Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Music Appreciation
Related: About this forumRemembering Johnny Pacheco: Fania Forever
Remembering Johnny Pacheco: Fania Forever
By Alejandro C. Eduarte, Crimson Staff Writer
There was never a first time you heard a Fania song. If you are Cuban or Puerto Rican or loved someone who is, the moment the record came on (and even a hair before that) you knew where it came from. You heard it in your grandmothers house, in the buzzy wash of air in the tropics, while cleaning or on the radio or just strolling the neighborhood. Or else in the dance bar you taxied to that night where the women encircled you, showed you how to use your arms and your hips and your feet, because you had your body now and what is life if you dont use it? All the younger people in your family taunted, laughed, thinking to embarrass you, but you didnt mind. You stayed, unashamed. How could you say no? Your partners feet sent you a secret message through the click of her heels on the floor while the band played one of those songs. Of Celia or Héctor or Willie or Cheo or Eddie or Rubén or Tito or Ismael. Only after a moment spent in a trance do you realize the beat of your partner and the track is the exact same. So keep up.
It is impossible to describe how it feels having two tracks of claves or trumpets or piano lines play on top of each other, pulling your hips spry in one direction and sending your head up to cry when the polyphony snatches any instinct out from under you. Anything you think you know is dust in the face of the music.
Salsa: Thats the word. The music shines a glorious flashlight to the Caribbean (and signals a deadly threat to the endangering neocolonial regimes), reminds you the better, more dangerous world is in wait, in invisible ink, right where you find yourself, whether on the islands themselves or in communities who come from them to Manhattan. Take your time. Grab it. Follow into that zone for the forging of never-go-back insurrectionary plans. The music is waiting for you when its five-beat rhythms come launch the world forward. ... When many think about Cuba and its indispensable revolution, they misunderstand that term to mean a hard-fought change of leaders. No. This is complete overturn. A re-engineering of structures from the inside. Salsa is the play, the unfettered genius that happens in that new possibility, with the colonial-backed leaders ousted and the revolutionaries among you now.
Johnny Pacheco, the Dominican-born flute expert, co-founded Fania Records in 1964, which became an engine of salsas path through the world, curating bands and plans for all these luminary currents. Looping in dozens of soon-to-be-famed musicians who descended from earlier Afro-Cuban and New York styles and folded in influences of jazz and mambo, he endowed not merely a platform for Latin music but an infrastructure: Being in Fania was being in Fania for life. If you made a record for him, you had it. The mark. The word FANIA was a pastel trapezoid in the corner of your album cover. Beginning from the endlessly-citable anecdote of selling CDs out of cars on the streets of New York, he systematized currents of Cuban music into an irreducible experiment. This test became, in its stylistic risk, more widely beloved, and blazingly, daringly successful chart-wise, eclipsing lazy imaginations of a monolithic Latin sound theoretically employed everywhere in the same fashion. Theres a particular reason he never stopped calling Fanias members, who hailed from many countries (and whose roots spread back to places such as the Congo), las estrellas: They are of the world.
{snip}
Staff writer Alejandro C. Eduarte can be reached at alejandro.eduarte@thecrimson.com.
Want to keep up with breaking news? Subscribe to our email newsletter.
By Alejandro C. Eduarte, Crimson Staff Writer
There was never a first time you heard a Fania song. If you are Cuban or Puerto Rican or loved someone who is, the moment the record came on (and even a hair before that) you knew where it came from. You heard it in your grandmothers house, in the buzzy wash of air in the tropics, while cleaning or on the radio or just strolling the neighborhood. Or else in the dance bar you taxied to that night where the women encircled you, showed you how to use your arms and your hips and your feet, because you had your body now and what is life if you dont use it? All the younger people in your family taunted, laughed, thinking to embarrass you, but you didnt mind. You stayed, unashamed. How could you say no? Your partners feet sent you a secret message through the click of her heels on the floor while the band played one of those songs. Of Celia or Héctor or Willie or Cheo or Eddie or Rubén or Tito or Ismael. Only after a moment spent in a trance do you realize the beat of your partner and the track is the exact same. So keep up.
It is impossible to describe how it feels having two tracks of claves or trumpets or piano lines play on top of each other, pulling your hips spry in one direction and sending your head up to cry when the polyphony snatches any instinct out from under you. Anything you think you know is dust in the face of the music.
Salsa: Thats the word. The music shines a glorious flashlight to the Caribbean (and signals a deadly threat to the endangering neocolonial regimes), reminds you the better, more dangerous world is in wait, in invisible ink, right where you find yourself, whether on the islands themselves or in communities who come from them to Manhattan. Take your time. Grab it. Follow into that zone for the forging of never-go-back insurrectionary plans. The music is waiting for you when its five-beat rhythms come launch the world forward. ... When many think about Cuba and its indispensable revolution, they misunderstand that term to mean a hard-fought change of leaders. No. This is complete overturn. A re-engineering of structures from the inside. Salsa is the play, the unfettered genius that happens in that new possibility, with the colonial-backed leaders ousted and the revolutionaries among you now.
Johnny Pacheco, the Dominican-born flute expert, co-founded Fania Records in 1964, which became an engine of salsas path through the world, curating bands and plans for all these luminary currents. Looping in dozens of soon-to-be-famed musicians who descended from earlier Afro-Cuban and New York styles and folded in influences of jazz and mambo, he endowed not merely a platform for Latin music but an infrastructure: Being in Fania was being in Fania for life. If you made a record for him, you had it. The mark. The word FANIA was a pastel trapezoid in the corner of your album cover. Beginning from the endlessly-citable anecdote of selling CDs out of cars on the streets of New York, he systematized currents of Cuban music into an irreducible experiment. This test became, in its stylistic risk, more widely beloved, and blazingly, daringly successful chart-wise, eclipsing lazy imaginations of a monolithic Latin sound theoretically employed everywhere in the same fashion. Theres a particular reason he never stopped calling Fanias members, who hailed from many countries (and whose roots spread back to places such as the Congo), las estrellas: They are of the world.
{snip}
Staff writer Alejandro C. Eduarte can be reached at alejandro.eduarte@thecrimson.com.
Want to keep up with breaking news? Subscribe to our email newsletter.
InfoView thread info, including edit history
TrashPut this thread in your Trash Can (My DU » Trash Can)
BookmarkAdd this thread to your Bookmarks (My DU » Bookmarks)
1 replies, 189 views
ShareGet links to this post and/or share on social media
AlertAlert this post for a rule violation
PowersThere are no powers you can use on this post
EditCannot edit other people's posts
ReplyReply to this post
EditCannot edit other people's posts
Rec (1)
ReplyReply to this post
1 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
Highlight:
NoneDon't highlight anything
5 newestHighlight 5 most recent replies
Remembering Johnny Pacheco: Fania Forever (Original Post)
mahatmakanejeeves
Mar 2021
OP
ornotna
(10,791 posts)1. RIP Johnny Pacheco