Salsa great, trumpeter; Born September 30, 1921; Died February 3, 2007. Pedro Knight, while a salsa star and highly accomplished trumpeter in his own right, was best known as the widower of the legendary salsa singer Celia Cruz. He died on Saturday after years of diabetes and other ailments, having spent his last months mired in financial and legal disputes. He was 85.
The Cuban-American salsero died early on Saturday morning at Methodist Hospital in Arcadia, in California.
Knight grew up in Cuba and, in the rollicking days of Havana in the 1950s, played trumpet in the internationally acclaimed Sonora Matancera, where Cruz was a singer. Band members fled Cuba after Fidel Castro's revolution, resettling in 1960 in Miami and then moving in 1961 to New York. There, they performed at the iconic Palladium Ballroom.
Knight pined for Cruz for years before divulging his crush - only to have the bombshell reject him initially. "She said musicians had too many women and she didn't want to suffer. And, well, it was true. I had a lot of women. But I told her that if she would have me, she could leave that problem to me," Knight said in 2004. "I stopped seeing all the women. I forgot about every single one because Celia was the most special woman in the world."
Cruz soon relented, and the couple married in 1962. By that time, Knight had already given up professional trumpet playing to manage the sky-rocketing career of his wife, dubbed "Queen of Salsa".
Cruz, who affectionately called the white-maned Knight "Cabecita de Algodon" (Cotton Head), often sang about their love. Despite a gruelling performance schedule and her status as the most influential woman in Afro-Cuban music, she almost never appeared on stage without Knight.
Their 41-year romance ended in 2003, when she died from brain cancer in New Jersey. She was 77.
Knight's physical and mental health declined after her death.
He fainted and was hospitalised after a cancer fund-raiser in Miami in Cruz's honour in 2004, and doctors described his condition as a combination of diabetes-induced low blood pressure and emotional breakdown.
Knight inherited Cruz's multimillion-dollar fortune, but in recent years executors have squabbled over whether Knight was getting his share of the estate and whether the funds were being mismanaged. Last year, according to published reports, Knight was evicted from his home in California, for defaulting on the $6050 (£3086) monthly rent.
Knight is survived by a daughter from a previous marriage, Ernestina Knight, and four children in Cuba, Pedro, Roberto, Emilia and Gladys.
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