rumba, conga, and mambo were more compelling than, say, the melancholy, marchlike compass of the tango. The joy and release generated in the intimate, vital physicality of dance and motion has contributed most directly to Cuban music’s widespread adoption, reinforcing the commercial channels through which it attained prominence. It is this affective power, ultimately, that transcended geographic and cultural boundaries to literally move thousands.
Puerto Rican artists also performed Cuban music and creatively reworked Cuban elements to create new Puerto Rican expressions that became internationally popular (Manuel 1994). By the 1950s, Puerto Rico’s most popular dance band—Cortijo y su Combo—performed Puerto Rican bomba and plena on Cuban percussion instruments instead of Puerto Rican drums. While the Cuban influence in música antillana is often overstated, Puerto Ricans not only adopted Cuban elements but also transformed them into musical vehicles that expressed a distinct Puerto Rican sensibility. As Ruth Glasser notes, “Puerto Ricans on the island and the mainland did not adopt Cuban music wholesale to the detriment of their own traditions but incorporated it into an ever-evolving repertoire of available cultural materials” (1995: 6). The hegemony of Cuban styles and artists in música antillana history is based on the predominance of Cuban instruments, rhythms, genres, and artists who were recorded, filmed, and distributed far more widely than were their Puerto Rican counterparts. I am not entirely comfortable, however, with the Cuba-centered discourse of many Latin music specialists. I think the Colombian term “música antillana” is actually more useful in this regard, since it does open a conceptual space for thinking about the historical ties that linked Cuba and Puerto Rico and led to the emergence of a transnational sound that by the 1950s could no longer be contained solely by the label “Cuban music.”
From Música Antillana to Salsa:
The Sonora Matancera and Cortijo y su Combo
Two of the most important groups to play a role in the transition from música antillana to salsa were Cuba’s Sonora Matancera and Puerto Rico’s Cortijo y su Combo. Although the style established by the Cuban innovator Arsenio Rodríguez and continued by the conjunto of Felix Chappotin and Miguelito Cuní21 was also important for several New York musicians and collectors, many productions made by Fania Records in the 1970s were modeled directly on the sound of the Sonora Matancera. In fact, one of salsa’s biggest stars from this period—Celia Cruz—was a key vocalist with the Matancera in the 1950s and recorded nearly identical versions of her former hits for Fania with a band directed by Johnny Pacheco. Pacheco also produced several albums in this vein with other musicians. The salsa historian Cesar Miguel Rondón criticized this trend, accusing Pacheco of strangling salsa’s innovative potential by “Matancerizing” the industry and imposing a commercial formula based on the old 1950s sound (1980: 90). Indeed, a retrospective of classic 1960s and 1970s New York salsa can be envisioned as a beast with three heads: one in the experimental vein led by Eddie Palmieri and Willie Colón; a second, “heavy” one in the Arsenio-Chappotin vein, led by Larry Harlow and Ray Barretto; and a third in the lighter Matancera style, led by Johnny Pacheco and Celia Cruz, that at times appeared to overpower the others. Of course, these schools are interrelated, and to an outsider the differences between these artists may not be clear—after all, “it’s all salsa.” To aficionados, however, their stylistic nuances are marked.
Puerto Rico, in turn, had its own schools, growing out of the combined influence of Cortijo and also the Sonora Matancera. The most famous group, El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, was founded in 1962 by members of Cortijo’s original combo after Rafael Cortijo and his lead vocalist, Ismael Rivera, were incarcerated for drug possession. El Gran Combo carried Cortijo’s legacy into the 1960s and 1970s, even after Cortijo and Rivera formed salsa bands of their own. Puerto Rico’s other principal band, the Sonora Ponceña, was founded during the 1950s. Originally modeled on Cuba’s Sonora Matancera, the Ponceña underwent several transitions and by the mid-1970s emerged with a style that retained the bright trumpets of its Cuban model but was fused with the heavy sound of the Arsenio school and the dynamic delivery of the Cortijo school. Marisol Berríos-Miranda notes that Rafael Cortijo and Ismael Rivera also had a significant influence on Venezuelan salsa musicians (1999).
