Word: cugat
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Brown spends a good deal more of his money (again as "Somebody") turning a theatrical warehouse into a super-canteen where the Deyo girls, Harry James, Xavier Cugat, Lena Home, Gracie Allen and Jimmy Durante entertain soldiers, sailors and cinemaddicts. In the end, Jean falls in love with a Texas onion-rancher in sergeant's uniform, and the way is clear for the girl with the million-dollar conscience to embrace the million-dollar blue-jacket...
...Scores. La Prensa's poll gave long-nosed Xavier Cugat. captain of the U.S. rumba industry (TIME, Dec. 28, 1942) only eighth place among bandleaders. The winner (pulling more than twice as many votes as his nearest competitor) was a stocky Cuban named Machito ("The Kid"). One of the chief attractions at Manhattan's La Conga, kinky-haired Machito (real name Frank Grillo) has built his reputation among knowing Latins with a high-octane rumba style that would rattle the fenders off a jeep. Often he prances before his ten-piece band in a solo rumba routine known...
Winner among male singers was Miguelito Valdes (real name Eugenio Lazaro Miguel Izquierdo Valdes y Hernandez), whose vigorous song-shouting has been featured with both Cugat and Machito. With the latter's band, big, bull-like Valdes recently recorded an album of his guarachas (risque ballads) and pregons (street-vendor songs) for Decca. He sings in a variety of moods from the comic to the truculent, but always with a full head of steam. He grew up on the Havana docks, became a prize fighter, started as a singer when the Havana Riverside Casino fished him out of tough...
...took a long time before rumbas caught on with Los Angeles' dancing public. Professional Cuban dancers, featured on Cugat's programs, frightened the average nightclubber with the intricacy and speed of their steps. Shrewd Xavier Cugat gradually slowed up the professionals, lured the amateurs to try a step or two. After five years of spade work, he had made Los Angeles the most rumbatic of U.S. cities, and Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria beckoned with a fat contract...
...regular hours of newspaper work soon got on Cugat's nerves. That was in 1928 when Paul Whiteman was still King of Jazz. No jazzman, Cugat realized that he could not compete with Afro-Saxons on their own ground. So he bravely cultivated a little Afro-Latin plot of his own. With a rumba orchestra of six, he opened at Los Angeles' Cocoanut Grove...