Salsa legend, Willie Colon, has died at age 75. Colon was a key a part of salsa’s growth within the 1970’s as an instrumentalist, songwriter and producer.
EMILY KWONG, HOST:
The salsa pioneer and legend Willie Colon has died at age 75, in keeping with his assertion from his household on one among his social media accounts. No reason behind demise was given. Willie Colon was a key a part of Salsa’s growth within the Nineteen Seventies as an instrumentalist, songwriter and producer. For greater than six many years, he was one of many style’s hottest acts. NPR Music’s Felix Contreras has this appreciation.
FELIX CONTRERAS, BYLINE: Looking back, Willie Colon was the perfect musician to reshape the sound of Afro-Caribbean dance music that grew to become recognized around the globe as salsa. He was born within the Bronx in 1950, and as a younger teenager, he was absorbing the favored music of mid Nineteen Sixties New York – R&B, rock and jazz – in addition to Puerto Rican folks music that he heard throughout summer season journeys to the island to go to his grandparents. He began taking part in trumpet at age 12, then switched to trombone, and by age 16, he had signed a recording contract.
At age 17, he launched his first album for a brand new upstart indie document label referred to as Fania Information. It was a mixture of jazz, rock and R&B, mixed with mambos and cha-cha-cha, and was so uncooked and unorthodox that critics and older musicians panned it. And but, finally, it grew to become common with younger Nuyoricans who have been on the lookout for one thing to hold their identification on.
(SOUNDBITE OF WILLIE COLON AND HECTOR LAVOE’S “JAZZY”)
CONTRERAS: The album featured Puerto Rican vocalist Hector Lavoe, who went on to turn into one among salsa’s main stars as a solo act, however solely after he recorded a number of common albums with Willie Colon between 1967 and 1975.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “AGUANILE”)
HECTOR LAVOE: (Singing in Spanish).
CONTRERAS: Two years later, Colon recruited vocalist Ruben Blades to affix his band. However this time, the music addressed among the social points the 2 musicians have been seeing within the Latino group, main as much as their album “Siembra,” launched in 1978 and nonetheless thought-about one of many excessive watermarks of salsa.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “PEDRO NAVAJA”)
RUBEN BLADES: (Singing in Spanish).
CONTRERAS: Musically, Colon’s trombone-based brass part set his band aside from different common Fania bands. He was additionally busy as a producer and arranger for a lot of Fania albums, which led him to teaming up with the Cuban vocalist Celia Cruz for an album referred to as “Solely They Might Have Made This Album.”
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, “USTED ABUSO”)
CELIA CRUZ AND WILLIE COLON: (Singing in Spanish).
CONTRERAS: Willie Colon’s later years have been a mixture of music and politics. Within the late Eighties, he was a guide with then-New York Metropolis Mayor David Dinkins. In 1974, he ran as a Democrat within the main for New York’s seventeenth Congressional District. And he served for over a decade as an adviser to one-time New York mayor Michael Bloomberg. Previous to that, Colon took a slight detour from music by enrolling and passing the Westchester County Police Academy. He was sworn in as a police officer in 2014 at age 64, staying with the division for eight years half time whereas nonetheless performing, earlier than resigning his rank of deputy lieutenant in 2022.
(SOUNDBITE OF WILLIE COLON’S “DOÑA TOÑA”)
CONTRERAS: In the end, it is the music that Willie Colon shall be remembered for. He was the sound of the Puerto Rican group in New York, discovering its voice culturally and politically, brash when difficult the established order, generally confrontational, different occasions sentimental, however all the time with a ardour for figuring out himself and his group as a part of the material of this nation. Felix Contreras, NPR Information.
(SOUNDBITE OF WILLIE COLON’S “DOÑA TOÑA”)
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