Xavier Cugat and His Orchestra

about

Francesc d'Asís Xavier Cugat Mingall de Bru i Deulofeu (1 January 1900 – 27 October 1990) was a Catalan-Cuban bandleader whom many consider to have had more to do with the infusion of Latin music into United States popular music than any other musician. Perez Prado followed in Cugat's footsteps. Cugat was born in Barcelona, Spain. [1] With his family, he immigrated to Cuba when he was five. He trained as a classical violinist and played with the Orchestra of the Teatro Nacional in Havana. On 6 July 1915, Cugat and his family arrived in New York as immigrant passengers on board the S.S. Havana. Entering the world of show business, he played with a band called “The Gigolos” during the tango craze.[2] Later, he went to work for the Los Angeles Times as a cartoonist. Cugat's caricatures were later nationally syndicated. In the late 1920s, as sound began to be used in films, he put together another tango band that had some success in early short musical films. By the early 1930s, he began appearing with his group in feature films. Cugat took his band to New York for the 1931 opening of Waldorf Astoria Hotel and it became the hotel's resident band. He shuttled between New York and Los Angeles for most of the next thirty years, alternating hotel and radio dates with movie appearances in films such as Week-End at the Waldorf (1945) and Neptune's Daughter (1949). In 1940, he recorded the song Perfidia with singer Miguelito Valdés which became a big hit. Cugat followed trends clos

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