Max Pollak | |
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Born | Vienna, Austria | 1 September 1970
Occupation(s) | Choreographer, dancer, musician |
Website | http://www.rumbatap.com |
Max Pollak (born 1970) is percussive dancer and World Music expert. He was born in Vienna, Austria and became known for his work in percussive dance, World Music, tap dance, and choreography. He created "RumbaTap", which merged American Rhythm Tap with Afro-Cuban music and dance. He is the only non-Cuban member of the Afro-Cuban Rumba and folklore ensemble Los Muñequitos de Matanzas. For the 19th and early 20th centurygraphic artist, Max Pollak. [1]
Max was born in Vienna, Austria on 1 September 1970. He has started tapping when, at the age of five, he watched Fred Astaire "finesse his way across the screen of the family television set." Tap lessons, however, were not available; in Austria, there was only classical ballet for a youth hungry to learn to dance.
At eleven, he started taking official dance lessons, and at 14, he learned to play the drums and percussion. [3] He was first exposed to the African American style of rhythm tap when he was 17 years old and met 71-year-old Carnell Lyons. Lyons, a Kansas City-born childhood friend of Charlie Parker, became Pollak's mentor.
Pollak studied theater at Theater an der Wien Musical Theater School in Vienna, Austria from 1988–1990[ citation needed ] and moved to New York in 1991 at the invitation of Heather Cornell, artistic director of the Bebop tap quartet Manhattan Tap. [4] In the United States, he studied Jazz at The New School, graduating in May 1995. Teachers included the jazz drummers Charlie Persip and Vernell Fournier, and the pianists Ted Rosenthal, Lee Musiker, and Phil Markovitz (music theory, arrangement). To develop his versatility as a dancer, Pollak studied ballet (Jan Miller), jazz dance (Daniel Tinazzi, Phil Black), theater dance (Robert Tucker, Chris Chadman), and diverse tap styles with recognized masters (Savion Glover, Bob Audy, Lesley Lockery, Phil Black).
Pollak began his professional career performing in musical theater in Europe. Highlights include Deutschland Lied (1989) at Sartory Theater in Köln, directed by Jürgen Flimm and choreographed by Michael Shawn. He also appeared with the original company of Eric Woolfson's musical Freudiana at Theatre an der Wien. [5] After moving to the United States in 1991, he appeared Off Broadway in the Wings Theater production of The Nutcracker in the Land of Nuts (1991); summer stock—at Surflight Theater, NJ (1992) in Brigadoon , Chicago, Meet Me in St. Louis , and A Chorus Line ; and regionally at the Downtown Cabaret Theater, Bridgeport, CT in The All Night Strut! (1995). [6]
Pollak also used the move to New York to launch his career with a variety of Tap-based dance troupes. These included "Manhattan Tap", "Feet 2 the Beat", "Beat the Donkey", and "Urban Tap". He co-hosted a weekly tap jam session at the East Village club Deanna's, together with his close friends Tamango of Urban Tap, Roxane Butterfly of Worldbeats, and saxophonist/composer Paul Carlon. He also appeared regularly at New York City jazz club La Cave with Dr. Jimmy Slyde, Dr. Buster Brown, Chuck Green, and Lon Chaney. [7] Performances included a collaboration at Lincoln Center with jazz bass legend Ray Brown. In 2004, he was featured on Cyro Baptista's Beat the Donkey Beat. [8]
The ideas behind RumbaTap began when Max took a class with Afro-Latin jazz icon Bobby Sanabria at the New School: “It changed my life,” Pollak recalls. “We played in a big band, and I had to play different instruments and learn as much as I possibly could.” The learning process included watching videos of Afro-Cuban traditional music, including performances by legends Los Muñequitos de Matanzas. “That really struck a chord. I told Bobby I was a tap dancer and that I wanted to tap dance to this music. He asked me if I wanted to tap dance to Cuban music, or tap dance Cuban music. Then he reached for the claves,”—the rhythmic base of Afro-Cuban music—“and said, ‘You have to play claves while you dance;’” a feat that sounds easier on paper than in reality. [9]
Pollak practiced doing just that, drawing on his drummer's ability to walk and chew gum at the same time. Eventually he mastered the approach and took it to the stage at the Nuyorican Poets Café. There, he had another life-changing encounter: He met Los Muñequitos de Matanzas and one of their finest rumba dancers, Barbaro Ramos, asked Pollak to teach him to tap.
