Though diminutive in stature like his racehorse jockey father, Johnny Seguí looms large in the early history of Latin music made in New York, even if you’ve never heard of him. During the 1940s and ‘50s when he worked in NYC, his band (first billed as Los Dandys Del 42, later as Johnnie Seguí And His Orchestra) was quite popular and respected in El Barrio, with several hits to their name that allowed them to play all the top venues and share the stage with the likes of Johnny’s friends and contemporaries, Tito Puente, Tito Rodríguez and Machito. In addition to pioneering the conjunto format and hot dance repertoire of guaracha, mambo, son montuno and guaguancó in New York, which would become part of the blueprint for the global phenomenon dubbed ‘salsa’ in the 1960s and ‘70s, many great musicians went through the ranks of Segui’s organization, several of whom got their start with Los Dandys and would become far more well-known and popular than their former employer. Towering figures like pianist brothers Eddie and Charlie Palmieri, percussionists Mongo Santamaría, Willie Bobo, Willie Rosario and Fred "Poppy" Pagani, and vocalists Eladio “Yayo El Indio” Peguero, Pedro “Pellín” Rodríguez and Pete Bonet made Seguí’s organization a band to be feared and admired by other orchestra leaders, as readily admitted at the time by Tito Rodríguez, Mario Bauzá and others. A young Joe Quijano received his first opportunity to perform in front of a large audience when Seguí let him sit in and sing a bolero once, and crooner Wilfredo Figueroa, who would become a well-known bolerista and sonero in the following decades, got his first big break with Seguí’s outfit.

But just who was Johnny (sometimes spelled Johnnie) Seguí? The New York-born (April 12, 1922), Puerto Rico-raised musician and bandleader was a bassist who started off playing the Cuban tres guitar. From an early age, he was in love with the “conjunto” (group) style of Cuban music as purveyed by Arsenio Rodríguez, Félix Chappottín, Conjunto Casino, Conjunto Rumbavana, Las Estrellas de Chocolate and Roberto Faz. After the tragic death of Johnny’s mother and a stint racing horses in Venezuela, Johnny’s father, Juan Seguí relocated to Puerto Rico, bringing the then-five-year-old Johnny with him. Directly exposed as a child to the magical sound of the tres when the Cuban group Septeto Matancero, with its eminent tresero Isaac Oviedo, visited Puerto Rico in 1933, little Johnny Seguí soon learned the rudiments of the instrument from his cousin Carlos Seguí who had a group called Los Soneros del Caribe that specialized in son cubano. Johnny, who was the “band boy” for his cousin’s group, would grab the band’s tres and practice on it during their downtime. He also learned from a formidable dockworker named “Jara,” who was the tresero in Conjunto Capacetti, another Puerto Rican outfit that played Cuban son. Trying to absorb all that he could of this music and instrument through the radio and these local conjuntos, Seguí said that he admired three treseros the most: Niño Rivera for his progressive arrangements, Isaac Oviedo for his technique and willingness to share, and Arsenio Rodríguez for his band’s overall sound, individual skill and most of all his compositions.

Following his father’s advice Seguí moved back to New York in the early 1940s, seeking better opportunities as a musician. He soon established his own conjunto, Los Dandys del 42, named after “Los Dandys,” the famous Cuban carnival ‘comparsa’ troupe that Johnny had seen in the movies, who dressed in dandified costumes and counted the great Chano Pozo, Silvestre Méndez and Miguelito Valdés amongst their members. With Los Dandys during the 1940s Segui was fortunate to befriend and hire the great Cuban singer and composer Marcelino “Rapindey” Guerra. In fact, it was with Guerra in the mid-1940s that Los Dandys debuted the first recorded version of Marcelino’s classic guajira, “Me Voy Pa’l Pueblo,” a tune which later became a “standard” when interpretations by Trio Los Panchos, Benny Moré and Celia Cruz made it a big international hit. Guerra arranged for Seguí and his Dandys to record several 78s for Gabriel Oller’s Coda label.

