By EFE
05 Mar 2024, 10:04 AM EST
San Juan – The legendary Puerto Rican musician Rafael Ithier, co-founder and director of the salsa orchestra El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, will be awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), Río Piedras campus (San Juan ).
Ithier will be honored by the institution’s Faculty of General Studies on March 13 at the UPR Theater, as reported in a press release.
Along with Ithier, Nadia Cordero Antuñano, professor of the Department of Natural Sciences, will also be honored.
This will be the first of two ceremonies in which the UPR will honor several academics with this distinction. The second will be on March 15.
Ithier entered the world of music from a very young age because his father, Nicolás, had a bohemia group, and his uncle Salvador was a guitarist and second voice of Rafael Hernández Marín’s Trío Borinquen.
Ithier founded El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico in 1962 together with Eddie ‘La Bala’ Pérez and Roberto Roena, after breaking up with the group of Rafael Cortijo y su Combo, to which they belonged for eight years and in which Ismael Rivera also participated. better known as “El sonero mayor”.
That same year, the group produced its first album, ‘Menéame los mangoes’, in which the Dominican singer Joseíto Mateo collaborated, thus beginning a long musical history that has led this band to take salsa around the world.
Some of the greatest hits of El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, known as ‘Los mulatos del flavor’ or ‘La Universidad de Salsa’ are ‘Brujería’, ‘Ojos chino’, ‘Timbalero’, ‘No hay cama pa’ tanta people’ and ‘And I don’t do anything else’.
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