In order to understand the impact of the above groups on Caleño audiences, it is worth examining the stylistic elements that characterized the Sonora Matancera and Cortijo y su Combo—the two most-loved música antillana ensembles in Cali. The Sonora Matancera featured a modified version of the Havana conjunto format established by the pioneer Arsenio Rodriguez, with only two trumpets in place of the three or four featured by Rodriguez and his successor Chappotín. When Caleño música antillana fans discuss the local popularity of the Matancera, they often refer precisely to these trumpets, which had a very bright timbre and piercing projection. In addition, the Matancera’s sound was characterized by the crisp detonation of the maracas, the distinct nasal quality of the coros (backup vocals), and the fluid, driving montunos of pianist Lino Frias. The principal draw of the Sonora Matanacera for its international audiences, however, was in its gallery of vocalists, which included some of the most legendary singers of música antillana: Daniel Santos, Bienvenido Granda, Celia Cruz, Nelson Pinedo (an expatriate Colombian from Barranquilla), Leo Marini, Miguelito Valdes, and Alberto Beltrán, among others (see Ramírez Bedoya 1996; Valverde 1997). These artists left a musical legacy that was popular not only in Cuba, but also served to define the Cuban sound for many listeners outside of Cuba.22 These songs expressed scenes of daily life and relationships, and although they reflected primarily a Cuban or Caribbean context, Caleño audiences identified greatly with the lyrics.
Among the singers who established the Matancera’s international fame, the two who have had the most profound impact in Cali have been Daniel Santos and Celia Cruz. Santos, born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, rose to fame in the 1940s as a kind of Latin Frank Sinatra, fronting groups such as that of Pedro Flores in Puerto Rico and the Sonora Matancera in Cuba. His scandalous drinking sprees, drug use, love affairs, and marriages added to his celebrity. After leaving the Sonora in 1953, Daniel Santos continued performing as a solo artist. He toured Colombia frequently during the 1950s and 1960s and in Cali often performed with Tito Cortes’s Los Cali Boys, a local Cuban-style conjunto renamed La Sonora Cali after their first concert together in 1953. Santos always stayed in Cali’s Zona de Tolerancia (red-light district) during these visits, and stories of his marijuana habit and crazy exploits became legendary. Rumor has it that he even had an official license to smoke cannabis (Ulloa 1992: 371.) His songs also reflected this figure of the romantic camaján, the barrio hustler—a smooth talker, ladies’ man, good dresser and skilled dancer. Eventually, in the 1980s, he married a young Caleña decades his junior and bought a farm close to Cali. No doubt the local contact with such a bohemian and famous character as Santos reinforced his tremendous local popularity, already established through the witticism of his songs and the deep, mellow voice in which he sang them. [Santos] was one of the first commercially popular Caribbean singers to become famous for his mastery of the Cuban musical convention of sonerismo, or skilled vocal improvisation, for which other Puerto Rican singers such as Ismael Rivera and later salsa vocalists became famous.
Celia Cruz is the best-known female música antillana artist, and her fame continued through her transition from son to salsa. A native of Havana, she rose to stardom in the 1950s with the Sonora Matancera23 before leaving Cuba for New York in 1961. Under the aegis of Johnny Pacheco, she began recording with Fania records in the late 1960s, helping to popularize a brand of salsa based essentially on the old Matancera sound. Cruz’s majestic voice and extraordinary vitality onstage have marked her as the grand dame of Latin music, and in the salsa world she holds a position similar to that of opera divas such as Maria Callas or great jazz vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald. In Cali, Cruz is best known as la reina rumba—the queen of the party. While it is de rigueur for most Latina musicians to acknowledge Cruz as a point of inspiration for their careers, in Cali she has acquired a special position, making her influence even more significant for local woman musicians (see Waxer 2001a). Her recordings and tours with the Sonora Matancera during the 1950s made Cruz a local favorite, and by the time she appeared in Cali with the Fania All-Stars in
