Jack Costanzo, jazz musician known as Mr. Bongo, dies at 98
Jack Costanzo, a Chicagoan of Italian descent who taught himself to play the bongos and, somewhat improbably, became a ubiquitous figure in Afro-Cuban jazz, accompanying singers like Nat King Cole and mingling with Marlon Brando and other Hollywood stars, died Aug. 18 in Lakeside, California, near San Diego. He was 98.
The cause was a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm, his wife, Maureen Wilson, said.
Costanzo, after stints with Stan Kenton, Cole and other prominent artists, became a bandleader himself, recording albums across half a century, some of them employing his nickname, Mr. Bongo, in the title. He was also a session player on numerous other albums and accompanied performers in television appearances, including Ann Miller during a rendition of “I’m Gonna Live ‘Til I Die” on a 1957 episode of “The Dinah Shore Chevy Show.”
Perhaps his starriest celebrity pairing was with Brando, a drumming aficionado. Costanzo was sometimes mistakenly credited with teaching Brando the bongos and conga drums, a claim he was careful to correct whenever he got the chance.
“Everybody thinks I taught Marlon Brando,” he told the music site Herencia Latina. “I never taught Marlon how to play. He knew how to play before I met him.”
Jack James Costanzo was born on Sept. 24, 1919, in Chicago to Matteo and Virginia Sances Costanzo, both immigrants from Italy. He grew up in Chicago at a time when dancing, the kind done in hotel ballrooms, was studied and practiced by young people who envisioned making a career out of it. Costanzo, at 13 or 14, would go to places like the Merry Garden Ballroom— which had a main ballroom and an annex—to work on his steps.
“The girls came down in long, gorgeous gowns, spaghetti straps,” he recalled in an interview with Whittier College’s “Inside Latin Jazz” series several years ago. “Everybody that was dancing in the annex wanted to be a dancer, and I was one of those persons. And I was dancing with people that were eight, nine years older than I. I was just a young kid. In fact, that’s what they used to call me: ‘the Kid.’ ‘I want to dance with the Kid.’ But nobody kidnapped me.”
During one visit, a band from Puerto Rico was playing.
“The drummer on one song came out in front and played the bongos, and that was the first time I saw a pair of bongos,” he said. “And I went crazy.”
He wanted to learn the instrument, but there was a problem.
“There was nowhere to buy them,” he said. “You couldn’t buy bongos anywhere in Chicago.”
So he made a set out of butter tubs. Costanzo, though, had not yet abandoned his aspiration to be a dancer; for a time he and his first wife, Mary Margaret Myers, whom he married in 1940, were a professional dance team known as Costanzo & Marda. (They divorced in 1959.)
Costanzo joined the Navy in 1942 and was discharged in 1945 on the West Coast, so he stayed there, teaching dance for three months at the Beverly Hills Hotel before bandleader Bobby Ramos, who had heard Costanzo play at a jam session, offered him a job in 1946. As Costanzo described it, it was a matter of being in the right place at the right time: Ramos wanted a bongo player for an engagement at the Trocadero nightclub, and there were no others around.
“It was either me or not having bongos,” Costanzo said.
In 1947 he joined Stan Kenton’s orchestra, raising his profile considerably, and by 1949 he was playing with Cole, who after adding Costanzo changed the name of his act from the Nat King Cole Trio to Nat King Cole and His Trio to reflect the fourth member. He stayed with Cole for more than four years.
Costanzo, his nickname notwithstanding, was also adept on the larger conga drums. “Bongos are the salt and pepper of the rhythm section,” he once explained, whereas congas were more substantive.