Los Muchachos

In the mid-‘60s, there was a thriving Latin-music scene at a Boston club called The Cave on Boylston Alley (now behind the Transportation Building in Park Square), and Los Muchachos performed nightly as the house band. A hotbed of authentic Cuban music, the venue attracted the incredibly polished dancers to its floor; so serious were some of the male terpsichoreans that they had their trousers made without pockets so as not to “disturb the line of the body.”

To form Los Muchachos, band leader and saxophonist Dick Meza assembled some of the  best musicians in the area: pianist Mark Levine, percussionist Skip Tosi (who had studied under renowned Cuban percussionist Walfredo Reyes Sr.), bassist Gene Perla, Don Alias on congas and Sheila Wilkerson guesting on timbales and vocals from time to time. After Levine left to further his career on the West Coast, Vladimir Vasilyev took over on keyboards, with Carl Schroeder occasionally sitting in for him. Los Muchachos played mambo, rhumba, salsa and cha-cha-cha to a packed house at The Cave almost every night, becoming the hottest Latin act in Boston (and arguably in New England).

Many members of the band became very successful after leaving the group, playing with the likes of Tito Puente, Nina Simone, Dinah Washington, Carmen Macrae, Miles Davis, Roy Haynes and David Sanborn, among others. Original bassist Perla, who founded a record label in Japan but has since returned to the US, is credited with introducing the electric bass to jazz and currently plays with his own group. Grammy nominee and author Levine lives in Los Angeles, where he composes, records, performs and teaches, and Wilkerson continued appearing as a percussionist-vocalist until passing away. Percussionist Tosi and band leader/saxophonist Meza have joined her in that “big band in the sky.”

(by Fiona Cortland)