The SONOTONE label was founded in Cuba in 1956 by producer and Cuban music enthusiast, Manuel Mato. Mato’s great passion for the classic music of his motherland inspired him to seek out his musical heroes – the “cream of the crop” of Cuban artists. The musicians in question were extremely popular in the nightclubs of Havana for many years, yet, for the most part, they were sadly neglected as far as recordings were concerned. Between 1956 and 1960, Mato diligently recorded as many of the great artists as he could find for his label, produced sessions for other Cuban labels and purchased the rights to earlier Cuban recordings for the sake of historic preservation. When Mato fled Cuba shortly after the 1959 embargo, he took up residence in Miami and began to record newly arrived Cuban émigrés which he continued to do up until 1986. He became the first to record strictly Cuban music in the USA and did so at Miami’s famed Criteria studio as well as Tropicana studios in Hialeah. In was around 1962 that Sound Triangle and its associated family of labels were formed. Since that time, the Sound Triangle label, which includes all the famed SONOTONE recordings, has become one of the most highly sought after catalogs by Cuban music fans across the globe.