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      The Trumpeter Adam O’Farrill’s Art of Avoiding the Obvious

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      The son and grandson of Latin jazz royalty is releasing a new album with his quartet Stranger Days, and it’s their most melodically engaging yet.If you pay close enough attention to jazz, Adam O’Farrill might have landed on your radar about a decade ago, when he was still an adolescent. His last name is immediately recognizable — his father and grandfather are Latin jazz royalty — but he stood apart even then, mostly by hanging back and letting his trumpet speak for itself.Since his teens, O’Farrill has prioritized restraint, so that his huge range of inspirations — Olivier Messiaen’s compositions, Miles Davis’s 1970s work, the films of Alfonso Cuarón, the novels of D.H. Lawrence, the contemporary American-Swedish composer Kali Malone — could emulsify into something personal, and devilishly tough to pin down.“I don’t really feel the need to pastiche too heavily,” he said in a phone interview last month, while visiting family in Southern California. “The point is really how you digest it — and in letting that be its own thing, and letting the influences sort of surface when you least expect.”That, he said, feels “more exciting than trying to prove that you’re coming from somewhere” in particular.Now 26, O’Farrill this year was voted the No. 1 “rising star trumpeter” in the DownBeat magazine critics’ poll, and there’s little disagreement that he is among the leading trumpeters in jazz — and perhaps the music’s next major improviser.For the last seven years he has led Stranger Days, a quartet that also features his brother, Zach O’Farrill, on drums, as well as the bassist Walter Stinson. Until last year, its tenor saxophonist was Chad Lefkowitz-Brown; after a brief hiatus, the band recently returned with a new saxophonist, Xavier Del Castillo.On Nov. 12, Stranger Days will release “Visions of Your Other,” its third album, and O’Farrill’s most melodically engaging effort yet.O’Farrill was mentored by the musicians around his father, Arturo O’Farrill, in whose Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra he still occasionally plays.Camilo Fuentealba for The New York TimesWith its spare lineup, the band has given O’Farrill ample room to play around with dimension, scale and tension in his compositions. He thinks of Stinson’s bass as the group’s sonic center, and challenges himself to orient his layers of dynamic melody around that point, even if it’s constantly shifting.Near the end of “Visions of Your Other” comes a standout, “Hopeful Heart,” a neatly balanced tune in an odd meter. O’Farrill begins his solo about halfway through the track, and it sounds as if he’s starting a conversation with a stranger, tentative and broadcasting caution. Then the harmony shifts, and he seems to find a riverbed coursing through the chord changes: His improvising begins to roll down easily, as simple and elegant as the trumpet playing on an old Mexican danzón record.But that flood of momentum only lasts a few bars; soon he pulls back again, holding his notes longer, and subtly gesturing at the influence of the contemporary trumpet star Ambrose Akinmusire. He alternates between beautifully diatonic notes and more worrisome ones, asking you to notice both.O’Farrill grew up enmeshed in New York’s jazz and Latin music scenes, and was mentored by the musicians around his father, Arturo O’Farrill, a Grammy-winning pianist, in whose Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra he still occasionally plays.He started out on piano at age 6, and was almost immediately composing tunes of his own. He took up the trumpet two years later, and started to learn the art of improvising.Anna Webber, a rising saxophonist and composer, has worked with O’Farrill in various situations since he was in high school — though she didn’t realize then how young he was. “He just had this patience and maturity and confidence to his playing,” she said. “Even when he was I guess 17 or 18, it felt like it was already there.”O’Farrill is an expert at “not throwing everything you have into a particular solo,” she said, “always trying to find something new in a given piece, but always letting the music choose which direction you go in.”“I don’t really feel the need to pastiche too heavily,” O’Farrill said. “The point is really how you digest it — and in letting that be its own thing, and letting the influences sort of surface when you least expect.”Camilo Fuentealba for The New York TimesWebber recently invited him to be a part of the band that recorded “Idiom,” her album of dense and rigorous experimental compositions. As she prepared the music, she had one-on-one conversations with each of the group’s 13 members, to ensure the ensemble would feel like an organism in motion, not a firing squad of hired guns. (That band will perform music from “Idiom” on Sep. 23 at Roulette.)Moved, O’Farrill said he was inspired to bring this approach to his own large-ensemble project, Bird Blown Out of Latitude, a nine-piece group for which he wrote a suite of electroacoustic music that surges with rock energy and toggles, sometimes abruptly, between borderline over-spill and near-total silence.Thinking about his son’s sense of efficiency and control, Arturo O’Farrill acknowledged that training in Afro-Latin music forces a trumpeter to learn the importance of precision and leaving space. But he also touched on another of Adam’s childhood pastimes: video games.“The golden rule of video games is that you don’t look at the avatar, you look at the shadow,” Arturo O’Farrill said. “It’s about not declaring. Not stating the obvious, not following the avatar.”It’s through video games that Adam first found out about Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Japanese musician whose old band, Yellow Magic Orchestra, planted the seeds in the 1970s and ’80s for what would become chiptune, or early arcade-game music. “Visions of Your Other” opens with a restive, cycling cover of Sakamoto’s “Stakra.”“He’s a real master of taking a lot of pillars of musical convention — whether it’s pop or more Romantic, Schumann-esque things — and both respecting and dismantling them,” O’Farrill said, explaining what he loves in Sakamoto’s music, though it sounded as if he could be describing his own work. “That’s what’s so brilliant about his voice: It’s both deeply individual and very grounded in musical history, and relatable.” More

