Edmundo Ros

Bandleader Edmundo Ros personified Latin music across Britain during the World War II years. As the favorite of London’s elite circles, he brought both the rhumba and the samba to British audiences for the first time. Born on December 7, 1910, in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, to a Scottish father and an African-Venezuelan mother, he passed most of his early years inside military school, where he performed percussion within the school band. That period proved deeply unhappy, prompting him at age 17 to flee to Caracas and take the tympanist chair in the Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela. Ten years afterward he moved to London, briefly enrolling in classical studies before committing himself entirely to popular music. He supported Fats Waller and performed vocals inside Don Marino Barreto’s Cuban band, then launched his own five-piece rhumba group in 1940. The 1941 Parlophone single “Los Hijos de Buda” became a hit and transformed him into a star whose lavish Coconut Grove shows drew the city’s uppermost social set. When a prominent divorce trial named him as the factor that ended the defendant’s marriage, Ros dominated the national press; far from harming his reputation, the ensuing scandal increased his fame and led him to instruct then-Princess Elizabeth and her sister Princess Margaret in dance. Following an extended run at the West End’s Bagatelle, he purchased the former Coconut Grove premises on Regent Street in 1951 and reopened the room as Edmundo Ros’ Dinner and Supper Club. Regular BBC radio broadcasts followed, while his Phase 4 albums for the London label—including the space age pop classics Rhythms of the South and Arriba!—moved briskly. “The Wedding Samba,” his greatest success, reached the U.S. Top Five and sold three million copies. Once Parliament authorized gambling in 1965, crowds at his club fell sharply, prompting an immediate sale of the business. A decade later he settled in Alicante, Spain, yet returned to London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall on January 8, 1994, to lead the BBC Big Band with Strings in a final concert. In the 2000 New Year’s Honours List he received the Order of the British Empire.