Victor Parra stewed in Latin music for decades.
He offered Chicagoans a taste in 1982 when his show “Mambo Express” hit the airwaves on WBEZ-FM (91.5).
It was a novelty to thousands who’d never heard the music that Mr. Parra had fallen in love with as a youth: Afro-Cuban jazz, also known as Latin jazz.
His epiphany began with a boom, when he first heard the drums of Cuban music as a teen and began a life of collecting, playing and sharing music.
Mr. Parra developed a devoted on-air following, formed his own band — also named Mambo Express — and was on air for more than 30 years.
“He sprinkled in the history and stories of the musicians,” said his wife, Connie Parra, a singer and fellow percussionist who performed with Mr. Parra. “He knew many of them personally, like Tito Puente and Jerry González. They’ve been to our house!”
He left WBEZ and moved his show in 2004 to WDCB-FM (90.9), where he hosted until signing off for a final time in 2017.
Mr. Parra, who didn’t earn any money for his radio gigs, spent hours researching and compiling music that he’d play on air.
His main job was working as a janitor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“He did it for the love of music,” said his wife.
Mr. Parra had well over 8,000 vinyl albums, not to mention his CDs and cassette tapes — all of which got their own special room when his home in Little Italy was renovated in 2007.
“We had music everywhere in the house, in the kitchen, in the front room, and we would dance,” Connie Parra said. “Victor had his own way of dancing, no turns and all this, he just stood in one place and grooved.”
Mr. Parra died July 26 from a lung infection. He was 87.
People regularly mistook Mr. Parra for Cuban because of his love for the nation that produced the music that shaped his life, but he wasn’t.
His parents immigrated from Mexico and settled in Little Italy. His father was a barber and a musician, and his mother was a homemaker.
Mr. Parra, one of 15 children, began working at a young age to support his family. He shined shoes and sold newspapers on Maxwell Street.
“He never went to high school; he always said the streets were his education,” his wife said.
Mr. Parra was exposed mainly to traditional Mexican music as a kid. It wasn’t until he was 15 when he was waiting outside a record store where his sister worked so that he could walk her home that he heard Cuban music for the first time.
“I heard the drum. Boom, boom. Boom, boom. And I got hooked,” he said during an interview before his last show on WDCB. “I was consumed, you know, I didn’t know it was Cuban music. It just sounded good to me. It’s the rhythm, that’s the hook.”
Mr. Parra served in the Army for two years in his early 20s and was stationed in Panama. Upon returning, he learned how to play conga drums from a musician who was also a 16-inch softball buddy of Mr. Parra’s brother.
“I was like glue; I was attached to him,” he recalled in the interview, noting that he began playing with as many bands as he could.
“They’re all playing the same music but got different approaches to everything. It’s just like a manager of a baseball club or football coach, they’re all playing the same game but have different strategies and approaches to the game. Music is no different,” he said.
In the early ’70s he opened a record store, VP Records, at North and Damen in Wicker Park.
Well-known musicians in town for gigs, like Willie Colón, would stop in, and Mr. Parra became friends with many of them. The store had about a six-year run.
Mr. Parra paid one of his young employees, Edwin Claudio, in records. When Claudio, who earned a master’s degree in education from Harvard University, served on the board of WBEZ, he tapped Mr. Parra to create a Latin music show.
“He said ‘You should do your own show and expose this music,’ and the rest is history,” Connie Parra said.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Parra is survived by his sons from a previous marriage, Victor Parra and Ted Parra, and two grandchildren.
Services have been held.