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      Larry Harlow, Influential Figure in Salsa, Dies at 82

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      He was born into a family of Jewish musicians, but he made his mark in Latin music, as a pianist, bandleader and producer.Born into a family of musicians, Larry Harlow was probably destined for a music career from the start. But it was his walks to class at the High School of Music and Art in Upper Manhattan that put him onto his lifelong passion.“When I got out of the subway, I would walk up this huge hill and hear this strange music coming from all the bodegas,” he told The Forward in 2006. “I thought, ‘What kind of music is this? It’s really nice.’”What he was hearing was early recordings by Tito Puente, the Pérez Prado mambo hit “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White” and other energetic new Latin sounds. Soon Mr. Harlow, a Brooklyn-born Jew, was fusing those and other influences into a career as a major figure in salsa, as a pianist, bandleader, songwriter and producer.In the 1960s and ’70s, onstage and in the production studios of Fania Records, a label often described as the Motown of Latin music, he would help define salsa and spread it throughout the United States and around the world. He was affectionately known in the Latin music world as “El Judío Maravilloso” — the marvelous Jew.Mr. Harlow, who lived in Manhattan, died on Aug. 20 at a care center in the Bronx. He was 82. His son, Myles Harlow Kahn, said the cause was heart failure related to kidney disease.As a bandleader Mr. Harlow was most identified with salsa dura, or hard salsa — brass-heavy, bebop-influenced and danceable. He performed in small clubs and on big stages, including for an audience estimated variously at 30,000 to 50,000 at Yankee Stadium in 1973 as a member of the seminal group the Fania All-Stars, a show that proved to any doubters that there was a vast audience for Latin music.He was just as influential behind the scenes at Fania, the Latin label formed in 1964 in New York by Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci. Mr. Harlow was one of the first artists the label signed — his first Fania album, “Heavy Smoking,” came out soon after — but he also became part of the Fania brain trust, helping to sign numerous up-and-coming artists and producing some 250 records.Aurora Flores, a music journalist and composer who was working with him on his memoir, said Mr. Harlow had displayed an acerbic wit, an acid tongue and a willingness to defy conventions.Mr. Harlow was one of the first artists signed to Fania Records, often described as the Motown of Latin music. His first Fania album came out soon after.FaniaMr. Harlow was not just a Fania artist; he was also part of the Fania brain trust, helping to sign numerous up-and-coming artists and producing some 250 records.Fania“He’d always side with the underdog,” she said by email. “His first recording, ‘Heavy Smoking,’ featured his girlfriend Vicky singing lead and playing congas, unheard-of in the Cuban patriarchy, where women were not allowed to touch the drums. He produced the all-female orchestra Latin Fever and later, when other bandleaders refused to accept Rubén Blades into the scene because he was too white and middle class, it was Harlow who took him under his wing, letting him front his big band.”She added simply, “Larry Harlow broke the mold.”Lawrence Ira Kahn was born on March 20, 1939, in Brooklyn. His mother, Rose Sherman Kahn, was an opera singer, and his father, Nathan, was a bass player and bandleader who used the stage name Buddy Harlowe, from which Larry later derived his own stage name, dropping the E.He began studying piano when he was about 5, and he also absorbed musical influences by lingering backstage at the Manhattan nightclub the Latin Quarter, where his father led the house band. The club was owned by Lou Walters, whose daughter would also sometimes hang out there — Barbara Walters, the future television journalist.“When I was a kid, 10 or 11 years old, Barbara and I used to sit in the booth next to the spotlight,” Mr. Harlow told The New York Times in 2010, “and we saw every show that came in there, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Joe E. Brown, Sophie Tucker.”His first interest wasn’t Latin music. It was jazz. But, he said, he wasn’t welcomed in jazz circles. “So I went into the next closest thing,” he told The South Florida Sun-Sentinel in 2009, “where I could still improvise and stretch — Latin music — and I got really good at it.”But that took some time. Mr. Harlow had been introduced to Latin music as a boy, when his father would play the Catskills, where the Jewish vacationers loved to dance the cha-cha and mambo. But by the time he was walking to high school, the music he was hearing coming from those bodegas was growing more complex. While he was still a teenager, a bandleader named Hugo Dickens invited him to play piano in his Latin band, but the first time Mr. Harlow took a solo, Mr. Dickens gave him a blunt review: He was terrible.So Mr. Harlow committed to getting better, buying up records and studying what the musicians on them were doing. While in high school he traveled to Cuba on Christmas break, and after graduating he returned there to immerse himself in Afro-Cuban music and culture, in the process expanding the Nuyorican Spanish he had picked up on the streets of New York.Mr. Harlow at the piano in an undated photo. He was introduced to Latin music as a boy when his bandleader father played the Catskills, and he became immersed in it as a teenager during a trip to Cuba.Fania Records“He was there with his reel-to-reel tape recorder taking it all in when the bombs started falling,” his son said in a phone interview — the bombs of the Cuban revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power at the beginning of 1959. That drove Mr. Harlow back to New York, but the music stayed with him.“There was no turning back,” he told The Miami New Times in 2000. “I was salsafied.”But the style that would become known as salsa was still evolving at that point. The music represented a mix of Afro-Cuban, Spanish and other influences, tempered with American jazz and refined by Cuban, Puerto Rican and other musicians living in New York. Mr. Harlow was an influential part of that swirl, first as a sideman in other people’s orchestras and then as the leader of his own groups.“Nobody was using a trumpet-and-trombone sound,” he told Latin Beat magazine in 2006, describing what he brought to the salsa mix. “It was my dream to use these instruments because then you could have a piano bass line, and then have the horns play counterpoints. So we had three to four layers of different things going on at the same time.”In addition to the many records he made and produced at Fania, Mr. Harlow was instrumental in pushing Mr. Masucci, who died in 1997, and Mr. Pacheco, who died in February, to back a documentary directed by Leon Gast called “Our Latin Thing” (1971), which chronicled a performance by the Fania All-Stars at the Midtown Manhattan nightclub Cheetah. (Mr. Gast died in March.)The film became a word-of-mouth hit among fans of Latin music and boosted the profiles of everyone involved.“We used to sell 25,000 copies of an album, and suddenly we’re now selling 100,000 copies individually, as bandleaders, and a million or more as the All-Stars,” Mr. Harlow told The New York Times in 2011, when a 40th-anniversary DVD of the film was released. “We were just playing around the ghetto, and all of a sudden we’re playing in soccer stadiums all over the world.”Mr. Harlow conducting a rehearsal of his suite “La Raza Latina” in 2010 for a Lincoln Center performance that included the singer Rubén Blades.Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesOther career highlights included “Hommy: A Latin Opera,” which Mr. Harlow, inspired by the Who’s “Tommy,” created and presented in a concert version at Carnegie Hall in 1973. In 1977 he branched out from the snappy dance numbers he was known for to record “La Raza Latina,” an ambitious suite.He later led an all-star group he called the Latin Legends.Mr. Harlow earned a bachelor’s degree in music at Brooklyn College in 1964 and later received a master’s degree in music from the New School. His marriages to Andrea Gindlin, Rita Uslan, Agnes Bou and Wendy Caplin ended in divorce. In addition to his son, from his first marriage, he is survived by his wife, Maria del Carmen; a daughter, Haiby Rengifo; a brother, Andy Harlow Kahn; and three grandchildren.Late in his career Mr. Harlow would sometimes turn up on the records or in the shows of younger musicians and bands, including the alternative rock act Mars Volta. He found such homages gratifying.“When someone comes up to me and says, ‘Thanks for the music, thanks for the memories,’” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1999, when the Latin Legends played that city, “that’s worth a million bucks to me.” More

