at this link<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
St. Pete Catalyst: Fifty years in the business of show. How does that feel to you?<\/p>\n
Willy Chirino: It feels great, for many reasons. People say to be, 50 years \u2013 it must have been hard. But to me, it wasn\u2019t hard because I was doing exactly what I loved to do. I was getting applause and recognition, and people singing my music, and that\u2019s awesome. Most of the time, if not all of the time, when I start the show I am more tired than when I finish, two hours later. Because people give you energy.<\/p>\n
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Were there many challenges to getting to this point?<\/p>\n
Oh many, even before I became a musician. I was 14 years old when I came to the United States. It was August 26, 1961. For some reason, we never felt down on our luck. We were a different type of exiles. We weren\u2019t here for any other reason which wasn\u2019t political. As soon as the Cuba situation got resolved, we expected we would go back to Cuba.<\/p>\n
For example, who would\u2019ve thought, in 1961, that a government declared Communist would survive 90 miles away from the United States?<\/p>\n
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Are you saying that everyone thought Castro would be gone quickly?<\/p>\n
Absolutely, we all thought about that, and we were anxious for that to happen, to go back to Cuba. We never wanted to stay and live here. But as time went by, we started to get the feeling of living in the United States. We started to plant grounds here, and do what we had to do not only to survive but to achieve the American Dream. And some of us did that. Others didn\u2019t, but most of us did that, that group of exiles that came in the \u201860s and early \u201870s.<\/p>\n
You know, they came here without any money, but with the knowledge of how to survive. How to be successful in business. Because back in Cuba, they knew how to do it, what to do, what steps to follow to become successful.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s why Miami became the city that it is, because all these Cuban guys that arrived here without a penny started making construction, creating businesses and restaurants, and any type of business possibilities.<\/p>\n
I was a child, a student in high school, and I had a newspaper route of the Miami News. I delivered 300 newspapers after school. I washed the dishes at lunchtime, in order not to be charged the fifty cents that it cost to pay for lunch.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m laughing because I tell these stories to my kids, and my grandkids, and they don\u2019t believe it. \u2018Did you do that?\u2019 \u2018Yes, I had to do it.\u2019<\/p>\n
And we did it not feeling down on our luck. We were doing it with our heads up high.<\/p>\n
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Did you ever reunite with your family?<\/p>\n
Yes, I was one of the lucky Pedro Pan children. I never left Miami. There was a bunch of them that had to be relocated all around the United States, because there was no more space in Miami. So they started relocating them in orphanages and other Catholic institutions. Like my (future) wife, she ended up in Dubuque, Iowa.<\/p>\n
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Your family eventually joined you in Miami?<\/p>\n
Me, I stayed in Miami. I didn\u2019t go anywhere. And it was a short time, about a year and a half, that I relocated with them.<\/p>\n
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Was it always going to be music for you, Willy?<\/p>\n
I\u2019m telling you! First of all, I loved percussion. Percussion was my first connection with music. I come from a little town on the western tip of Cuba, and I heard all those percussion players get together and do rhythms and stuff like that, and I was fascinated.<\/p>\n
Then two movies changed my life. I remember the movie theater was open maybe three times a week, and one of the movies that I saw that I went crazy with was The Gene Krupa Story. Sal Mineo was the actor. He started doing the drum solo \u2013 dum dum dum, ba-dum\u2013 and I was crazy, \u201cI want to do that!\u201d So I created my own drum set at home with kitchen utensils and stuff.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I became a drummer without being in front of a drum set in my life.<\/p>\n
I then saw The Glenn Miller Story, and was nuts for Glenn Miller. He had a classic jazz band, but he added a clarinet to the saxophone section. Instead of being five saxophones, it was that plus a clarinet, and the sound was totally different. \u201cMoonlight Serenade\u201d and \u201cTuxedo Junction,\u201d and I loved them all. \u201cSong of the Volga Boatmen.\u201d I fell in love with those songs, and I started looking at music beyond only percussion. I started learning to play guitar, and bass, and because of economic reasons I started playing drums professionally when I was a junior in high school.<\/p>\n
And I played six nights a week, alternating with my regular hours in high school. During the day I was totally asleep in the classes, but at night I was shining! I was so happy to be playing.<\/p>\n
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Why do you think salsa and merengue music connects with so many disparate people around the world?<\/p>\n
Let me tell you something that happened to me yesterday. I played at a concert at Bayfront Park here in Miami. Maybe more than 100,000 people were there. And most of the artists were rappers and singers, not rock but different styles of music. I was the only Latino in the bunch. Most of them were well-known artists. Most of the audience was African American.<\/p>\n
So I started to play. And at the beginning, I felt a little concerned, like oh my God, this is not gonna work. But as I got along, and started into the rhythm of the thing, they started moving, shaking a little bit \u2013 and by the end of my show they were all fascinated with the Latin music.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Willy Chirino will take the Ruth Eckerd Hall stage Saturday, accompanied by a nine-piece band. And as Gloria…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":332160,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-332159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/332160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}