Click to open image viewer. Many Washingtonians danced to rhythms played on this Haitian conga drum. Hide stretched taut across the drum forms its head, held by ropes wound around pegs that pierce the ...

In 1917, Ramon Santamaria Rodriquez was born into poverty in Havana, Cuba. Nicknamed “Mongo” (a tribal chief in Senegal), he began playing the conga drum at an early age and as a teen, Mongo ...

Candido Camero, a Cuban musician who helped find new expressive directions for conga drumming, providing dynamic rhythmic accents to jazz and other forms of music, died Nov. 7 at his home in New York ...

Dizzy Gillespie reportedly once described Francisco Aguabella as “the Coltrane of the conga drum.” And the influence of the legendary Cuban percussionist, now in his 70s, upon hand drummers of the ...

In his column this week, Jeff Weiss talks with renowned conga player Poncho Sanchez about the unlikely gringo who put him on. Today we've got another Sanchez story about an even stranger encounter — ...

Cuban percussionist Miguel “Anga” Diaz, an acclaimed conga master who perfected a dazzling five-drum technique with a versatility that allowed him to span genres from progressive jazz to traditional ...

Marcos Odara has been playing the conga drums for 39 years and teaching for the last 20. Odara hails from Salvador da Bahia, Brazil and now calls Oakland home. The drum master teaches Brazilian ...

Click to open image viewer. CC0 Usage Conditions ApplyClick for more information. Many Washingtonians danced to rhythms played on this Haitian conga drum. Hide stretched taut across the drum forms its ...