Edmundo Martinez Tostado, born in El Paso in 1923, played with all the greats of the Swing Band era.
“Everybody’s born with talent. God doesn’t make anybody anything,” he told Mark Guerrero in a 1999 podcast. “You can pray to God all your life to make you something. He’s too busy. He’s got a lot of people. But if you want to, all you have to do is study. And you get there.”
Tostado was raised by his maternal grandparents after his mother moved to California and didn’t know his father until later. At school, he was nicknamed Don Tosti, because his teachers could not pronounce his name.
Young Tostado was mischievous and got in trouble at school, so his grandfather forced him to take music lessons to keep him busy. Tostado took to it and practiced obsessively, two hours every day. He was a prodigy: He could play seven different instruments, including the violin, saxophone and piano.
At 9 years old, Tosti played second violin in the El Paso Symphony Orchestra. At 15, he moved to Los Angeles and lived with his mother. Tosti played the saxophone in high school and then took up the upright bass.
While studying accounting at L.A. City College in 1943, Tosti got his first big break as a musician.
“One day, I went to hear the band. They had a real great jazz band at the college, and the bass player didn’t show up,” he said. “So they asked me to sit in, if I could read and play. I said ‘yeah.’”
Jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden’s band happened to be recording at the same studio as the school’s jazz band rehearsal. Teagarden was impressed with the 19-year-old Tosti, and his band offered him a job as a bass player for $250 a week in New York.
Performing with Teagarden kickstarted Tosti’s jazz career. During the 1940s, he performed with other major swing band leaders like Jimmy Dorsey and Les Brown.
Tosti eventually met his father, a band leader who encouraged him to lead his own band and to write his own music.
Tosti soon started his own group, the Pachuco Boogie Boys, alongside other iconic Chicano musicians, playing with piano player Eddie Cano and drummer Raul Diaz.
In 1948, Tosti released his biggest hit, “Pachuco Boogie,” a blend of jumping blues and boogie-woogie music inspired by El Paso’s Chicano zoot suit culture. The rhythm and blues hit became the first million-selling Latin song.
