What do Elvis, a peanut vendor, and the Martin Luther King of music have in common?
Bruno Mars
Welcome to The Influencers.
I’m Lisa Robbin Young.
I LOVE music and I love knowing the stories behind the artists that shape our lives. And now I get to share those stories with you! With the help of music historians, educators, journalists, and fans, we’ll trace back hundreds of years to find the earliest influences that helped make American Pop singer and songwriter, Bruno Mars, who he is today.
Some will be obvious:
Tito Puente.
The big figure in New Jack Swing in the 90’s was Teddy Riley.
But who else will we find along the way?
The very little that we know are descriptions, usually, by missionaries.
Hop into the musical wayback machine with me as we create a mixtape for the ages. Together, we’ll climb Bruno’s musical family tree and find out…
Who Influences the Influencers?
It’s hard to come up with one word to describe Bruno Mars, but I’d start with “collaborator”. Starting in his family’s band as a toddler, Bruno’s worked with a laundry list of artists over the years, including British DJ and record producer, Mark Ronson. He’s best known for his work with Amy Winehouse on her album, “Back To Black”, writing credits on “Shallow” from the film “A Star Is Born”, and of course, the Grammy-award winning song featuring his co-writer, Bruno Mars, Uptown Funk.
(Mark Ronson w/ Bruno Mars Uptown Funk)
From the 2015 album, Uptown Special, Uptown Funk began it’s life during a freestyle studio session as Ronson and his co-writers were working on a jam Mars and his band had been playing on tour. We’ll talk more about that session later in the show.
I’m Lisa Robbin Young and this is The Influencers - where we connect the dots of popular artists of our time to artists of the past hidden in their musical family tree. As I say in each episode: There’s no way we can talk about every musical influence in the time we have today. You can visit WFIU.org/TheInfluencers if you want to see Bruno’s entire musical family tree and sort through the research we’ve done. I follow the research to find stories and connections that you might NOT know - even if you’re a super fan. Stories that make this tree come to life and give us a bigger view of what happened in the past that made today possible. But maybe you know something I didn’t find! Share it with us on our website and it might end up in a future episode!
Bruno Mars comes from a very musical lineage. His grandfather, Pedro Hernandez Vazquez, came as a teenager to New York from Puerto Rico. He eventually built a following at the El Tropical night club in New York City as a bandleader. It’s even reported that he played with Tito Puente, one of the most well-known Latin Percussionists of the 20th century.
Pedro’s son, Pete Hernandez, Sr. is Bruno’s Dad.
“Pete Hernandez, … used to go with his father, …during the 50s to all these clubs. And he would see Tito Puente….his father had a band. ”
That’s Aurora Flores, a music journalist who’s entrenched in the latin music scene of the early 20th century in New York - and also a friend of Tito Puente. We’ll hear more from her later in this episode.
Pete Senior was a latin music percussionist, too. But he also developed a deep and abiding passion for doo-wop. According to my research, somewhere around age 13, he declared himself “Dr. Doo-wop” and started learning everything he could about the music. When he moved to Hawai at age 25, he brought that love of Doo-wop with him. It was an unusual musical style on the islands and it helped Pete stand out. He formed a family band called Love Notes that included most of Pete’s kids.
Pete Junior started performing with the group before he turned 3. As an adorable Elvis impersonator. I found a clip on youTube of the boy who would become Bruno at age 6 performing in the Star Hunt competition on the Arsenio Hall show, rocking and rolling in an adorable rendition of Heartbreak Hotel. I’ll include a link to that video in our show notes.
Here’s the King, with his version of the song that won Bruno a week’s supply of groceries.
(Elvis Heartbreak Hotel)
(Menudo Lost)
That was the early aught’s version of the latin boy band, Menudo - without Ricky Martin - with the first song Bruno Mars ever sold, Lost. The 20 grand Bruno got for that song helped keep him afloat while he and his songwriting partners in The Smeezingtons built their reputation. They also wrote another song which became Cee-Lo Green’s biggest solo hit to date, F…orget You.
