Preface
My husband, to whom this book is dedicated, likes to recount an anecdote about the Brazilian crooner Miltinho, who gave a concert in Cali in 1983. The singer was much loved by local audiences for his three albums of boleros (love ballads) in Spanish, produced in the 1960s. Long retired from music and with faded, patchy memories of the boleros and scores of other tunes he recorded in his lifetime, Miltinho valiantly tried to remember the lyrics to his old hits as he sang before his expectant Caleño (Cali-based) fans. Each time he began a song, however, memory failed him, and he could not complete the tune. To his surprise, the audience—who had memorized his songs by heart from the recordings—took up where he left off and finished each song in chorus from the rafters. The old man, stunned and overwhelmed by the loving tribute of his fans, wept openly onstage.
I love this story, because it—along with many others that unfold on the pages of this book—embodies the powerful ties between musical memory and recordings in Cali. While conducting field research in this Colombian city, I often heard it said that Cali was “the city of musical memory,” and nearly everything I encountered in my study of local popular culture drew me back to this point. More familiar is Cali’s vociferous claim to be “the world capital of salsa.” Colombians are also familiar with Cali’s slogan as “heaven’s outpost”—a pleasure hub of fantasy and alegría (happiness). The first saying, however, is the most potent. To anyone fascinated by sound recordings and their capacity to generate links to new, imagined spaces—past or present—the Caleño obsession with records offers a particularly potent vein for ethnomusicological study. For instance, many Caleños assert that they are “Caribbean” despite their geographic distance from its sparkling blue waters. This cultural identification has emerged by virtue of their having embraced salsa and its Cuban and Puerto Rican roots, and Caleños proudly acknowledge the role that recordings have played in first introducing and then maintaining these sounds in local popular culture. This is an imagined space built from technological links. Having myself tumbled into an Alice’s Wonderland of sonically induced imaginary landscapes when I discovered Benny Goodman’s 1938 Carnegie Hall recording at the public library when I was twelve—with ensuing metamorphoses via exposure to records of different musical styles ever since—I could easily relate to such a claim. These are worlds Walter Benjamin scarcely dreamed of when describing the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (1936). Far from being alienated, Caleños have formed a rich and vivid musical culture based on recordings and the memories pulled out of their vinyl grooves.
In the following chapters, I explore the theoretical ramifications of the music-memory link and its conjuncture through sound recordings, unfolding my study through an ethnographic analysis of this process in one Latin American city. I was initially drawn to Cali because of stories I had heard about its being the supposed “world capital of salsa.” During pilot field-work conducted in Caracas in 1992, musicians urged me to visit Cali, especially since the Venezuelan scene had diminished
