Carnegie Hall

For decades Latin music has found a home in New York City. As early as the 1940s, the city embraced the high-energy rhythms and expressive sounds with open arms. Throughout the years, Latin music has been center stage in the city’s bustling nightlife scene, with many Latin superstars calling New York home.

The Creation and Influence of Fania Records

The true history of salsa rests on the shoulders of giants, but its exact moment of inception is owed to a small record label that was started in Brooklyn in 1964, Fania Records.

The label’s origins started at a party where Jerry Masucci—a Brooklyn-raised lawyer from an Italian family who had spent time in Cuba working for the US Department of State—met the Dominican flute player Johnny Pacheco, whose passion was classic Cuban music. Together, they founded Fania in 1964, taking its name from “Fanía Funché,” a little-remembered vintage Cuban song by Reinaldo Bolaños.

They started out with a modest budget of $5,000, operating in an office the size of a broom closet and selling records out of the trunk of a car in Latin neighborhoods. And like many other American indie artists who aimed to bring the music of marginalized communities into the mainstream, they didn’t find overnight success. Though they were selling a new sound, it wasn’t altogether unfamiliar to people. It was simply a culmination of the evolution of what Latin music in New York was up until that time.

The label’s eventual popularity was amplified by the success of the appropriately named Fania All-Stars. This super group featured popular artists from their roster, including Pacheco, Willie Colón, Tito Puente, and Eddie Palmieri. Each already famous in their own right, this collective of musicians went on to make an indelible mark on music history.

The Night Salsa Was Born

The myth goes that salsa was born on August 26, 1971, at the Cheetah Club on West 52nd Street, a brisk five-minute walk from Carnegie Hall. It was “Latin Night” at the Cheetah—a former mambo palace turned Saturday-night discotheque and rock club that had hosted the Grateful Dead, Sam & Dave, and the rock musical Hair.

On that Thursday evening, more than 20 young Latin performers, the Fania All-Stars, crowded together on stage. They wore silky wide-collared shirts and pastel suits. They played congas, timbales, and electric keyboard, and blew trumpets and trombones. They made music unlike anything many people in the crowd had ever heard.

Izzy Sanabria—who would later describe the sounds of the evening as “all in-your-face ... brassy, crazy, wild”—was the MC, alongside the pioneering jazz DJ Symphony Sid. Sanabria has been credited with coining the term salsa, which he used to describe the musical “sauce” of pumped-up Cuban music and Puerto Rican rhymes injected with the rhythm of the New York City streets.

This legendary 1971 concert—now acknowledged as the event that catapulted salsa into the global consciousness—would be documented through two albums—Live at the Cheetah Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, and in Leon Gast’s documentary Our Latin Thing, which captured images of the barrio along with scenes from that night.

Mambo Sets the Stage

Before salsa, Latin dance music peaked in New York City during the 1950s, when mambo and cha-cha-cha were all the rage and bands freely traveled between the US and Cuba. At that time, three bandleaders—Afro-Cuban jazz pioneer Machito, Nuyorican timbales player Tito Puente, and Puerto Rican singer Tito Rodríguez—where the stars of Manhattan’s Palladium Ballroom on Broadway and 53rd Street, where music broke through barriers of race and class.

The audience members were Latin, Jewish, Italian American, and Black—all of whom wanted to dance. Taking cues from the jitterbug, soul music, and rock ‘n’ roll (which was new at the time), as well as Cuban ballroom dances and Afro-Cuban rumba, they invented a language of movement on the dancefloor.

At around the same time, a 14-year-old Eddie Palmieri, alongside fellow classmates Orlando Marin and Joe Quijano, formed a group called The Mamboys. They recorded their first songs in a studio in an East Harlem walkup, where anyone could make their own single for a small price.

Big bands were playing across New York, and young musicians like Palmieri were listening. “Radio stations were playing music by Machito and Tito Rodríguez every day,” he shared in a 2019 interview. “All of the bodegas in the neighborhood turned it up loud, and while we were playing stickball in the street, we were listening to all of those new records that came out.”

Encouraged by his older brother Charlie (who was already a professional musician at this point), Palmieri would go on to play piano with Tito Rodríguez’s band and eventually form his own group, La Perfecta, in 1962. His signature New York–born barrage of sound—a horn-driven and plugged-in cornerstone of a new kind of Latin music that would come to be known as salsa—would live on through masterpieces recorded on the Roulette, Tico, and Coco labels that included signature albums Harlem River Drive and The Sun of Latin Music.

