The Puerto Rican plenary loses this morning one of its staunch defenders and exponents, Héctor “Tito” Matos, who died of an apparent heart attack while at home in San Juan, according to preliminary information.
The death was confirmed by a relative of the family.
Matos was married to Mariana Reyes, with whom he fathered Marcelo, eight years old. He is also the father of the adults Hector and Seliana. He was 53 years old.
Matos, born in Santurce, made the tambourine that he received on Three Kings Day from his grandfather his own and until then he never stopped playing the instrument or promoting it among the new generations.
“He learned to play the bomba barrels and all the tambourines -including the follower and the tambourine- but he specialized in the requinto becoming one of the most creative requinteros of his generation”, states the biography on the page Bomba y Plena and many plus
He belonged to multiple groups, beginning with the Sapos del Caño, Pleneros del Almendro, Grupo Agüeybaná, Pleneros del Pueblo, Pleneros del Coquí, Pleneros de la 23, Pleneros de la 21 – with whom he travels and performs on important platforms in the United States. , even recorded the productions “Somos boricuas” and “Para todos tú”, which were nominated for a Grammy in 2006.
In the interim, he lived for 10 years in New York, where he completed a degree in landscape architecture. In that city he also formed his own project, Viento de Agua, in 1996, together with Ricardo Pons and Alberto Toro. Through this concept he achieved a contemporary approach towards plena and bomba by integrating instruments such as piano, bass, brass and even drums.
“His grandfather Felipe did not know that that first tambourine on January 6 would be only the first of what is now perhaps the largest and most varied collection of tambourines in Puerto Rico, made by the best artisans on the Island and in New York, from cedar, ausubo, aluminum and whatever material can be bent. It is those same tambourines that lie like a mountain in the center of the circle of pleneros that gather to play on the corners during the Plenazos Callejeros”, the biography continues.
These plenazos, the result of his interest in cultivating the instrument and the musical genre that moved it, were complemented by offering bomba and plena workshops together with the anthropologist Ramón López, Dr. David González and Juan Gutiérrez from Los Pleneros de la 21 .
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