The band carried on in this fashion playing son cubano in the conjunto format (tres, piano, trumpets, bass and percussion) for a few years, adding more trumpets along the way as the band began earning more and playing larger venues like The Palladium (where Segúi was often employed with his other profession as a sign painter and graphic designer, painting posters and marquee cards for concerts). Los Dandys were quite popular in New York among the Hispanic population and would share the bill with several bigger bands like those of Machito and Jose Curbelo. Unlike the big band orchestras that played sitting down and were static, Los Dandys had a dynamic dance routine while they performed (inspired by Conjunto Casino) and though they did not read music they were able to learn all the latest tunes from Cuba by ear, utilizing a series of marks of their own devising for notation and performing in such a tightly synchronized, swinging fashion that many other bandleaders, promoters and musicians were surprised they did not have any real sheet music with written arrangements. Seguí eventually learned rudimentary music theory at the Escuela Libre de Música in San Juan, Puerto Rico and then, after returning to New York in 1951, changed his tres for an upright bass. He learned to play from Cuban composer, arranger, pianist and bassist Armando “Mandy” Vizoso who was a member of Tito Puente's orchestra and had been in Los Dandys earlier.

Since the hottest New York Latin dance bands of the day no longer featured stringed instruments like guitar or tres and had found success with the big band jazz swing format instead, Johnny decided to drop the tres altogether and continue as a piano and trumpet led small orchestra. Despite his enthusiasm and drive, Seguí’s first live performance playing standup bass was torture since he was unaccustomed to the instrument’s thick, stiff strings, his fingers becoming raw by the end of the night and his right arm beginning to shake uncontrollably. Because he did not follow Vizoso's advice to gradually build up calluses and arm muscles before constantly gigging, Seguí’s torture was all the greater since he put some electrical tape over his wounds and continued to play vigorously, which, due to trapped excess humidity and lack of rest, aggravated his cut fingers all the more, making the healing process take longer and hindering his ability to perform in the first weeks of the new band configuration. However, such was his determination to switch to the instrument (as part of an ambitious plan to compete with the popular big mambo bands of the day), Seguí prevailed and remained a bass player/bandleader for the next 60 years until shortly before his death in 2020.

Although Johnny Seguí did not record for the major labels of the time such as Victor, Decca or Columbia, he did work with some imprints of more humble size with close ties to the Latin market in the U.S., namely Tico, Seeco, Ansonia, Verne and Coda/SMC, primarily on 78RPM records. The only LP released under his own name was a strictly cha-cha-chá album simply titled “Cha Cha Cha” for Ralph Pérez’s Ansonia Records, compiled from a set of 78RPM singles and several sessions recorded between 1956 and ’57 and released later that year. In fact, the cha cha chá was not the group's specialty, nor was Seguí personally inclined towards that genre, but Pérez insisted that was the only way he’d cut a record with the bandleader. Seguí has said that he saw it as a career move that would help him become more widely known in international markets and especially to non-Latin audiences. At the time, “Yayo El Indio” was Seguí’s lead singer, but when Johnny went to Seeco and the other Barrio-centric indie labels looking for a recording contract, they all told him Yayo had too much exposure already, and they would only record Los Dandys if Seguí could find another vocalist. This led to Wilfredo “Willie” Figueroa replacing Yayo as vocalist.

