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Efrain Rivera Castillo (1925, Mayagüez, Puerto Rico ; 12/03/1978, Manhattan, New York City, USA).Efraín was specifically known for salsa and a Puerto Rican style called plena. He is credited for a fast humorous style and for introducing the sound of an all-trombone brass section to Afro-Rican orchestra music.
Three of Efraín's brothers were also musicians. Efraín's son is the percussionist, Javier Rivera.
Efraín's mother died when he was a little boy, and Don Mon remarried a few years after, fathering a total of twelve children. Since the family's economic situation was precarious, Efraín had to support and look after his younger brothers by taking various odd jobs. The one that he was most successful at, besides music, was as shortstop for the Indios de Mayagüez, the local winter league baseball team, for which he had been the bat boy at an earlier age. He played with them between 1943 and 1945.
In his beginnings as a musician, Efraín and Germán Vélez (later the father of Wilkins Velez) formed "El Dúo Huasteco", and sang Mexican folk songs that were popular in Latin America at the time (they even dressed the part). Santos Colon joined the duo occasionally and made it a trio. Their talent moved Gilbert Mamery (who also happened to be William's son; Gilbert legally changed the family name's spelling to prevent mispronounciations) to feature them as part of musical reviews staged at Mayagüez's San José Theater. Later, Mon became a singer with various local bands, working with bandleaders Juan Ramón Delgado, better known as "Moncho Leña"[2] and William Manzano, both of whom he persuaded to have some of his father's plenas arranged for a full orchestra. A full orchestral version of "Aló, ¿Quién Ñama?" was a sleeper hit in 1950.
Efraín (by now widely called "Mon") also began to write his own plenas soon after. One of them, "La Plena de Rafael Martinez Nadal" was written in admiration for the Puerto Rican lawyer and legislator, who was extremely successful in local courts. Another one, "Carbón de Palito", described the route followed by street vendors of wood charcoal (then used as cooking fuel) through most of Mayagüez. Almost all sections of the city at the time are mentioned in the lyrics. Both plenas were local hits, and along with Rafael Cortijo's rendition of "El Bombón de Elena", they helped to revive the genre during the late 1950s.
By the mid-1950s, Efraín was an accomplished singer in Puerto Rico, but since the island is rather small, he did as many other local performers and emigrated to New York City, as to guarantee a living playing music, given the sizeable Latino population there. When Moncho Leña's orchestra moved to New York City in November 1953, he moved along with them. He went to the extreme of arranging a plena version of Hava Nagilah for the Italian and Jewish clubgoers who danced to their music at New York's Palladium Ballroom.[3]He also sang with Joe Cotto and Héctor Pellot. He was featured in the second television music special by the Banco Popular de Puerto Rico in 1960.
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