The City of Musical Memory. Lise A. Waxer
of pianist Lino Frias. The principal draw of the Sonora Matanacera for its international audiences, however, was in its gallery of vocalists, which included some of the most legendary singers of música antillana: Daniel Santos, Bienvenido Granda, Celia Cruz, Nelson Pinedo (an expatriate Colombian from Barranquilla), Leo Marini, Miguelito Valdes, and Alberto Beltrán, among others (see Ramírez Bedoya 1996; Valverde 1997). These artists left a musical legacy that was popular not only in Cuba, but also served to define the Cuban sound for many listeners outside of Cuba.22 These songs expressed scenes of daily life and relationships, and although they reflected primarily a Cuban or Caribbean context, Caleño audiences identified greatly with the lyrics.
Among the singers who established the Matancera’s international fame, the two who have had the most profound impact in Cali have been Daniel Santos and Celia Cruz. Santos, born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, rose to fame in the 1940s as a kind of Latin Frank Sinatra, fronting groups such as that of Pedro Flores in Puerto Rico and the Sonora Matancera in Cuba. His scandalous drinking sprees, drug use, love affairs, and marriages added to his celebrity. After leaving the Sonora in 1953, Daniel Santos continued performing as a solo artist. He toured Colombia frequently during the 1950s and 1960s and in Cali often performed with Tito Cortes’s Los Cali Boys, a local Cuban-style conjunto renamed La Sonora Cali after their first concert together in 1953. Santos always stayed in Cali’s Zona de Tolerancia (red-light district) during these visits, and stories of his marijuana habit and crazy exploits became legendary. Rumor has it that he even had an official license to smoke cannabis (Ulloa 1992: 371.) His songs also reflected this figure of the romantic camaján, the barrio hustler—a smooth talker, ladies’ man, good dresser and skilled dancer. Eventually, in the 1980s, he married a young Caleña decades his junior and bought a farm close to Cali. No doubt the local contact with such a bohemian and famous character as Santos reinforced his tremendous local popularity, already established through the witticism of his songs and the deep, mellow voice in which he sang them. [Santos] was one of the first commercially popular Caribbean singers to become famous for his mastery of the Cuban musical convention of sonerismo, or skilled vocal improvisation, for which other Puerto Rican singers such as Ismael Rivera and later salsa vocalists became famous.
Celia Cruz is the best-known female música antillana artist, and her fame continued through her transition from son to salsa. A native of Havana, she rose to stardom in the 1950s with the Sonora Matancera23 before leaving Cuba for New York in 1961. Under the aegis of Johnny Pacheco, she began recording with Fania records in the late 1960s, helping to popularize a brand of salsa based essentially on the old Matancera sound. Cruz’s majestic voice and extraordinary vitality onstage have marked her as the grand dame of Latin music, and in the salsa world she holds a position similar to that of opera divas such as Maria Callas or great jazz vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald. In Cali, Cruz is best known as la reina rumba—the queen of the party. While it is de rigueur for most Latina musicians to acknowledge Cruz as a point of inspiration for their careers, in Cali she has acquired a special position, making her influence even more significant for local woman musicians (see Waxer 2001a). Her recordings and tours with the Sonora Matancera during the 1950s made Cruz a local favorite, and by the time she appeared in Cali with the Fania All-Stars in 1980 she was already a legendary figure. Umberto Valverde’s 1981 biographical tribute to 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