14 Facts About Mon Rivera

Mon Rivera is the common name given to two distinct Puerto Rican musicians, namely Monserrate Rivera Alers and his oldest son, Efrain Rivera Castillo,.

Mon Rivera is credited for a fast humorous style and for introducing the sound of an all-trombone brass section to Afro-Rican orchestra music.

Mon Rivera lived in the working class Barcelona barrio of the city proper.

Mon Rivera assembled impromptu plena jams in the neighborhood, which were so widely known that they were preserved for posterity in the documentary film on YouTube by Amilcar Tirado.

Curiously enough, at the time don Mon Rivera was illiterate and had no formal musical training.

Efrain's mother died when he was a little boy, and Don Mon Rivera remarried a few years after, fathering a total of twelve children.

Mon Rivera went to the extreme of arranging a plena version of "Hava Nagilah" for the Italian and Jewish clubgoers who danced to their music at New York's Palladium Ballroom.

Mon Rivera was featured in the second television music special by the Banco Popular de Puerto Rico in 1960.

Mon Rivera organized his own orchestra by 1961, when he started working on his album Que gente averigua, which was released in 1963.

An early example of this is the earliest recording Mon Rivera made of "Askarakatiskis".

Mon Rivera could make a living with his orchestra, but migrating to New York had disconnected him from his fan base in Puerto Rico.

Colon, who had admired Efrain's multiple trombone sound strongly enough to model his own band after Mon Rivera's, persuaded Efrain to record an album with him, for which he would perform and produce.

Mon Rivera died on March 12,1978, in Manhattan, New York City, United States, of a heart attack, at the age of 53.

Mon Rivera was buried in Mayaguez's Old Municipal Cemetery, gathering the second largest funeral crowd assembled in the city, second only to that of the 1993 burial procession for Benjamin Cole, the longest-serving mayor in the city's history.