'Palo Congo'

I was playing this album in my office when a co-worker (a black man who listens to hip-hop and neo-soul) comes into my office and asks, with a certain amount of puzzlement as if I were listening to recorded farts, what I was listening to.

Palo Congo is a 1957 album from Sabu Martinez, one of the foremost Latin and jazz percussionists of all time. It wasn't the typical type of music you hear on the radio, but it wasn't anything you might hear in a Latin club or in any film. This isn't odd music or anything.

I told him that more people in the world listened to this type of music than they did his favorite music (like soccer), and that he should broaden his horizons a bit and listen to different types of music.

Like so many jazz musicians before him, Sabu Martinez died at the rather early age of 49. Fortunately, he wasn't a drug addict (or didn't die because of it), but instead a boring, unjazz gastric ulcer.