Jaime Prats Estrada (29 March 1883, in Sagua la Grande – 3 January 1946, in

Havana Havana (; ) is the capital and largest city of Cuba. The heart of La Habana Province, Havana is the country's main port and commercial center.flautist The flute is a member of a family of musical instruments in the woodwind group. Like all woodwinds, flutes are aerophones, producing sound with a vibrating column of air. Flutes produce sound when the player's air flows across an opening. In th ...

, composer and orchestral director. He also played the

clarinet The clarinet is a Single-reed instrument, single-reed musical instrument in the woodwind family, with a nearly cylindrical bore (wind instruments), bore and a flared bell. Clarinets comprise a Family (musical instruments), family of instrume ...

, violin,

double bass The double bass (), also known as the upright bass, the acoustic bass, the bull fiddle, or simply the bass, is the largest and lowest-pitched string instrument, chordophone in the modern orchestra, symphony orchestra (excluding rare additions ...

and piano. He started to study music at seven, and in 1893 went to

Cienfuegos Cienfuegos (), capital of Cienfuegos Province, is a city on the southern coast of Cuba. It is located about from Havana and has a population of 178,368 in 2022. Since the late 1960s, Cienfuegos has become one of Cuba's main industrial centers, ...

, where he continued to study music as well as taking a first degree, graduating at 17. In 1899 he could be found in Havana playing first flute in the orchestra of the Azzali Opera company, with which he toured several countries of the Americas. On return, he took the post of director of the Municipal band of Sagua la Grande. He graduated from the Conservatorio Peyrellade in 1904, and from 1906 directed orchestras of theatrical companies, touring with them again to Central America. In 1913 he graduated as a doctor of

pharmacy Pharmacy is the science and practice of discovering, producing, preparing, dispensing, reviewing and monitoring medications, aiming to ensure the safe, effective, and affordable use of medication, medicines. It is a miscellaneous science as it ...

. He worked as musical director of the

bufo ''Bufo'' is a genus of true toads in the amphibian family Bufonidae. As traditionally defined, it was a wastebasket genus containing a large number of toads from much of the world but following taxonomic reviews most of these have been moved to ...

company of Arquímedes Pous when it went to

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

. In 1922 he founded the Cuban Jazz Band in Havana, one of the first of its type in Cuba. The personnel, all Cubans, included his son Rodrigo Prats on violin, the great flautist/saxophonist

Alberto Socarrás Alberto Socarrás Estacio, (19 September 1908 – 26 August 1987), was a Cuban-American flautist who played both Cuban music and jazz. Socarras was born in Manzanillo in 1908, and started learning the flute in 1915 with his mother, Dolores Estaci ...

, who later emigrated to New York, and Pucho Jiménez on

slide trombone The trombone (, Italian, French: ''trombone'') is a musical instrument in the brass family. As with all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player's lips vibrate inside a mouthpiece, causing the air column inside the instrument to ...

. The line-up would probably also have included double bass, kit drum, banjo, and cornet. His last years were devoted to teaching the history of music at the Iranzo Conservatory, and giving classes on

harmony In music, harmony is the concept of combining different sounds in order to create new, distinct musical ideas. Theories of harmony seek to describe or explain the effects created by distinct pitches or tones coinciding with one another; harm ...

and

composition Composition or Compositions may refer to: Arts and literature *Composition (dance), practice and teaching of choreography * Composition (language), in literature and rhetoric, producing a work in spoken tradition and written discourse, to include ...

at the Conservatorio Ramona Sicardó. He composed the

bolero Bolero is a genre of song which originated in eastern Cuba in the late 19th century as part of the trova tradition. Unrelated to the older Spanish dance of the same name, bolero is characterized by sophisticated lyrics dealing with love. It h ...

"Ausencia", and other pieces.Giro Radamés (2007). ''Diccionario enciclopédico de la música en Cuba, Vol. 3''. La Habana. p. 258.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Prats, Jaime 1883 births 1946 deaths Cuban flautists Cuban composers Cuban male composers Cuban multi-instrumentalists Musicians from Havana 20th-century Cuban conductors (music) Cuban male musicians 20th-century flautists