Histórias de canções pop latinas

COBO, Leila. Decoding “Despacito”: An Oral History of Latin Music. Vintage: New York, 2021.

"It's in Our Veins"

A recent influx of Latin Americans into Edmonton, Alberta, has been met with a significant rise in interest in Latin music and dance. Many Latin dance studios in Edmonton are continuing to gain popularity with people of Latin American descent and many other Canadian cultural groups. This paper focuses on one Latin dance studio in Edmonton called ETOWN SALSA. Through a narrative interview with the owner, coupled with supplementary research about cultural identity tied to Latin music, this paper provides insight into how Latin dance studios’ presence helps develop and maintain diasporic Latin American identities. For many Latin Americans, music and dance are an essential way in which they can connect to their home countries. Not only can Latin dance help new immigrants find a sense of familiarity, but dancing can also help second or third-generation immigrants reconnect with their heritage. Our findings also suggest that non-Latin Americans who regularly participate in Latin dancing can identify and connect more with Latin American communities in Edmonton.

Race, Latinidad, and Latin Pop

Popular music is one site where the contributions of Afro-Latinos are widely recognized. However, few Afro-Latino musicians reach the top of the Latin music charts. Several authors have argued that music like mambo or salsa, which began with strong Afro-Latino representation, “whitened” once it entered the mainstream Latin music market. This whitening involved both a shift in aesthetics and in the prevalence and popularity of white Latino artists. This chapter examines the contemporary pop phenomenon reggaetón as the latest iteration of this shift. The author pays particular attention to the rise and popularity of CNCO, the “first reggaetón boyband” that emerged from a television show called La Banda on Univision. Through an analysis of CNCO’s self-presentation, performance, and music videos, the author examines the current trend toward whitening in reggaetón that has helped facilitate the genre’s growth in Latin and global pop music.

Charanga Embalao

This chapter features the work of charanga flute player Johnny Pacheco in New York before he became known as the creator of the Fania All Stars, and also the work of pianist Charlie Palmieri and his Charanga La Duboney. The Puerto-Rican brothers Eddie and Charlie Palmieri have been highly influential in the development of Latin music in the United States. While Eddie Palmieri’s La Perfecta utilized the charanga flute of George Castro, Charlie Palmieri’s charanga (one of the first to play the Palladium), featured flautists Johnny Pacheco and Rod Lewis Sánchez. Flute solos by Pacheco and Sánchez on the Charanga Duboney recordings of ‘Bronx Pachanga’ and ‘Mack the Knife’ are analyzed here to ascertain whether a distinctive New York sabor is present.

Conclusion

In this final chapter research findings are summarized, defining a variety of distinctive New York performance aesthetics and sounds that go beyond the usual description of New York-based Latin music as being simply loud, gritty, and aggressive. Conclusions are drawn here which have implications for future studies on the history of clave-based Latin dance music, performance aesthetics, and improvisational creativity.

Improvising Sabor

The term ‘salsa’ has come to stand for a particular standardized set of performance practices and the dominant narrative of its origins, particularly through the lens of the Fania Records story, has tended to over-simplify Latin music history in the USA. This book documents an understudied period of Latin music history across the divide of the Cuban Revolution of 1959 to demonstrate a wider narrative which includes the history of the influential charanga orquestas of 1960s New York. A típico aesthetic is shown to be an important one with the combination of charanga and conjunto stylings giving rise to a plurality of ensemble types, each with a distinctive sabor and varying degrees of cubanía. In this book Miller thus examines the New York contexts for Cuban dance music performance in the first part of the twentieth century before considering the mid twentieth-century developments. The text makes its argument for a distinctive New York sabor through interviews with performers and through the sensitive transcription and analysis of recordings by Orquesta Broadway, Pacheco y su Charanga, Charlie Palmieri’s Charanga Duboney, Eddie Palmieri’s La Perfecta, and Ray Barretto’s Charanga Moderna, amongst others. Analytical transcriptions of improvisations, in dialogue with musicians’ own perspectives, highlight a specific Latin music performance aesthetic or sabor that is rooted in both Cuban dance music forms and the rich performance culture of Latin New York.

Spaces and Places

This chapter provides a summary of the most important venues in New York where musicians have performed danzón, rhumba/son, mambo, chachachá, and pachanga. Aside the Palladium, other venues operating in the 1950s and ‘60s are examined in terms of the types of Latin music played in them, documenting the experiences of performers of Cuban dance music in The Bronx, Spanish Harlem, downtown Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Catskills resort venues. The usual narrative of the Palladium as ‘home of the mambo’ is not negated but the narrative is expanded so that the relationships between the various performance scenes can be evaluated more fully. In the latter part of this chapter the history of the dance hall from 1947 to 1966 is examined in terms of the mambo big bands, conjuntos, and charanga bands that performed there, drawing on the perspectives of musicians who experienced live performances there.

Strings and Skins

This chapter outlines the important history and role of craftsmen based in New York City who produced and repaired traditional instruments used in the performance of Latin music. It introduces individuals who came from Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Jewish communities, and examines how their instruments physically represented the actual sound of Latin Music to New York and the world on widely disseminated recordings. Many of these instrument makers also sold their instruments beyond New York City and the United States. The chapter also discusses the work of builders and musicians in New York City to create and modify the tools used to forge the sound of Latin music and diffuse both the instruments and their aesthetic throughout the world. Ultimately, the chapter seeks to unify into one coherent narrative, the efforts of folklorists, journalists, and authors who paid attention to the origins of hand percussion instruments in New York, their subsequent mass production, and the people who built the instruments used to play Latin music in New York City.

Conclusion

This chapter draws the main themes of the book together and offers ideas for a clearer and more coherent overview of Latin music in New York, as well as ideas for future scholarship. It outlines Cuban author Leonardo Padura Fuentes' ten points to defend the position that salsa might or might not exist as a genre. Using this as a model, the chapter presents ten themes from the book that show how musicians based in New York City shaped the international sound of Latin music. These include: (1) the physical and metaphysical aspects of clave, (2) the importance of folklore, (3) the emphasis on music education, (4) musical biculturalism and triculturalism, (5) the evolution of the anticipated bass part, (6) instrument making and its impact on performance and recording, (7) the role of dance, (8) lineages of musicians, (9) interethnic collaboration, and (10) the role of jazz. All of these are not treated in each chapter, but they recur throughout and overlap considerably.

Puerto Rican Engagement With Jazz And Its Effects On Latin Music

This chapter explores how Puerto Rican and Nuyorican (New York-born Puerto Rican) musicians in New York City used jazz harmony, arranging, improvisation, and musical aesthetics to broaden the sound of Latin popular music from the postwar period into the 1990s and beyond. It argues that the Puerto Rican connection to jazz was extensive and encompassed a variety of styles and eras. The chapter challenges the debate over salsa's patrimony and development, by demonstrating how particular Puerto Rican musicians in New York City were fluent in jazz and incorporated it into Latin music. Much discourse has unfortunately centered on pitting Puerto Rican against Cuban musicians or looking only at commercial or sociocultural considerations when considering Latin music in New York. Proficiency in both jazz and Latin music allowed Puerto Rican musicians to innovate in ways that did not happen in Puerto Rico or elsewhere. The chapter also explores other themes discussed in the introduction, such as the importance of clave, the impact and extent of music education among Puerto Rican musicians, family lineages, the importance of folklore, and inter-ethnic collaboration.