(Cee-Lo Green Forget You)
(Silk Sonic Leave the door open)
Bruno’s songwriting abilities are amplified by the quality of his collaborations. Anderson .Paak, his partner in Silk Sonic, helped pen that Grammy winning smash, Leave The Door Open.
Bruno’s ability to blend modern sounds with a retro feel has made him an in-demand songwriter, but sometimes, his ability to channel those old-school sounds has left folks wondering if he’s not more of an impersonator than an originator.
“The thing I feel like Bruno Mars is really good at doing is, previous styles of music."
Kyle Adams is a professor of Music Theory at Indiana Universty’s Jacobs School of Music.
"… he's got his seventies. You've got Silk Sonic on there, which is like this total 1970s Neo soul kind of thing… and then, I don't know when finesse came out 2016, 2017, but that's clearly like a nineties throwback. And again, when we saw him in concert, they were doing the dances I remember from being in high school, like he's, he's really, really good at somehow just assimilating those styles and making them his own. "
Then Dr. Adams shared his favorite Bruno Mars tune as an example.
“My favorite Bruno Mars song by a long shot is Finesse, the one they do with Cardi B. That direct influence there is New Jack Swing… the big figure in New Jack Swing in the nineties was Teddy Riley, who was a producer."
When Bruno accepted the Album of the Year Grammy Award for 24 Karat Magic, he specifically named Teddy Riley as one of the biggest influences of his teenage years. So I asked Dr. Adams what the New Jack Swing sound is all about.
"It's hard to describe exactly what characterizes new Jack Swing, but if you listen to Poison by Bell, Biv DeVoe, and to finesse by Bruno Mars, they are like, there's such a clear influence there…that's clearly like a nineties throwback."
But Teddy Riley didn’t produce Bell Biv Devoe. That honor went to Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis who were also steeped in the New Jack Swing sound. They brought on a guy named Dr. Freeze to produce Poison. We’ll hear more about that later in the show.
Now, let’s have a listen to both those tracks and see the similarities. First, Finesse, featuring Cardi B. then Poison by BBD.
(Bruno Mars w/ Cardi B. Finesse)
(Bell Biv Devoe Poison)
In addition to the ability Bruno has of recapturing a sound, he is also a showman who’s not afraid to resurrect the look and the feel of a moment in pop culture when it serves him. The music video for Finesse, for example emulates the opening credits to the 1990’s sketch comedy show, “In Living Color”, the Keenan Ivory Wayans project that helped launch the careers of several comedians and a then unknown dancer named Jennifer Lopez, who we’ll hear more about in a future episode.
According to an interview I found with Bruno’s drummer and brother, Eric Hernandez, a number of Bruno’s songs come out of jam sessions, where he and his band just start playing together. Those sessions sometimes go for hours. In a separate Interview, Mark Ronson confirmed that that’s exactly how Uptown Funk was created. I’ll link to those interviews in our show notes. The danger of being part of so many collaborations is that the lines between influence and infringement get really blurry. I wanted to get more, shall we say, clarity on the blurring of those lines.
First, from Brian DiBlassio, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Michigan Flint:
"It's absolutely a thing because no composer composes in a vacuum. You know, you hear music and it's part of the language. It'd be like attempting to speak without using the same language. So just depends if you're using someone else's words, word for word, or if you're using language for something new, but there are phrases, there are words, of course, other composers use… That you would use yourself."
And Dr. Kyle Adams tends to agree, and talks specifically about Bruno Mars:
"I don't know when one crosses the line from like imitation to sampling to plagiarism. With the New Jack swing stuff, with finesse, you know, to me, it's just like, well, he loved that style… he was able, he or his producers were able to find the kind of synthesizer timbres that they used back in the nineties. And he just used the same sounds, …You know, so it's easy to look at Bruno Mars and say he's copying or he's stealing from an earlier style because nobody else is doing that style right now. But if Bruno Mars had made finesse in 1992, it would have just sounded like, Oh yeah, that's what people are doing these days. So he's making music in that style."
