Afro-Cuban Jazz Still Gives Bobby Matos Rhythm Fever : Percussion: The conga player, who appears Sunday with his group Heritage Ensemble in Santa Ana, has long been obsessed with his craft.

Anybody who’s heard Afro-Cuban jazz performed live has felt its seductive powers.

“It’s very powerful stuff,” percussionist Bobby Matos explained recently from New York, where the bandleader was vacationing and visiting family. “The rhythms are heartbeat rhythms, the congas go directly into your bloodstream when you hear them. You go to hear these bands live, and it makes something inside your body vibrate--it hits me right in the pit of my stomach. It’s like a physical reaction. You get drawn to this type of stuff.”

Matos, who appears Sunday with his group Heritage Ensemble at the Fiesta Marketplace in Santa Ana, experienced those rhythms at an early age. Now living in Hollywood, the native New Yorker grew up hearing a well-rounded mix of musical styles. “I listened to Machito and Billie Holiday. I listened to Tito Puente and the Modern Jazz Quartet. I listened to a lot of Cal Tjader, but I also listened to a lot of straight-ahead jazz, too, from Louis Armstrong to Dizzy Gillespie.”

But it wasn’t until high school that Matos took up the congas. “I was a freshman and turned on the TV--in New York we had Spanish hour then--and the Machito orchestra was on and Patato (Valdez) was playing congas. That did it. The orchestra was so dynamic, and he was so dynamic playing congas and dancing. Everyone at school was talking about it the next day.”

Suddenly the congas became an obsession for the young aficionado. “I used to lie about my age to get into places like the Village Gate and the Palladium to see Machito, or Tito or Herbie Mann, who had an Afro-Cuban group at the time with Patato. I was fascinated by Patato. I’d follow him from group to group and go backstage and insist that he teach me how to play different things. He would show me just to get me to stop bothering him. ‘Go have a drink or go bother the women or something,’ he would tell me.”

Matos’ entry into studio work came in 1971 from a chance meeting with, of all people, Barry Manilow. “I was going for an audition at Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare Festival-Theatre in New York and had my conga in a duffel bag. And I couldn’t find which room the audition was in and was going from one theater to another. Then I ran into a guy who said the audition had been canceled. He saw the duffel bag and said, ‘Give me your number. I sometimes need a conga player to do overdubs.’ I didn’t know who I was talking to at the time, but it was a young Barry Manilow.”

In addition to studio work, Manilow was also working as Bette Midler’s musical director at the time. “Nobody knew who Bette was then, unless they’d seen her playing the bath houses in New York,” Matos said. “She was still an underground cult figure.”

The young conga player was soon a member of Midler’s expanded group and eventually backed the singer at her first Carnegie Hall appearance. He also worked with Manilow, providing some rhythm for the singer-songwriter’s first album.

But it was a late-’70s stint with the latter-day Rascals that brought him to Los Angeles. “I did two or three months with them at a time when only two of the original members were left. They were in an interesting period, getting very jazzy and experimental. They’d played with Hubert Laws and Alice Coltrane and decided they wanted a Latin percussionist in the band. We traveled to Los Angeles, and I liked the vibes and the weather and decided to move.”

Matos’ first album, “Heritage Ensemble” on Enclave Records, was released in 1988 with the percussionist, in addition to congas, playing timbales, bata drum, guiro and shekere. The recording, which features a particularly warm front line of flute and vibes, pays tribute to a number of Matos’ influences with tunes such as Darrell Harris’ “Tjaderade” (for Cal Tjader). A new album, recorded earlier this year, is currently undergoing final mixing.

For his Santa Ana appearance, Matos promises a mix of concert and dance music from three or four percussionists along with vibes, bass, piano and voice. There’ll be no horns or flute to front the band; instead, Matos has enlisted a cohort to play the tres, a guitar with four sets of triple strings that originated in Cuba.

The percussionist provides a little history when explaining why he is adamant about calling the music he presents Afro-Cuban jazz, rather than the more popularly accepted term Latin jazz. “Calling it Latin jazz is inaccurate,” he said. “Latin jazz infers Venezuela, Argentina, a Pan-American influence. I was brought up on the music of Machito, a Cuban. I knew him when he was alive, and I did a recording with him. His brother-in-law, Mario Bauza, was also a figure in the world of Afro-Cuban jazz--he was the one who formed the Machito orchestra. He said that calling this music ‘Latin jazz’ was like taking the child that he had given birth to, named and baptized, and then changing its name. It’s not tango, or bossa nova or salsa. Afro-Cuban jazz is a very specific term.”

“I think the bitterness we’ve had with Cuba in the last 30 years has led to the labeling of the music as Latin jazz. Also the word “Afro” sounds like a nationalistic term. But even if we’re playing a Brazilian tune, we approach it with an Afro-Cuban concept. We play Afro-Cuban jazz and dance music--period.”