Ruben Rada

Ruben Rada (born 17 July 1943) is a Uruguayan percussionist, composer, and singer. He is closely associated with candombe, a genre built around a chorus of tamboriles, Uruguayan barrel drums. His music, sometimes named candombe beat, combines pop, rock, and other styles with Uruguayan sounds, such as candombe drums and murga choruses. Rada has composed some of Uruguay's most cherished songs. In 1965, he and Eduardo Mateo formed the band El Kinto Conjunto. This was the first group in Uruguay to create the beat genre in Spanish (Castilian) and to fuse rock with Latin American musical styles. In 1969 the success of his Candombe song "Las Manzanas" ("The Apples") led to his first solo album and paritcipation in the Festival of Popular Music in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A year later he formed the band Tótem. He has recorded more than thirty albums and was recently awarded with a Grammy award.