Bruno Mars is not without controversy. To date, he’s settled 4 copyright infringement suits and one is still pending. The French artist, Breakbot, released a song called, “Baby I’m Yours” in 2010. 2 years later, Bruno released his song, “Treasure” which is incredibly similar in melodic structure and feel. Breakbot took to twitter to say that the songs sounded incredibly similar:
“To those who think that it’s just a coincidence, or that “we are both inspired by the same artists”, let me just tell you that Bruno asked my label if he could cover “Baby I’m yours” a few months ago and we said no. Then he recorded “treasure”. To be perfectly honest, I’m not mad at all, if anything I am rather flattered that someone selling millions of mp3s is interested in my music.”
Dun-dun-duuunnnnn.
Breakbot is now included on the songwriting credits and along with it, he gets a cut of the royalties for “Treasure”.
But what do you think?
Have a listen to the two songs. Treasure, by Bruno Mars, and Baby I’m Yours, by Breakbot.
(Bruno Mars Treasure)
(Breakbot Baby I’m Yours)
We’ve only scratched the most recent surface of Bruno’s musical family tree. We’ll climb higher - including a wild connection between New Jack Swing and Tito Puente in just a minute. I’m Lisa Robbin Young and you’re listening to The Influencers.
This is The Influencers: a music and history show that climbs into the branches of the musical family tree of today’s popular music. I’m Lisa Robbin Young and today we’re exploring the influences of Bruno Mars.
Circling back to the music of New Jack Swing, we find an interesting connection in Bruno’s family tree. Poison, which we heard earlier, was written and produced by Elliot Straite, better known as Dr. Freeze, who worked with several artists, including Michael Jackson, Color Me Badd, as well as the aforementioned Bell Biv Devoe. Dr. Freeze cited German band Kraftwerk and Tito Puente as two of the inspirations behind that song. Quote:
"When I made 'Poison' I was studying Kraftwerk."
(Underscore: Kraftwerk, Numbers)
"When I heard Kraftwerk’s Trans-Europe Express album and their 'Numbers' record, it made me want to change my whole style and approach to music. It gave me the musical inspiration to do 'Poison.' …I’m also mixed…Black and Puerto Rican. I had uncles that played with big Latin bands like Tito Puente and Mongo Santamaria. …I wanted to bring the Latin element into that record by using timbales. "
And there’s no Timbale player more well known than Tito Puente.
I had the great good fortune with sit down with Aurora Flores, a musician and music journalist that’s been deeply entrenched in the latin music scene in New York for decades. She’s also a friend of Tito Puente. You can watch our full interview, on our website: WFIU.org/TheInfluencers.
Though he studied at Julliard, Tito grew up listening to Puerto Rican songwriter Rafael Hernandez and other music of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. I asked Aurora to explain how latin music became so popular in the US. Turns out, it may have never happened if Union musicians hadn’t gone on strike.
“1940, you had a musician strike, so no musician could play on the radio”
If no union musicians could play on the air, that created a tremendous opportunity for Latin artists.
“… BMI had Peer International. Peer International had all these international Latin artists. So they started giving all this music to the radio stations for free.”
On one hand, I’m disappointed by the blatant exploitation. But on the other, Latin music flooded the airwaves, giving rise to a talented young timbale player.
“So, there were two strikes. One in 1940, another one in 1948 49. And by 48 49, Tito Puente has a number one hit. On mainstream radio from New York to California called El Abaniquito, The Fan.”
(Tito Puente Abaniquito aka "The Fan")
“Tito Puente was a virtuoso. Tito Puente played piano. He played trumpet. He played drums. He could dance. He was a fabulous dancer. And, um, by the time he started recording in 1950, I think he did like 20 albums. The first 10 years the first five years he did like 20 albums. So he was always at the top of the charts. He was always getting top billing."
