her, Celia Cruz: reina rumba (1981), based on interviews conducted with her during that 1980 tour, is particularly significant given her prominence among local fans.24 Cruz’s regular concert appearances in the city since 1980 have consolidated her presence as a key performer for Cali’s salsa fans. In 1994 the Caleña all-woman salsa band D’Caché recorded an album also titled Reina rumba, whose title cut is dedicated to Celia Cruz.
Cortijo y su Combo, led by the percussionist Rafael Cortijo during the 1950s, is considered by aficionados throughout Latin America to be the most important and most popular Puerto Rican ensemble of its time. Like the Sonora Matancera, the group was also based on the small Cuban conjunto format but featured two trumpets and two saxophones, bridging the gap between groups with the larger dance-band instrumentation and the smaller conjuntos. This trumpet-saxophone combination was copied by many Colombian ensembles of the time. While Cortijo’s group performed Cuban genres such as guaracha, son, and bolero, his fame stems principally from his adaptation of Afro-Puerto Rican bombas and plenas to the conjunto format. Cortijo’s predecessor, Cesar Concepción, had attempted to fashion a cosmopolitan sound for these traditional genres in the 1940s, writing bombas and plenas for large dance orquestas, but in the process he lost much of the dynamism and vitality of the traditional style (Pagano 1993: 18). The ten members of Cortijo’s combo, however, performed in a lively and spontaneous manner, animating their live shows and television appearances with energetic dance routines. According to the famed salsa composer and musicologist Tite Curet Alonso, Cortijo’s band revolutionized Latin popular music by using dance choreography as a way to fill up the visual space left on the stage by the absence of a full dance orchestra.25 These lively dance routines were continued by El Gran Combo and became a standard for 1970s salsa bands throughout Latin America.26
Of particular importance to Cortijo’s unique sound was his lead vocalist, Ismael Rivera. Rivera, known as Maelo, had a distinct vocal timbre (both growly and nasal) that caught on widely with listeners. Gifted with an extraordinary talent for improvising pregones, Rivera truly merited the title granted him by Cuba’s own Benny Moré: el sonero mayor (the greatest sonero).27 After Cortijo’s original group disbanded in 1962 (many of the members left to form El Gran Combo), Rivera continued as leader of his own group, Los Cachimbos. By the early 1970s he had become one of the premier salsa vocalists of the time, and he continued performing until his death in 1987. Rivera’s impressive abilities as a sonero, in turn, stem from the Puerto Rican tradition of improvising décimas, lyric verses with a fixed ten-line poetic structure. In this tradition, emphasis is placed not only on improvising a pleasing combination of words and rhymes, but at the same time telling a good story. In montuno sections Rivera was able to spin out dozens of pregones on the spot, all thematically related and able to keep listeners engaged. Daniel Santos, already famous by the time Rivera emerged in the early 1950s, is another Puerto Rican vocalist with tremendous gifts as a sonero.
The ability to improvise verses characterized the great Cuban soneros of the 1940s and 1950s—Benny Moré, Miguelito Cuní, Miguelito Valdes, Orlando “Cascarita” Guerra, Celia Cruz, and the New York-based Machito were all talented vocalists in this regard. Since 1960, however, surprisingly few Cuban singers have emerged who match this old school.28 In Puerto Rico, however, Maelo’s example spawned a whole succession of talented soneros who became legendary salsa vocalists during the 1960s and 1970s: Hector Lavoe, Cheo Feliciano, Pete “El Conde” Rodríguez, Marvin Santiago, and Cano Estremera. Although the art of improvised soneros has diminished greatly with the current generation of romantic salsa singers, who sing precomposed lines, Puerto Rican vocalists such as Gilberto Santarosa maintain the sonero tradition. Despite the extensive literature on salsa, few commentators have pointed to this quality as a specific contribution of Puerto Rican artists to the development of salsa.29 No other country has produced the quantity and quality of salsa soneros that Puerto Rico has—even recognized salsa vocalists such as Venezuela’s Oscar D’León and Panama’s Rubén Blades do not have the improvisational skills displayed by Puerto Rico’s premier salsa singers. Although scholars have recognized the great ability of Puerto Rican vocalists, usually this comment passes without further analysis.
