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Fania Fire: Reissues from Willie Colón & Héctor Lavoe
by C. Andrew Hovan
In terms of fostering the active Latin music scene in New York City back in the late '60s and early '70s, Fania Records stands out as a major purveyor of some of the finest recorded music of the genre. Founded in 1964 by musician Johnny Pacheco and his lawyer Jerry Masucci, Fania built a roster of talented artists including Rubén Blades, Ray Barretto, Celia Cruz and Andy Harlow. Pacheco would form the Fania All-Stars in 1968, the ensemble featured in ...
Continue ReadingWanted: For Being Hip—Willie Colon, Hector Lavoe and the Birth of Salsa
by Richard J Salvucci
It may require some effort to imagine that there were once no Latin Grammy awards. The albums reviewed here truly appeared in a different world. Until 1970, there was, with one brief exception, no systematic attempt to compute the size of the Latino population of the United States. The first effort did not go well. The Bureau of the Census ultimately invented the term “Hispanic," to aggregate people of different nationalities and ethnicities, although calling, for example, someone from Ecuador ...
Continue ReadingHéctor Lavoe: La Voz
by Rob Garratt
Craft Recordings have been on a roll of late, following 2021's excellently presented Ornette Coleman boxset, Genesis of Genius, with 2023's Contemporary Records Acoustic Sounds series and imminent Sonny Rollins set Go West!: The Contemporary Records Albums. So it is only natural that jazz-inclined audiophiles will start turning their attention to what other treasures the LA-based reissue specialists are digging out of the vaults. And so we arrive at Craft's new “special reissue" of salsa star ...
Continue ReadingWillie Colon: The Player: A Man and his Music
by Norman Weinstein
This two-disc overview of the work of the trombonist, vocalist, and composer Willie Colón presents a musically convincing case that Colón was to the history of Latin music what Don Drummond was to Jamaican ska and J.J. Johnson was to jazz. If the preceding suggests a holy trinity, note that all three had a fervor frequently associated with the spiritually possessed. While many jazz fans have immersed themselves in J.J. Johnson's legacy, few know Drummond and Colón as well as ...
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