Worth Beating the Drum For

Novice vocalist Jorge Moreno comes from the Nick at Nite generation, youngsters raised on reruns of such early television shows as “I Love Lucy.” The Miami kid grew up and learned to download “Babalu” from Napster, using guerrilla technology to preserve and pass on the Afro-Cuban composition made famous by Desi Arnaz on the 1950s sitcom.

Later this month, the 26-year-old Cuban American makes his own recording debut on Maverick Musica, the new Latin division of Madonna’s Maverick label. Right in the middle of Moreno’s remarkable new album, sandwiched between songs infused with a hip mix of straight-up salsa and ‘60s pop, sits his modern, thundering rendition of “Babalu.”

Television audiences will get their first glimpse of this recharged classic during “I Love Lucy’s 50th Anniversary Special,” airing Sunday at 9 p.m. on CBS, hosted by Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr. The siblings join Moreno on this big-band “Babalu,” which cuts back and forth between old clips of Arnaz as Ricky Ricardo, his shock of black hair bouncing on his forehead with each kick of the conga beat.

Desi Jr. (who is actually Desiderio Arnaz IV) appears with his father’s famous tapered conga strapped across his chest. The instrument--whose natural hide has to be heated from inside with a hot lightbulb to be tuned--was borrowed for the show from a Lucille Ball exhibit at Universal Studios. Lucie plays a conga too. (And yes, those are L.A. veterans Rudy Regalado and Alex Acuna on backup percussion.)

Moreno, lean and handsome in a white Panama hat and two-tone shoes, introduces the number as homage to Desi Arnaz, who died in 1986, when the young Cuban American was 11.

“If you really want to think of the first Latin crossover artist, it’s Desi Arnaz,” Moreno said this week. “Before Ritchie Valens had ‘La Bamba,’ Desi Arnaz was in every household in the country.... He’s definitely a big musical influence of mine.”

Now, that’s historic. This must be the first time any serious Latin musician cites Desi Arnaz as an important influence. Most knowledgeable fans and critics realize that Arnaz was an entertainer who picked up the conga as a prop for his onstage persona, not as a serious instrument. Arnaz just doesn’t rank with such respected pioneers as Machito or Miguelito Valdes, the real “Mr. Babalu,” who has the definitive version of the song.

In Arnaz’s 1976 autobiography “A Book,” he tells how he fell into a musical career by accident. After his prominent family fled Cuba’s political violence in 1933, a teenage Desi bought a $5 guitar at a pawnshop and serenaded friends on Miami Beach. By 1936, at 19, he got his first gig at a hotel lounge with the Siboney Septet, “a little rumba band” that really had only five members.

There, he was spotted by bandleader Xavier Cugat, who hired the rookie and took him on the road. But Arnaz soon felt confident enough to start his own band and headed back to Miami. His first act was a disaster. Advertised as “the only typical Cuban band in town,” his band of misfits was actually “two Italians, two Jews and a Spaniard” who had never played Latin music. As Arnaz tells it, they were almost fired until he hit upon a gimmick to whip up the audience.

Arnaz started the conga line in the United States, or so he says. He taught his musicians to bang out the conga’s most basic four-beat rhythm, with a kick at the end of each measure. One, two, three, kick . “All of Miami Beach was soon doing the conga,” he writes.

But the conga had already been introduced in this country, claims John Storm Roberts, author of “The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States.” Arnaz was just the conga’s sharpest promoter.

“Like Cugat, Arnaz was an important popularizer,” writes Roberts. “Unlike Cugat, he knew relatively little about the music he was hybridizing. But he had looks, charm, chutzpah and the great advantage over most important Latin musicians of being both upper-class and pure white.”

Arnaz’s complexion would later help on American television during an era when blacks were mostly caricatured, says Arturo Gomez, music director of Miami’s public radio affiliate WDNA-FM and a walking Latin music encyclopedia.

“To be quite honest, Desi was not the best of singers, and he was not the best conguero, obviously,” says Gomez. “But he gets credit for introducing Afro-Cuban music to the masses on television, which in the ‘50s was unheard of.”

That contribution cuts both ways, because Arnaz was all most Americans saw of Latin culture at the time. His hammy style promoted a cultural stereotype and, as a result, Margarita Lecuona’s tender and spiritual song to Babalu became an ethnic joke.

But if anybody laughed at Arnaz’s shtick, it would have been in keeping with the very genesis of the Yoruba deity to whom the song is addressed. Babalu-Aye is one of a group of gods revered in the Afro-Cuban religion called Regla de Ocha, popularly known as Santeria. Because Santeria fuses African and Catholic elements, Babalu in the New World is represented by San Lazaro (St. Lazarus) and pictured with a cane.

According to Yoruba cosmology, Babalu was mocked by the other gods because he was lame and danced awkwardly. Babalu was so angered that he unleashed plagues on the world and was later banished from the mythical holy city.

Regretting what he had done, Babalu later dedicated himself to caring for those who suffered from the plagues. In Cuba, he’s worshiped as a loving father figure.

So middle America unwittingly joined Arnaz in his watered-down weekly prayer to a non-Christian deity. Maybe Americans would have thought twice before merrily joining a conga line dedicated to the god of smallpox, as Babalu is still known in Africa, according to Raul Canizares’ very accessible study of Santeria, “Walking With the Night.”

By contrast, Moreno’s version feels fully informed of the song’s deep religious power. He’s done more than pay tribute to Arnaz; he has restored a tradition. The young performer--joined on record by Xiomara Laugart, Cuba’s almost mystical and underappreciated female vocal treasure--sings as if to really invoke “Babalu.”

And not just to make Americans dance.