Los Kenton were a merengue orchestra out of Villa Francisca, in Santo Domingo, by way of New York. They are the reason Dominican orchestras rehearse their choreography as seriously as their arrangements. Tito Kenton built the routines and led the group for its whole life.

Were they brothers?

Partly, and not in the way almost everyone assumes. Tito and Luis were brothers, and so was Raffy, who came later. Freddy was raised with them in the same house and the same barrio without being a blood relative — Tito calls him a brother by upbringing and by trade. Johnny was no relation at all: a boy a friend brought round because he wanted to dance. The surname was adopted by all of them, and Tito eventually made his legal when he took American citizenship.

Villa Francisca to New York

Tito was around thirteen when his father sent for him. He did not know how to dance — at parties in the barrio it was Luis who danced — and he went to New York frustrated, waiting for his brother to arrive and teach him. Freddy got there first, already carrying Johnny Ventura’s steps, and Tito set about learning them from him: a sandwich, the pool across the street, and then Freddy dancing while Tito watched from behind and practised alone afterwards.

In winter people held parties in each other’s apartments. At one of them Tito’s father asked what the group was called. There was no group. Pressed for a name, Tito said Los Tercios, after the word then used for a close friend. His father promptly stopped the party, announced them as artists, went home for a 45 and put on Cascabel by Félix del Rosario. They danced it under protest. The applause that came at the mambo settled the question.

Normandía Maldonado, the folklorist who ran a New York dance company, took them on to partner her dancers, and they used the middle of her routines to show what they could do alone. A theatre contest followed — tomatoes came out of the audience when the record was cued up wrong — and then a week-long run at a theatre with Dominican and Spanish artists on the bill.

The name

Kenton came from an American bandleader whose music had been used in a cartoon, the cartoon’s odd dancing being a joke in the barrio. A dancer they looked up to — older than them, the first anyone in Villa Francisca remembered dancing that way — carried the nickname. When a Santo Domingo announcer kept stumbling over Los Tercios, Tito’s brother Tony called out from the doorway to use Kenton instead. It stuck.

Karate

When they came home to dance in Santo Domingo they were mocked as effeminate, which was what men there said about anyone dancing in that style. Tito’s answer was to enrol in a karate school on 72nd Street in New York, found by Luis, and to feed the movements into the merengue once he was far enough along. It read as force rather than display, and it settled the question in front of an audience the way no argument would have. Every one of them trained. Nothing on a Dominican stage looked like it.

Bonny, Los Hijos del Rey, and the Fania night

Their first work inside an orchestra was not Los Hijos del Rey but Bonny Cepeda’s. There had been an earlier attempt, a group Tito named La Agrupación, which recorded a Rubén Blades song with Freddy singing and an arrangement by Félix del Rosario. Then Bonny was dismissed from La Gran Orquesta and built his own, and at a thirty-hour marathon dance at the Teatro Agua y Luz Johnny Ventura’s musicians left their seats to watch the two dancers. Wilfrido Vargas turned to Bonny afterwards and told him to hold on to those two.

When Wilfrido went on to form Los Hijos del Rey he wanted seven musicians and no dancers. Tito asked for a private word, argued the case by pointing at El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, and Wilfrido — drawing lines on a scrap of paper while he listened — agreed to build the full orchestra instead. Tito has said plainly that this is why Los Hijos del Rey exists in the form it does. In it he and Luis only danced. Singers were tried and discarded until Fernando Villalona auditioned and made his name with a Tatico Henríquez song. July Mateo "Rasputín" was there, Bonny directed, and Raulín Rosendo arrived later singing salsa, with Tito teaching him the steps.

In August 1976 they debuted at the Estadio Olímpico alongside the Fania All Stars, in front of twenty thousand people. Fania’s road manager did not want the Dominican group to play at all. Tito went and found Johnny Pacheco, explained the situation, and Pacheco walked out in front of a crowd that erupted thinking the headliners had started, quieted them, and asked that Los Hijos del Rey be given their two songs. During the charanga Tito jumped down from the high stage to reach Luis for their solo; the dust they raised hung over them like stage smoke. The audience stood. Tito has called it the best moment of his life in music.

