Your host, Maximilian, looks into the microphone dreamily, and starts to croon. The show’s theme song drifts across the airwaves. It’s “Este Tarde Vi Llover,” an old Latin standard redone by Mexican jazz duo Nery & Lopez. Maximilian leans into the mike. “Good evening,” he says, “and welcome to “A Romantic Evening with Maximilian.’ Things are going to be a little bit on the softer side tonight. . . .”
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Tonight the show includes songs from Brazilian singer Maria Bethania, and tangos by Gato Barbieri, the Argentinian who wrote the music to Last Tango in Paris. Later, Maximilian will spin tunes by Tito Rodriguez, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, Chicago’s Fareed Haque (who’s in Maximilian’s band), the great gypsy flamenco singer Camaron, and Nil Lara, who Maximilian calls “a Latino Tracy Chapman.”
The radio show, Maxmilian hopes, will fuse together the various musical interests he’s accumulated over the years. He says all the music he plays is unified by clave, a four-beat syncopated pulse that rests under all rhythms. “It’s the node where all these rhythms are one,” he says. “The fact that in Cuba they call it mambo and in Brazil they call it samba doesn’t mean anything. You put a samba drummer and a mambo drummer together in the same room, they’re going to find the same beat. They are going to click, because they all are one.”
When he was 14, his parents sent him to Taft, the tony all-boys prep school in Connecticut. Maximilian was late for his first day of school, and hurried to get to the campus. “I’m rushing to the mess hall, I open these doors, I walk through, and the whole room stops like an E.F. Hutton commercial,” he says. “Some kid ran up an shot a picture of me. I was dressed in a white linen suit, like Shaft or something like that, like a pimp. I had a white hat, white suede shoes, thick white nylon socks, a white shirt, with a white silk tie, and all kinds of jewelry. Man, I was white on white. That picture was in my graduation yearbook.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Lloyd DeGrane.
