Salsa Rising

In the 1920s and 30s, musicians from Latin America and the Caribbean were flocking to New York, lured by the burgeoning recording studios and lucrative entertainment venues. In the late 1940s and 50s, the big-band mambo dance scene at the famed Palladium Ballroom was the stuff of legend, while modern-day music history was being made as the masters of Afro-Cuban and jazz idiom conspired to create Cubop, the first incarnation of Latin jazz. Then, in the 1960s, as the Latino population came to exceed a million strong, a new generation of New York Latinos, mostly Puerto Ricans born and raised in the city, went on to create the music that came to be called salsa, which continues to enjoy avid popularity around the world. And now, the children of the mambo and salsa generation are contributing to the making of hip hop and reviving ancestral Afro-Caribbean forms like Cuban rumba, Puerto Rican bomba, and Dominican palo. Salsa Rising provides the first full-length historical account of Latin Music in this city guided by close critical attention to issues of tradition and experimentation, authenticity and dilution, and the often clashing roles of cultural communities and the commercial recording industry in the shaping of musical practices and tastes. It is a history not only of the music, the changing styles and practices, the innovators, venues and songs, but also of the music as part of the larger social history, ranging from immigration and urban history, to the formation of communities, to issues of colonialism, race and class as they bear on and are revealed by the trajectory of the music. Author Juan Flores brings a wide range of people in the New York Latin music field into his work, including musicians, producers, arrangers, collectors, journalists, and lay and academic scholars, enriching Salsa Rising with a unique level of engagement with and interest in Latin American communities and musicians themselves.

'Salsa Rising' provides a full-length historical account of Latin music in this New York guided by close critical attention to issues of tradition and experimentation, authenticity and dilution, and the often clashing roles of cultural communities and the commercial recording industry in the shaping of musical practices and tastes.

This ethnographic journey into the New York salsa scene of the 1990s offers detailed accounts of musicians grappling with intercultural tensions and commercial pressures. The author, himself an accomplished salsa musician, examines the organizational structures, recording processes, rehearsing and gigging of salsa bands.

Improvising Sabor: Cuban Dance Music in New York begins in 1960s New York and examines in rich detail the playing styles and international influence of important figures in US Latin music. Such innovators as José Fajardo, Johnny Pacheco, George Castro, and Eddy Zervigón dazzled the Palladium ballroom and other Latin music venues in those crucible years. Author Sue Miller focuses on the Cuban flute style in light of its transformations in the US after the 1959 revolution and within the vibrant context of 1960s New York. While much about Latin jazz and salsa has been written, this book focuses on the relatively unexplored New York charangas that were performing during the chachachá and pachanga craze of the early sixties. Indeed, many accounts cut straight from the 1950s and the mambo to the bugalú’s development in the late 1960s with little mention of the chachachá and pachanga’s popularity in the mid-twentieth century. Improvising Sabor addresses not only this lost and ignored history, but contends with issues of race, class, and identity while evaluating differences in style between players from prerevolution Cuban charangas and those of 1960s New York. Through comprehensive explorations and transcriptions of numerous musical examples as well as interviews with and commentary from Latin musicians, Improvising Sabor highlights a specific sabor that is rooted in both Cuban dance music forms and the rich performance culture of Latin New York. The distinctive styles generated by these musicians sparked compelling points of departure and influence.

Pleasure-based politics in Puerto Rican and Cuban pop culture Joy is a politicized form of pleasure that goes beyond gratification to challenge norms of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Kristie Soares focuses on the diasporic media of Puerto Rico and Cuba to examine how music, public activist demonstrations, social media, sitcoms, and other areas of culture resist the dominant stories told about Latinx joy. As she shows, Latinx creators compose versions of joy central to social and political struggle and at odds with colonialist and imperialist narratives that equate joy with political docility and a lack of intelligence. Soares builds her analysis around chapters that delve into gozando in salsa music, precise joy among the New Young Lords Party, choteo in the comedy ¿Qué Pasa U.S.A.?, azúcar in the life and death of Celia Cruz, dale as Pitbull’s signature affect, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s use of silliness to take seriously political violence. Daring and original, Playful Protest examines how Latinx creators resist the idea that joy only exists outside politics and activist struggle.

How is Latin American music heard, by whom, and why? Many in the United States believe Latin American musicians make “Latin music”—which carries with it a whole host of assumptions, definitions, and contradictions. In their own countries, these expatriate musicians might generate immense national pride or trigger suspicions of “national betrayals.” The making, sounding, and hearing of “Latin music” brings into being the complex array of concepts that constitute “Latin Americanism”—its fissures and paradoxes, but also its universal aspirations. Taking as its center musicians from or with declared roots in Latin America, Jairo Moreno presents us with an innovative analysis of how and why music emerges as a necessary but insufficient shorthand for defining and understanding Latin American, Latinx, and American experiences of modernity. This close look at the growth of music-making by Latin American and Spanish-speaking musicians in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century reveals diverging understandings of music’s social and political possibilities for participation and belonging. Through the stories of musicians—Rubén Blades, Shakira, Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, and Miguel Zenón—Sounding Latin Music, Hearing the Americas traces how artists use music to produce worlds and senses of the world at the ever-transforming conjunction of Latin America and the United States.

Salsa, the irresistible dance music of the Spanish-speaking world, has made its way into the lives of millions around the globe. But salsa is only one of many popular Latin rhythms. The first comprehensive guide to the music, its history, and its legends, Musica! charts the vast territory of this lively Latin heritage, which began in Cuba and spread throughout the Caribbean and into North and South America. Illustrated with contemporary and vintage photos, Musica! features a gallery of legendary musical performers, plus sections on the musical styles and dances including the rumba, mambo, cha-cha, and merengue. A discography and bibliography complete this comprehensive story of Latin America's extraordinary rhythmic tradition.

Winner of the MLA's Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for an outstanding book published in English in the field of Latin American and Spanish literatures and culture (1999) For Anglos, the pulsing beats of salsa, merengue, and bolero are a compelling expression of Latino/a culture, but few outsiders comprehend the music's implications in larger social terms. Frances R. Aparicio places this music in context by combining the approaches of musicology and sociology with literary, cultural, Latino, and women's studies. She offers a detailed genealogy of Afro-Caribbean music in Puerto Rico, comparing it to selected Puerto Rican literary texts, then looks both at how Latinos/as in the US have used salsa to reaffirm their cultural identities and how Anglos have eroticized and depoliticized it in their adaptations. Aparicio's detailed examination of lyrics shows how these songs articulate issues of gender, desire, and conflict, and her interviews with Latinas/os reveal how they listen to salsa and the meanings they find in it. What results is a comprehensive view "that deploys both musical and literary texts as equally significant cultural voices in exploring larger questions about the power of discourse, gender relations, intercultural desire, race, ethnicity, and class."

Rondón tells the engaging story of salsa's roots in Puerto Rico, Cuba, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela, and of its emergence and development in the 1960s as a distinct musical movement in New York. Rondón presents salsa as a truly pan-Caribbean phenomenon, emerging in the migrations and interactions, the celebrations and conflicts that marked the region. Although salsa is rooted in urban culture, Rondón explains, it is also a commercial product produced and shaped by professional musicians, record producers, and the music industry. --from publisher description.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.