But before the strikes of the 1940s, there was at least some Latin music on the air. One song in particular was ubiquitous.
“El Manisero, The Peanut Vendor, that was everywhere. I remember on TV they had followed the bouncing ball. They would have El Manisero."
Written by Moisés Simón Rodríguez, El Manisero is a type of Cuban music called a son-pregon <<SOHN pray-GOHN>> According to my research, The Peanut Vendor was written in the early 1900s and first recorded and released in the U.S. by singer Rita Montaner <<Mahn-tah-NAIR>>in either 1927 or 1928. Here’s a clip:
(Rita Montaner (1892) The Peanut Vendor)
While hers was not the most well known version of the song, Rita’s recording launched the song that would eventually become the first million-selling record for Cuban music in the States. She went on to perform the song in a film, Romance del Palmar, and you can watch that performance on our website.
Rita Montaner <mahn-tah-NAIR>>, was a Cuban singer, pianist, actress and musical ancestor of Mungo Santamaria, who we cited earlier as one of Dr. Freeze’s influences for “Poison”. Rita was studied Mendelssohn while at conservatory in Havana. According to my research, his music was part of her final exam. Thus our second link in Bruno’s tree to Germany.
But hold on a second…before we head to Germany, how did this music that inspired Tito Puente get from Latin America to the United States in the first place?
"Actually, then we would have to begin in 1898 with the Spanish American war"
Aurora explained that, during the war, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic were hot properties, geopolitically speaking. The US sent troops into the region and eventually laid claim to several islands previously under Spanish rule.
“And when the u. s goes into cuba and puerto rico Um, they took puerto rico. Out of Cuba, they just got Guantanamo Bay"
Taking possession meant that Puerto Ricans could now come to the United States to work and live. Raphael Hernandez and his brother were musicians in North Carolina just before World War I broke.
"You had a band leader who was also, I think he was a lieutenant and he was up there, uh, in World War I and he started and created the first all black marching band to go to Europe, the Harlem Hellfighters.”
That band leader was lieutenant James Reese Europe, whom jazz legend Eubie Blake dubbed the Martin Luther King of music. A trailblazing pioneer, he organized the Clef Club, a society for blacks in music. His orchestra made history as the first band to play proto-jazz at Carnegie Hall more than a decade before Gershwin and more than 2 decades before Benny Goodman played there. And they only played music by black composers.
Then, came World War I and the Harlem Hellfighters. Aurora continues:
“But within the Harlem Hellfighters, he knew that in Puerto Rico, because of the marching bands, you had all these Afro boricuas who could read anything. I mean, the way they said it was, if a fly fell on the music, they'd read it as a note. That's how good they were. So out of his, I think it was like a 30 piece band, 19 of his brass and reed players were from Puerto Rico, starting with Rafael Hernández… and Rafael Hernández, after World War I, he and some of those other players stayed in New York."
James Europe is recognized as the first African American officer to lead troops into battle, earning The Hellfighters were awarded the French Croix de Guerre <<KWAH deh-Gehrh>> for battlefield gallantry by the President of France. After the war, James Europe returned to the states and had this to say about the importance of being an originator, not an imitator:
"I have come from France more firmly convinced than ever that Negros should write Negro music. We have our own racial feeling and if we try to copy whites we will make bad copies ... We won France by playing music which was ours and not a pale imitation of others, and if we are to develop in America we must develop along our own lines."
Here’s music co-written with Jazz composer and fellow Lieutenant, Noble Sissle, All of No Man’s Land Is Ours.
(Noble & Sissle: All of No Man’s Land Is Ours)
While on tour, James Europe got into a dispute with Herbert Wright, one of his drummers. Wright lunged at him and stabbed him in the neck with a penknife. The wound seemed superficial, but at the hospital, they couldn’t stop the bleeding and Europe died in a matter of hours. At the time of his death, James Europe was the best known black-american bandleader in the U.S.