Bonny con Kenton, and then Los Kenton

The impresario Luis Medrano — who had lived in their house in Villa Francisca — put together the next group, Bonny con Kenton, and Tito named it. They brought Freddy back from Johnny Ventura’s orchestra. Carlos Manuel El Zafiro had been Bonny’s first choice to sing and was passed over on the grounds that he would not be able to dance with them. They broke Puerto Rico. It ended when Bonny objected to Freddy’s conduct and Tito was made to choose; he chose the brother, and has said since that Bonny was right. Bonny left and went on to produce Richie Cepeda.

Los Kenton as an orchestra in its own name began in 1980. Tito started singing here, taught by Bonny and by Eddy Quiroz. His first record was La Política — the B-side of a 45 whose A-side, El Gato, was the first recording by his brother Raffy Kenton, newly discharged from the army to replace Freddy, who had stayed on in Puerto Rico. Radio announcers flipped the disc. The lyrics were written by Tito’s uncle Fran Pérez Palacio, who wanted no credit; the song outlived everyone involved and comes back around every election, and a military officer once summoned Tito over it.

The singers

Tito and Luis did not sing, and the orchestra was built to give each singer who passed through a hit of his own. Eddy Quiroz took Campesina, a Venezuelan song Bonny had the idea of turning into merengue. Alberto José — nicknamed for John Travolta before anyone saw him — sang Palo con Ella, written with the Show del Mediodía décima poet Jaime Chanlatte after the group rejected Tito’s own Christmas song. Miguel Miguel, whose stage name Tito gave him, had Te Seguiré. Johnny Reyes had Ella y Él, and left for the Wilfrido Vargas orchestra he had always wanted. Gabby Arias sang Te Lo Pido Por Favor and El Negro del Swing — a song Pochy y su Cocoband had shelved and Los Kenton asked to be released to them. Los Melones, their first hit in Puerto Rico, was Freddy’s lyric, softened from Los Mamones after a phone call from a woman who took offence.

After the accident Tito brought Roy Tavaré into the group in Puerto Rico and taught him to dance. It went badly enough at first that the musicians wanted him out; Tito kept him and struck his feet with a stick to move them, and Roy travelled from Santo Domingo week after week until he had it. Tito rates him among the best they had, and has noted that Roy has never mentioned the years publicly.

The dancing was not decoration and it caused friction. Fernando Villalona asked that they hold still while he sang, because the crowd watched them instead of him. Tito, asked about it decades later, said the story that Wilfrido Vargas ordered them to stop was false and that the request came from Fernando himself — and that Fernando had been right.

29 October 1987

They were at the Centro Olímpico at ten in the morning, working up an acrobatic entrance for a Madison Square Garden show. They had swum hard the night before and their shoulders hurt, so they moved from the floor to a trampoline. Luis went into a back flic-flac and a somersault, lost the shape of it, and came down between his head and his back. He broke the fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae. A friend pinched his leg and he felt nothing; he raised a hand and it dropped onto his chest. He told Tito to take him, that something serious had happened.

A doctor in Santo Domingo said he would never sit up again. Dr Bienvenido Fajardo, a friend from childhood then practising in the United States, took him to New York for the spinal fixation. He never walked or danced again. From the chair he painted, wrote books, founded groups — Mermelada among them — and went on appearing with the orchestra seated. He had always been the one with the business sense; Tito had built every routine with him.

Legacy

Los Kenton arrived as dancers rather than singers, which no Dominican orchestra had done, and made choreography a permanent part of the job. Groups rebuilt their front lines to imitate them and the practice outlasted the band by decades; Grupo Manía still call Tito godfather. Luisito Martí had wanted to build a group around them before any of it started. Neither Acroarte nor anyone else has formally recognised them.