A composer, conductor and drummer, Costanzo is best known for having been a bongo player, and was nicknamed "Mr. Bongo". He visited Havana three times in the 1940s and learned to play Afro-Cuban rhythms on the bongos and congas.
A Chicago native, Costanzo was 14 when he became enchanted with the bongos after hearing a musician play them at a dance concert at a ballroom in the Windy City. It was an epiphany. “My eyes came out of my head!” the self-taught Costanzo recalled in a late 2015 Union-Tribune interview. “I had to learn on my own, which is good, because I developed my own style. It seemed like it came natural. I listened to a lot of music. Xavier Cugat was big. And, many years later, he hired me.”
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| Costanzo with Marda c.1946 |
Costanzo started as a dancer, touring as a team with his wife before World War II. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1942 and worked in aviation ordnance in the New Hebrides in the South Pacific. After his discharge he worked as a dance instructor at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Latin band leader Bobby Ramos heard Costanzo playing bongos in a jam session and offered him a job. Throughout the 1940s, Costanzo worked with several Latin bands, including a revived version of the Lecuona Cuban Boys, Desi Arnaz, and Rene Touzet.
Costanzo toured with Stan Kenton from 1947–48 and occasionally in the 1950s, and played with Nat King Cole from 1949 to 1953. He also played with the Billy May Orchestra, Peggy Lee, Danny Kaye, Perez Prado, Charlie Barnet, Pete Rugolo, Betty Grable, Harry James, Judy Garland, Patti Page, Jane Powell, Ray Anthony, Martin & Lewis, Frances Faye, Dinah Shore, Xavier Cugat, Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, and Eddie Fisher.
Costanzo formed his own band in the 1950s which recorded and toured internationally. “Afro Cuban Jazz North-of-the-Border,” Costanzo’s debut album as a band leader,” came out in 1955. In 1957 came “Mr. Bongo,” the first of about half a dozen Costanzo albums that used his stage moniker. His popular-song and instrumental compositions include "I Want (Quiere)", "Bongo Blues", "Drumarama", "Go Bongo", and "El Diablito".
Here’s “Cumbanchero” (feat. Eddie Cano) from above album.
Leonard Feather who in the 1960s was the Los Angeles Times’ jazz critic, called out “Mr. Bongo” when he saw Costanzo at a Philadelphia train station after a concert with Kenton. The name stuck. Many Hollywood stars studied bongos with him, including Marlon Brando, Rita Moreno, Carolyn Jones, Hugh O'Brian, Keenan Wynn, Van Johnson, Tony Curtis, Betty Grable, Vic Damone, James Dean, and Gary Cooper.
Costanzo moved to San Diego from Los Angeles in the early 1970s and was in retirement until 1998 when he decided to make a comeback and in 2001 recorded Back From Havana under the Ubiquity Records umbrella. This album featured the likes of Black Note's Gilbert Castellanos, Steve Firerobing and the Panamanian singer Marilu. In 2002 he released another album with the same cast called Scorching the skins this time he also added Quino from Big Mountain. . The albums were followed by a concert tour that included at least one date in Canada.
Jack Costanzo’s final performance was on Aug. 9, 2018 when he sat in on congas at trumpeter and San Diego Latin-jazz mainstay Bill Caballero’s weekly jam session at Border X in Barrio Logan. Costanzo was admitted to Grossmont Hospital the next day, then returned a few days later to his Lakeside home, where he received hospice care up to his death on August 18, 2018, aged 98. He died of complications from a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm.
(Edited from Wikipedia & San Diego Union Tribune