remastered CD is awsome and never sounded better. It is a must for Tito Puente Fans

Very good compilation. If you are a fan of Tito Puente or a fan of Latin Music, now better known as Salsa, you can't go wrong with this two, 40 track CD set. Sony/Legacy has done a good job with their Essential series. I'm a fan of 'the old school' Latin Music, such as Tito Rodriguez, Joe Cuba, Willie Colon, etc. and not so much into the experimentation Tito Puente did with main street jazz or Latin Jazz. This compilation has some of that but not enough to turn me against it. It has a good balance of all that Tito did throughout his long and distinguished career. A good mix of all instrumental, vocals, mambos and Jazz/Latin Jazz. And who can complain when you have the original "Oye Como Va", and "Ran Kan Kan". If you are a lover of Latin Music as I am, then you must add this to your collection. It will one day be a collectors item for sure. I have many of Tito Puente's older recordings and this is one of the better ones. The remastered sound is great. You can't go wrong with this in your collection.

This is not a complete set by any means but as the title says, it is essential in order to grasp the enduring career of Tito Puente if you are not familiar with his music or are just starting out. Its two discs cover a career by giving a sampling of his work from all periods, and of course featuring the popular favorites which may have drawn people to start to listen in the first place. I highly recommend this set for the individual who has no Tito Puente but would like a small collection of some of his best works. The sound quality is great and the songs are superb. Just TRY not to dance when you play these discs!

Tito Puente may not have invented mambo but he sure was one of the best drummers in Latin music. His band played some of the greatest Latin dance songs in the history of mambo, some of which compared to the great early pioneers of mambo Perez Prado and Xavier Cugat. Tito had a little more professionalism in his arrangements, meaning his band wasn't quite as sloppy or unbalanced like Perez, and Tito's arrangements sometimes had more swing to them. Although I don't agree with the fact that Tito deserves the title king of mambo over say Perez or Xavier. Songs like Oye Como Va, which turned out to be a big hit for Santana a decade after Tito wrote it, 3-D Mambo, and Son De La Loma show Titos ability to create his own mambo pieces and add a very catchy drum and brass beat to his songs. Tito also differed slightly by using more woodwind, instead of overpowering his music with Brass instruments like early mambo performers. Tito was one of the best of his kind, and this 2 disc compilation spans his career pretty well, and contains most of his hits. This is perfect for dance parties or just to get you in a energetic mood, his music had some of the best Latin swing and this collection shows it.

IF YOU WANT TO HEAR SOME PRIMITIVE LATIN BEATS,
AND SWINGIN ARRANGEMENTS, YOU CANNOT GO WRONG
WITH THIS CD. JUST PLAY RAN KAN KAN AND YOU'RE
READY TO BLAST OFF,TO SATURN AND MARS, AND ALL POINTS
IN BETWEEN!

I don't have this album but hearded it on winamp the musics are very good in fact it has the best musics of winamps latin arquives.My favorite is the first track even knowing winamp does not put the number of the tracks it's easy to know because the melodies can not variate so much in one track and one track does not durates more than one hour.However it's worth buying it.