“We met in a studio, and I brought along an old pair of my tap shoes. I said 'This is how you play cascara on the side of the drum. This is how you do it with your feet.' He was immediately able to reproduce what I was doing," Pollak reflects. "I thought, 'If this guy can learn the basic gist of tap dancing so fast, this is worth my energy.' I taught him for a couple of hours, and then told him 'Keep the shoes.'" A couple months later they met up in New York and Ramos performed a "mindblowing" tap solo on stage. [9]
RumbaTap, the music/dance ensemble created and named after Pollak's unique body percussion/tap concept, premiered in 1999. It was hailed as "... a stylistically satisfying blend of polyrhythms and percussive landscapes" and "infectiously charming ..." [10] It was officially launched at a show in 1999 at El Taller Latino Americano, featuring Bobby Sanabria, Barbaro Ramos, and Paul Carlon's Latin jazz quartet Grupo Los Santos. The international cast of musicians and dancers now consists of marimba, a saxophone trio, vocalists and a percussion section led by six body-drumming tap dancers. Since 2010 RumbaTap also performs as an a cappella vocal ensemble.
RumbaTap has since toured throughout Europe, Japan, Cuba, Brazil, Turkey, Canada and the United States, in 2008 performing to a capacity crowd at New York City's Central Park Summer Stage. [11]
In 2001, Pollak received a grant from Arts International to help establish Cuba's first tap festival in Havana. [12] Traveling with Pollak were Paul Carlon's quartet of virtuosic jazz musicians who performed with Cuban jazz musicians led by Chucho Valdez.
In 2011, he began working to make European and South American classical music more accessible by playing with classical ensembles in prestigious venues such as Vienna's Konzerthaus [13] and Musikverein and Havana's Teatro Nacional and Teatro Amadeo Roldan. He has since performed with members of both the Vienna Philharmonic and New York Philharmonic, and as a soloist in the Morton Gould Tap Dance Concerto with the Duluth Superior, East Texas and Plano Symphony Orchestras. [2]
Of Pollak's performance at a 2013 concert in Orford, Canada, Steve Bergeron of Québec La Tribune wrote:
In 1996, Pollak married Broadway actress Mary Illes. In 2002, their daughter Caroline was born. [20]
Salsa music is a style of Caribbean music, combining elements of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and American influences. Because most of the basic musical components predate the labeling of salsa, there have been many controversies regarding its origin. Most songs considered as salsa are primarily based on son montuno and son cubano, with elements of guaracha, cha-cha-chá, danzón, descarga, bolero, guajira, rumba, mambo, jazz, funk, R&B, rock, bomba, and plena. All of these elements are adapted to fit the basic Son montuno template when performed within the context of salsa.
The clave is a rhythmic pattern used as a tool for temporal organization in Brazilian and Cuban music. In Spanish, clave literally means key, clef, code, or keystone. It is present in a variety of genres such as Abakuá music, rumba, conga, son, mambo, salsa, songo, timba and Afro-Cuban jazz. The five-stroke clave pattern represents the structural core of many Cuban rhythms. The study of rhythmic methodology, especially in the context of Afro-Cuban music, and how it influences the mood of a piece is known as clave theory.
Latin jazz is a genre of jazz with Latin American rhythms. The two main categories are Afro-Cuban jazz, rhythmically based on Cuban popular dance music, with a rhythm section employing ostinato patterns or a clave, and Afro-Brazilian jazz, which includes samba and bossa nova.
The conga, also known as tumbadora, is a tall, narrow, single-headed drum from Cuba. Congas are staved like barrels and classified into three types: quinto, tres dos or tres golpes (middle), and tumba or salidor (lowest). Congas were originally used in Afro-Cuban music genres such as conga and rumba, where each drummer would play a single drum. Following numerous innovations in conga drumming and construction during the mid-20th century, as well as its internationalization, it became increasingly common for drummers to play two or three drums. Congas have become a popular instrument in many forms of Latin music such as son, descarga, Afro-Cuban jazz, salsa, songo, merengue and Latin rock.
Mozambique refers to two separate styles of music.
Ramón "Mongo" Santamaría Rodríguez was a Cuban percussionist and bandleader who spent most of his career in the United States. Primarily a conga drummer, Santamaría was a leading figure in the pachanga and boogaloo dance crazes of the 1960s. His biggest hit was his rendition of Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man", which was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998. From the 1970s, he recorded mainly salsa and Latin jazz, before retiring in the late 1990s.
Afro-Cuban jazz is the earliest form of Latin jazz. It mixes Afro-Cuban clave-based rhythms with jazz harmonies and techniques of improvisation. Afro-Cuban music has deep roots in African ritual and rhythm. The genre emerged in the early 1940s with the Cuban musicians Mario Bauzá and Frank Grillo "Machito" in the band Machito and his Afro-Cubans in New York City. In 1947, the collaborations of bebop trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and percussionist Chano Pozo brought Afro-Cuban rhythms and instruments, such as the tumbadora and the bongo, into the East Coast jazz scene. Early combinations of jazz with Cuban music, such as "Manteca" and "Mangó Mangüé", were commonly referred to as "Cubop" for Cuban bebop.
Guaguancó is a subgenre of Cuban rumba, combining percussion, voices, and dance. There are two main styles: Havana and Matanzas.
