Victor Parra was a Chicago-area radio host, musician and bandleader who championed Afro-Cuban jazz music as the host of his weekly radio show, “Mambo Express,” on both WBEZ-FM and WDCB-FM.

Parra was on Chicago’s airwaves for more than 25 years, and he performed with his band for a similar amount of time.

“He was really in love with Cuban music,” said Juan Montenegro, a friend and a former Chicago radio host. “And he was really an innate musician and percussionist who managed to gather around him … musicians in the Chicago music scene that he incorporated into his band.”

Parra, 87, died of a lung infection aggravated by the recent Canada wildfires on July 26 at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, said his wife of 34 years, Connie. He had been a longtime resident of the Little Italy neighborhood.

Born in Chicago to Mexican immigrant parents, Parra grew up in Little Italy and lost both his parents by the time he was 9 years old. As a result, Parra never attended grammar school or high school, his wife said.

Instead, Parra held various jobs in his neighborhood from a young age, selling newspapers and shining shoes, his wife said. He later worked in the garment district around Maxwell Street, operating pressing machines and handling retail.

“My education was when I hit the street,” Parra told the Tribune in 2017. ”That’s the best education you can get, man. You meet different people every day.”

Parra heard Mexican music at home, but he told the Tribune that he was “hooked” by the mambo and cha-cha music of the long-running, Havana-based band Orquesta Aragon, and he began collecting Afro-Cuban records.

“I heard 78s (records) of Orquesta Aragon and Perez Prado,” he told the Tribune in 1999. “I had no idea it was Cuban music, it just sounded good to my ears. So I started to become a small-time collector, getting 78s wherever I could.”

Parra later served in the Army and was stationed in Panama. Back in Chicago, he worked in the clothing industry and then started distributing records, initially from his car.

From 1972 until 1977, Parra operated his own record store, VP Records, in a former cigar store at the intersection of Damen, Milwaukee and North avenues in Wicker Park.

“I was one of the first guys to play music before you bought it,” Parra told the Tribune in 1999. “I used to do clinics before those things had a name. (Musicians) would come to my store and I would say, ‘This is the man. Come here and ask him the questions.’”

One of Parra’s employees at the record store, Edwin Claudio, later served on Chicago’s Board of Education and also helped the Board of Education-owned radio station, WBEZ-FM, develop a Latin music show. That led Claudio to his old boss, despite Parra’s lack of previous radio experience.

Parra began co-hosting “Mambo Express,” a half-hour show on WBEZ on Saturday mornings with fellow Chicagoan Bill Zayas, with Parra becoming the show’s solo host in 1988. By that point, the “Mambo Express” show “remained informative but felt more like a lush two-hour Cuban dance party,” the Tribune wrote in 1999.

“I loved it, it was easy, it was a pleasure,” Parra told the Tribune in 1999. “People used to call me and tell me that they planned parties around my show.”

Dayna Calderon, a friend and former producer at WBEZ, called Parra “a walking party.”

“Back in the day, the DJs would walk into the WBEZ studios with their canvas bags filled with vinyl from their personal collections, and Victor’s bag was bursting with the all-stars of the mambo genre,” Calderon said. “He was so entrenched in this music that for the longest time I just assumed he was Cuban. My Mexican compadre was a true fan of the music and the history.”

Noted New York record producer Harvey Averne, who established a record label specializing in Afro-Cuban and Latin American music, called Parra “a great salesman” for the music.

“The best thing I can say about Victor is that he was the real deal,” Averne said. “He loved the music and he was very knowledgeable. He just talked from the heart and he was a great messenger.”

In 1987, Parra, whose day job was as a laborer at the University of Illinois at Chicago, formed his own mambo band, the Mambo Express, with a group of veteran local sidemen. A percussionist, Parra played the congas, and his band played local clubs and then at city festivals like Jazz Fest and Taste of Chicago.

“Victor always said that Cuba put the world to dance, musically, because there was nothing political here. It was about the music,” Parra’s wife said.

Parra’s program on WBEZ came to an end in 1995 after he and the station’s management differed over whether to broaden its focus to music from all over Latin America. Parra stood firm that he didn’t want to host a pan-Latin program.

Parra retired from UIC in 2001. In 2004, he resumed hosting the weekly show “Mambo Express,” this time on Sunday afternoons on WDCB-FM, the College of DuPage-run public radio station in Glen Ellyn. He hosted that show until retiring in 2017, citing the lengthy commute from the city to Glen Ellyn, especially in winters.

“It’s hard to let this go,” Parra told the Tribune in 2017. “In the wintertime, you don’t know what the weather is going to be. Sometimes I can’t get out of my garage. We get these snow drifts, and I’ve got to shovel.”

A first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, Parra is survived by two sons, Victor and Ted; and two grandchildren.

Services were held.

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