In the winter of 1956 when Johnny knocked on Ansonia’s door, the label director Ralph Pérez felt that in addition to jettisoning Yayo, it would be a good idea to capitalize on the relatively new phenomenon of the cha cha chá, a popular genre and easy to learn dance style developed by Cuba’s flute and violin led charanga orchestras such as Arcaño y sus Maravillas, Orquesta América, Orquesta Aragón, and Fajardo y sus Estrellas and recently taken up by the likes of “The Big Three” (Machito, Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez) in New York. In those days, according to Johnny, you could buy all the latest sheet music for pennies on the dollar in Cuba, and Pérez had just returned with some of the hottest like “El Bodeguero” and “Señor Juez,” which were big hits for Aragón at the time. In the repertoire for the album, Pérez also included an older composition by his friend Rafael Hernández titled “Tati,” which was written 20 years before as a bolero but was rearranged as an up-tempo cha by Seguí’s talented pianist Mario Román. According to Seguí, this tune was selected because Tati was the nickname of Pérez’s daughter Mercedes, who would later inherit and run the label along with Ralph’s business partner and Mercedes’ future husband, Herman Glass. The charanga style of cha cha chá is performed often with a unison chorus and for the sessions, aside from his new lead singer Wilfredo Figueroa, according to Seguí he managed to sneak in an uncredited Yayo as well as Pellín Rodríguez, Juan Ramón “El Boy” Torres, Vitín Avilés (who recorded an LP under his own name for Ansonia the same year), and Pompillo “Pompo” Rodríguez who had been with Marcelino Guerra in Los Dandy’s Del 42 in the previous decade. In addition to arranger and pianist Mario Román, the recordings also featured Willie Rosario on timbales and four trumpeters, three of whom were identified by Seguí as Johnny Ruíz and two non-Latinos, Larry Esposito and Larry Moser (who went on to play with Maynard Ferguson, Tito Rodríguez and Tito Puente). The resulting dozen tracks compiled into the LP feature a bright and punchy sound that fits right in with the New York brass-heavy style of that era. Throughout the songs, Román’s piano solos shine, along with the fine lead vocals from Figueroa and the peppy coros of the other vocalists backing him up.

Though the singles and album did well for a time, Pérez failed to renew the contract for more recordings and so, sadly, it was Johnny Seguí’s one and only long play as a bandleader. Growing disillusioned with the highly competitive New York scene, Seguí decided to return to Puerto Rico shortly after, where his wife and daughters were already residing. He left his band to Willie Rosario, who formed his own orchestra out of Los Dandys (with a young Bobby Valentín as lead trumpeter and arranger), becoming one of the most popular salsa bandleaders of all time. As a curious fact, it is worth noting that before relocating to Puerto Rico for good, Johnny Seguí did some excellent additional session work for Ansonia, accompanying his friend Daniel Santos for some recordings that were released under the name “Daniel Santos Y Su Conjunto de Sociedad.” This also occurred with some recordings he made with Alfredito Valdés Sr. and Marcelino Guerra that appeared as “Las Estrellas del Ritmo” on the SMC-Pro-Arte label, as well as a solo album with Yayo El Indio (and featuring an uncredited Mongo Santamaría) on the Seeco sub-label Tropical, a record backing crooner Tony Pizarro, and some merengue singles with Mon Rivera.

In the end, Johnny would remain in his ancestral home of Puerto Rico for the rest of his life, where he still led an excellent version of Los Dandys well into his 80s, managing to play bass and lead his band with enormous vitality despite never releasing a record in Puerto Rico during the salsa boom of the 1970s or the típico revival of the ‘80s. In fact, during his final four decades on the island, Johnny’s group was still performing the original repertoire and arrangements from the golden period of the legendary New York Latin bands from the 1940s and ‘50s, when the two Titos and Mario Bauzá first gave him their music and arrangements to copy onto sheet music by hand since Seguí, in addition to his musical talent, was a respected graphic artist with a knack for drawing musician’s likenesses as well as doing calligraphy and hand-painted signage.

Though by no means a household name among today’s Latin music fans, and mostly forgotten during the heyday of the salsa boom he helped start, Johnny Seguí is still known and revered by serious students of the genre as well as fanatical salseros the world over, from Cali to Caracas. It is Ansonia’s sincere hope that, by remastering and reissuing Johnnie Seguí’s sole long play album “Cha Cha Cha,” the sprightly son of a Puerto Rican jockey who only wanted to play son cubano will finally have his well-deserved moment with today’s global digital audience and earn his rightful place among the pantheon of salsa’s progenitors. Like many other musicians, from Mongo Santamaría to Eddie Palmieri, Willie Rosario never failed to give tribute to the man who helped get his career going, the following statement serving as an apt epitaph: “We as musicians always have those bands we emulate. I learned a lot while I was with Johnny Segui. He had a phenomenal orchestra. Johnny’s was the first in New York with four trumpets, before Machito, Puente or Rodríguez. I liked the sound of those bands and I tried to emulate that sound and swing.”

-Pablo Yglesias