Pedro Knight

To abandon a successful musical career for the love of a woman rather conflicts with the stereotype of the Latino male. But that is what happened to the Cuban trumpeter Pedro Knight Caraballo after he fell for the singer in his dance band, the future Queen of Salsa, Celia Cruz. More than three years after her death (obituary, July 24 2003), he has died aged 85, following a series of illnesses.

Knight, a trained and powerfully expressive musician, played the trumpet with the Havana-based conjunto band, La Sonora Matancera (the sound of Matanzas, a port with a large black population). When he joined it at the age of 23, Havana was becoming one of the world's most musically exhilarating nightspots. La Sonora was an Afro-Cuban band, operating under a veiled apartheid system which kept many black musicians out of the glitzy clubs catering for American tourists. However, by the 1950s their sophisticated arrangements and live radio performances were part of the golden age of Cuban music, and they appeared alongside American singers such as Nat King Cole and Sarah Vaughan.

Trumpets were key to the conjunto sound, with percussion, Cuban guitar, double bass, voices, and piano. This raunchy, highly rhythmic dance music was rooted in the traditional, Africa-based styles of son and guaracha, as revived decades later by the Buena Vista Social Club. In 1950, the band's leader, Rogelio Martínez, invited Celia Cruz to join them. She was already popular through her radio performances and the sexy song and dance act Las Mulatas de Fuego, who broke the colour bar at Cuba's mafia-run casino-club, the Tropicana. Her voice and charisma elevated the band from superb to magnificent, and she can be heard among Knight's high-pitched interjections and sharp, darting choruses on albums from the period.

Cruz's arrival was the turning-point in Knight's life. "It wasn't love at first sight," he said, describing the wooing he conducted over six or seven years. "We gradually became good friends, and over time our friendship grew into love," he said during filming for the BBC2 Arena documentary, My Name is Celia Cruz (1988). Cruz's father disapproved of his daughter's career and insisted she was chaperoned. She would go straight home from work, relying on the band as "my bodyguards". She knew - and he admitted - that he played the field. And she would not hook up with a musician with five children because she "didn't want to suffer".

In January 1959, Fidel Castro's revolutionary army arrived in Havana in triumph, and musicians' livelihoods were threatened. When La Sonora Matancera was offered a two-year contract in Mexico City from July 1960, the band flew out on what they assumed was just another tour. But after an hour in the air, Martínez announced "This is a one-way trip." No one ever returned. After 18 months, the band accepted a long-term contract at the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, which entitled them to US residencies.

By then, Cruz had accepted Knight's advances and the couple moved to New York, where they married on July 14 1962. The relationship would be a 41-year true romance; they were inseparable. In 1965, Knight abandoned his own music to become Cruz's manager. As she told the writer Mary Kent: "Pedro is my 50%. I am the one that sings, but he takes care of everything else."

In 1963, after pressure from New York's salsa label, Fania, to record Cruz, Knight agreed to an album with the musician/producer Johnny Pacecho. Celia y Johnny led to other successes and a lifelong friendship. Now Knight stood on stage at his wife's concerts, baton in hand, supervising the musicians. During the 70s and 80s - the heyday of New York salsa - they visited every continent.

By the mid-90s, Cruz was an international star, and incorporated Knight into her performances, clasping him to her and referring to him as "Mi cabecita de algodon" (my little cottonhead) because of his halo of now white hair (and white mutton-chop sideboards). But back at home in Queens, New York, and later in Fort Lee, New Jersey, Cruz said she was a conventional Latino wife, cooking for her husband "and packing his suitcases".

Her predictably public death took its toll on Knight. He sold their house and moved to California, near to their surrogate son, Luis Falcon. After complications following years of diabetes, he suffered strokes while working on a biography and CD releases. Recent family feuding over Cruz's fortune triggered a rapid deterioration, though lawsuits were withdrawn because of Knight's dementia. The events were an unsavoury closing chapter to a life filled with exceptional love - of music and of his wife. He leaves a daughter, Ernestina, in Tampa, Florida, by his first wife, and another four children, Pedro, Roberto, Emilia and Gladys, in Cuba.

· Pedro Knight Caraballo, trumpeter, musical director and manager, born September 30 1921; died February 3 2007

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