It was his vision of a band built on talent, not skin color, that gave Rafael Hernandez his foothold in the United States. That paved the way for a generation of latin artists to make their mark on North America.
But if we try to go deeper into the branches of Latin American music, we kind of hit a wall. So many musical influences come together here that some things get lost. I went to ethnomusicologist Dr. Javier Leon to help me sort things out. He’s the director of the Latin American Music Center at the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. He explained that Spanish missionaries came into the Americas and documented indigenous music, but through a European lens.
"...the very little that we know are descriptions usually by missionaries, or some other traveler who is hearing something. And this is a person from Europe who's hearing something completely strange and to them will sound completely strange. So to what degree that's a reliable account of what we're hearing, we don't know."
So what DO we have that’s a reliable reflection of this important musical history?
"because a lot of that population disappeared, we don't have many clues musically. We can't point to songs or rhythms or things of that sort. But what we do have are instruments. Um, some of the instruments that to this day we kind of tend to assume are African instruments are in fact not. "
He gave me an example.
"Maracas. People assume because they're usually next to congas or bongos or some other similar instrument that we do know, in fact, came from West Africa, that these are also West African instruments. In fact, no, they're indigenous instruments… "
Can we use those instruments to reconstruct what the music may have sounded like?
"Absolutely not. I mean, we have no idea. What you can do with a maraca now is not necessarily what people did with a maraca back then. And so that's, that's where it gets a little bit trickier."
You can see my entire interview with Dr. Leon on our website: WFIU.org/The Influencers.
The earliest AfroCubano music I could find traces through Habanera Contradanza to the european contradance forms from Spain, France, and England - the same musical style that gave us American Square Dancing centuries later. The earliest work I could find was from the Morris Dances collected by composer and folk song collector, Cecil Sharp in the late 1800s. Sharp’s collection did a lot to preserve this music, and I’ve got a video that breaks it down in more detail on our website. Morris Dances date back to the 1400s, though I couldn’t peg an exact date for this next piece, Sharp’s arrangement of a tune from the Fieldtown tradition of Morris Dances, Leap Frog, also known as Glorisher, as performed by Robert Harbron on Concertina, for the Morris Contemporary Dance resource, on the English Folk Dance and Song Society Resource Bank.
That leaves us with Germany, and an interesting story of influence in the family of Felix Mendelssohn. He was part of a musical family, including his sister Fanny, his mother Lea, and her sister, Sara, who grew up in Prussian royal court society. But it’s his Father’s non-musical lineage that I want to highlight here.
Abraham Mendelssohn partnered with his brother in a bank. THEIR father, Moses, was the first Mendelssohn. It was a conscious decision to change their family name that gave us the Mendelssohn lineage.
Abraham wrote to Felix:
"My father felt that the name Moses Ben Mendel Dessau would handicap him in gaining the needed access to those who had the better education at their disposal. Without any fear that his own father would take offense, my father assumed the name Mendelssohn. The change, though a small one, was decisive.”
Decisive indeed. Changing his identity in a seemingly small, but significant way opened doors of possibility for a family that went on to influence not only the musical landscape of 19th century Europe, but pave the way for Latin American music, through Rita Montaner to make its way to the US in the 20th century and inspire artists like Bruno Mars, making music in the 21st century.
(THEME SONG UNDERSCORE)
As I said at the beginning, we’ve only scratched the surface. To unpack more of Bruno Mars’ musical family tree, including our references, extended interviews, and show playlist point your browser to WFIU.org/TheInfluencers.
The Influencers is part of the educational mission of Indiana University and produced by the small but mighty team at WFIU Public Radio in Bloomington Indiana. Our Executive Producers are Eric Bolstridge and John Bailey. Special thanks to our Program Director, Aaron Cain, Dr. Kyle Adams, Brian DiBlassio, Aurora Flores and Dr. Javier Leon for their contributions to this episode.
I’m Lisa Robbin Young reminding you that you never know what kind of an impact you make on the world around you. Who influences you?