Música Antillana and Música Tropical in Colombia
Música antillana first reached Colombian shores in the early 1920s, through Cuban radio broadcasts from Havana. Live programs on Radio Progreso, CMQ, and La Cadena Azul—the principal Cuban stations—could be picked up by shortwave radio sets on the Atlantic coast of Colombia and as far inland as Medellín. One shortwave radio hound told me that during the 1950s he had received signals from Havana stations as far as Cali.30 Tuning in to Cuban radio seems to have been a fairly regular practice among musicians and aficionados in Colombia’s Atlantic coast, at least through the early 1940s, when national stations began to flower and local airspace began filling up, blocking radio airwaves from Cuba (Múnera 1992).31 According to Adolfo González, “The musical programming of these stations was so influential that, for many of the best Costeño musicians, tuning in was a pressing daily task that provided inspiration and prime material for their work. From this moment, the Cuban contribution was predominant and absolutely necessary to produce the most lively popular music in the country” (1989: 41).
The advent of música antillana in Colombia was prefaced by the development of national and transnational transport and commerce since the second half of the nineteenth century. Increased contact and trade with the Caribbean region through the late 1800s, as well as with the United States, opened the doors for outside cultural influences. Urbanization and industrial expansion through the first half of the twentieth century grew hand in hand with channels of transportation, communication, and musical diffusion. In the first part of this century, a steady transnational flow of people, musicians, sounds, and ideas began linking Colombian cities to other urban centers in Latin America and the United States. With the evolution of mass media between the two world wars, the flow of musical styles through the Americas spread even more rapidly, via recordings, radio, film, and concert tours. The popular dance music of this time reflected and also contributed to this process. Cuban and North American styles were particularly influential and were listened and danced to in Colombia’s urban centers. Regional Colombian traditions were also fused with cosmopolitan musical practices and styles for city audiences.
Through radio broadcasts, musicians and fans were introduced to the sounds of Cuban son, played by groups such as the Trio Matamoros and conjuntos such as the Sexteto Habanero and Septeto Nacional. The sounds of danzón were also popularized, played by such charanga ensembles as that of Antonio Romeu and, later, the famed radiofónica of Antonio Arcaño. In these early decades of radio, from the 1920s through the 1950s, bands performed live-to-air in radio theater studios (see López 1981). Hence, those perched by their shortwave radio sets in Colombia actually heard the music as it was being performed in Havana.
Records have comprised the most important avenue of diffusion for música antillana in Colombia. The first 78 rpm records arrived with sailors docking in Barranquilla, Colombia’s principal port on the Caribbean. Indeed, Barranquilleros, when challenging Cali’s claim to be the Colombian stronghold of this musical tradition, often point to the fact that música antillana arrived first in their city. Exact dates of the first Cuban recordings in Colombia are uncertain, but González notes that local newspaper advertisements for Cuban music appear by September 1927 (1989: 41). Radio stations in Barranquilla purchased recordings of Cuban music for local airplay, a practice that continued through the 1950s.32 Recordings of música antillana soon found their way into other urban centres in Colombia, brought through the main ports of Barranquilla and Buenaventura (on the Pacific) by sailors or by special dealers traveling directly from New York, then the capital of the recording industry. In the late 1940s the Colombian record mogul Antonio Fuentes purchased national distribution rights for recordings made by several Cuban artists. The 1950 catalog of his company, DiscosFuentes, lists such groups as the Sonora Matancera, Orquesta Riverside, Hermanos Castro, and Miguelito Valdés (Betancur 1993: 288). Most records of música antillana, however, arrived in Colombia via sailors in Barranquilla,