Latin and Jazz, A Perfect Combination

Another essential element to the development of salsa was jazz, which alongside Latin music made what Palmieri referred to as “the perfect combination.”

In 1961, Al Santiago, owner of Alegre Records, corralled an ensemble of Latin musicians he billed as the Alegre All Stars for a recorded jam session. The improvisational sets on Alegre were led by Charlie Palmieri and featured Johnny Pacheco, who started his career signed to that same label. In the mid-1960s, Pacheco and the Palmieri brothers were part of the cast at the historic descargas at the Village Gate, recorded live for the Tico label. These moments coincided with the rise of the Fania All-Stars, both reflecting and fueling a transformative era in Latin music.

In 1972, Palmieri put out a live album from Sing Sing Correctional Facility, where his band performed for a heavily Latin crowd of inmates. The record, in the mold of Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison from 1968, was in sync with the activism of other artists like master conga player Ray Barretto and with other music from the time that expressed the concerns of the barrio.

A Departure from Boogaloo

The musical revolution was, at least for a time, bilingual. There were nearly one million Puerto Ricans living in New York City, reflecting a remarkably steep rise in 20 years. Throughout the mid-1960s, New York–born Latin musicians were expressing themselves in English to the beat of boogaloo, a funky style that had more in common with R&B than the music of the dance orchestras that their parents listened to. But Fania was going in another direction.

After Fidel Castro installed his government in Havana and the United States put in place the Cuban embargo during the ’60s, the flow of Cuban bands performing in New York stopped, which prevented the import and export of new LPs. At Fania, Masucci and Pacheco turned away from the boogaloo trend, focusing instead on Spanish-language songs, with a repertoire that featured many updated versions of popular vintage Cuban tracks with more hectic arrangements and choruses that often referenced the urban immigrant experience.

A Secret Sauce by Any Name

Up until the end of his life, Tito Puente would dismiss the term salsa by saying that “salsa is something you put on spaghetti,” and argued that younger artists were still playing Cuban music, no matter what they called it. Celia Cruz, whose own career was reborn in exile when she joined up with the Fania All-Stars, reportedly referred to the salsa sound as “Cuban music with another name.” Of course, many of us know her today as the queen of salsa.

The Global Legacy of Salsa

Whatever the name, there was no stopping the music. The Fania artists performed at Yankee Stadium, Madison Square Garden, and of course Carnegie Hall. The Spanish lyrics and Latin rhythms of their songs soon connected with listeners in Latin America, where the All-Stars would tour and be embraced on the level of rock stars.

Panamanian singer-songwriter Rubén Blades, who had started out in the label’s mailroom, raised the profile of salsa internationally with conscious lyrics that put the social messages of the region’s protest music movement to a different beat. The album Siembra—Blades’s 1978 collaboration with trombonist and producer Willie Colón—became Fania’s all-time bestselling record. Blades’s compositions “Pedro Navaja,” and “Buscando Guayaba” are still among the best-known Spanish-language songs in any genre.

New York salsa influenced artists across Latin America. From Puerto Rico’s Gran Combo to Colombian stars Fruko y sus Tesos and Grupo Niche, musicians, labels, and audiences globally embraced the term salsa as a name for their own sounds. They in turn also influenced New York musicians, who began to incorporate more varied Latin rhythms and instruments from Latin America into their own music.

Salsa’s Dimming and Resurgence

At the same time that rock and pop took over global stadiums, disco became all the rage. DJs took the place of bands at dance clubs, and a new generation of English-speaking Latinos came of age in New York. Salsa’s popularity dimmed. A softer romantic salsa that had more in common with Latin pop than the swaggering sound of the original New York salsa was momentarily embraced as the next trend by major labels and radio.

At Fania, internal rifts between the artists—so many of them musical giants in their own right—combined with questions about contracts and royalties contributed to the label’s downfall. Salsa never died, but for a while it became a niche for nostalgic fans and record store crate diggers.

It was in fact those DJs and record collectors who spearheaded the genre’s resurgence in the 2000s. Today, while original salsa stars headline festivals beside rock and electronic artists, a new generation is making the music their own. Colón is not surprised.

“Salsa is not a rhythm; it’s a concept,” the Bronx-born salsa pioneer explained in an interview. “It is the reconciliation of all the things we are. I’m not only talking about music. It’s about the themes and stories of our lives … Salsa will never die.”

Photography: Palladium Ballroom by Augie Rodriguez, Times Square by Derzsi Elekes Andor, other images courtesy of Craft Latino and Carnegie Hall Rose Archives.