Songo is a genre of popular Cuban music, created by the group Los Van Van in the early 1970s. Songo incorporated rhythmic elements from folkloric rumba into popular dance music, and was a significant departure from the son montuno/mambo-based structure which had dominated popular music in Cuba since the 1940s. Blas Egües was the first drummer in Los Van Van, but it was the band's second drummer, José Luis Quintana "Changuito", who developed songo into the world-wide phenomenon it is today.
Prudencio Mario Bauzá Cárdenas was an Afro-Cuban jazz, and jazz musician. He was among the first to introduce Cuban music to the United States by bringing Cuban musical styles to the New York City jazz scene. While Cuban bands had had popular jazz tunes in their repertoire for years, Bauzá's composition "Tangá" was the first piece to blend jazz harmony and arranging technique, with jazz soloists and Afro-Cuban rhythms. It is considered the first true Afro-Cuban jazz tune.
Cándido Camero Guerra, known simply as Cándido, was a Cuban conga and bongo player. He is considered a pioneer of Afro-Cuban jazz and an innovator in conga drumming. He was responsible for the embracing of the tuneable conga drum, the first to play multiple congas developing the techniques that all players use today, as well as the combination of congas, bongos, and other instruments such as the foot-operated cowbell, an attached guiro, all played by just one person. Thus he is the creator of the multiple percussion set-up.
Rumba is a secular genre of Cuban music involving dance, percussion, and song. It originated in the northern regions of Cuba, mainly in urban Havana and Matanzas, during the late 19th century. It is based on African music and dance traditions, namely Abakuá and yuka, as well as the Spanish-based coros de clave. According to Argeliers León, rumba is one of the major "genre complexes" of Cuban music, and the term rumba complex is now commonly used by musicologists. This complex encompasses the three traditional forms of rumba, as well as their contemporary derivatives and other minor styles.
Carlos Valdés Galán, better known as Patato, was a Cuban conga player. In 1954, he emigrated from La Habana to New York City where he continued his prolific career as a sideman for several jazz and Latin music ensembles, and occasionally as a bandleader. He contributed to the development of the tunable conga drum which revolutionized the use of the instrument in the US. His experimental descarga albums recorded for Latin Percussion are considered the counterpart to the commercial salsa boom of the 1970s. Tito Puente once called him "the greatest conguero alive today".
Bobby Sanabria is an American drummer, percussionist, composer, arranger, documentary producer, educator, activist, radio show host, and writer of Puerto Rican descent who specializes in jazz and Latin jazz.
Carlos Vidal Bolado (1914–1996), also known as "Vidal Bolado", was a Cuban conga drummer and an original member of Machito and his Afro-Cubans. Vidal holds the double distinction of being the first to record authentic folkloric Cuban rumba and the first to play congas in Latin jazz.
The annual Explorations in Afro-Cuban Dance & Drum workshops were founded by Howie Kaufman and are hosted by the Humboldt State University Office of Extended Education in Arcata, California. The classes focus on Afro-Cuban folkloric song, dance, and percussion and brings together some of the world's top AfroCuban folkloric dancers and drummers.
The quinto is the smallest and highest pitched type of conga drum. It is used as the lead drum in Cuban rumba styles such as guaguancó, yambú, columbia and guarapachangueo, and it is also present in congas de comparsa. Quinto phrases are played in both triple-pulse and duple-pulse structures. In columbia, triple pulse is the primary structure and duple pulse is secondary. In yambú and guaguancó duple-pulse is primary and triple-pulse is secondary.
Love the Donkey is an album by percussionist Cyro Baptista's percussion and dance ensemble Beat the Donkey, which was released on the Tzadik label in 2005. The album was privately released as Beat the Donkey Beat in 2004.
Michelle Dorrance is an American tap dancer, performer, choreographer, teacher and director. Awarded a MacArthur "Genius Grant", she is the Founder and artistic director of Dorrance Dance. Dorrance is known for her creative ensemble choreography, rhythm tap style and ambitious collaborative projects with fellow tap dance choreographers and musicians. She is currently a 2017 Choreographic Fellow at New York City Center and an Artist in Residence at the American Tap Dance Foundation. Dorrance lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Pedrito Martinez is a Cuban percussionist, drummer, singer, dancer, bandleader, songwriter, composer, and educator. He was born and raised in Havana, Cuba. He is a Cuban Conguero performing classic Cuban Rumbas, Afro-Cuban folkloric and religious music. He is a Santería priest. He came to the United States of America from Havana in 1998. He plays the Batá drum, conga, cajón, timbale, and bongo drums, among other percussion instruments. Pedrito learned his craft from the streets of Havana, Cuba. He has performed with Paquito D'Rivera, Arturo O'Farrill, Brian Lynch, and Bruce Springsteen. He settled in the New York City - New Jersey area in 1998.