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      Larry Harlow, a Salsa Revolutionary

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      The musician, who died on Friday, was a true originator of the genre. An outsider, he lived a Latin music life by immersing himself in Afro-Caribbean culture.In many ways, Larry Harlow — one of the central figures of salsa and its defining label, Fania Records — was a master at mixing the diverse musical connections between New York and the Caribbean. In a career that spanned six decades, he stitched together overlapping genres like rock, jazz and R&B and various Cuban genres like rumba, son and guaracha through intimate, soulful knowledge of both musical traditions.Harlow grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and studied classical piano. His father, Buddy Kahn, was a Jewish mambo musician who led the house band at New York’s Latin Quarter club. The musician and scholar Benjamin Lapidus writes in his new book that Jews were sponsoring Latin dances with live bands as early as the 1930s in New York City. Harlow came out of a tradition of mamboniks, Jews who danced mambo at spaces like Midtown’s Palladium, various spots in Brooklyn and the Catskills hotel circuit. Jewish musicians like Marty Sheller often wrote arrangements, and radio D.J.s like “Symphony” Sid Torin and Dick “Ricardo” Sugar promoted the music. Immortal Latin band leaders like Tito Puente regularly played the Catskills, a space where young musicians like Alfredo “Chocolate” Armenteros, who became a Harlow collaborator, cut their teeth.Yet Harlow, who died on Friday at 82, wanted to go beyond the Europeanized mambo performance styles heard in the Catskills and be true to the music’s African roots. He traveled to pre-Castro Cuba in the 1950s and returned determined to combine what he learned with what was happening in New York, creating a modern synthesis of the traditional and the avant-garde. Seeking acceptance among core post-mambo musicians, he even went so far as to become initiated to the Afro-Caribbean religion of Santería to stake his claim to authenticity and earn respect from the music community.“Here was a Jewish guy hanging out with all these Cubans and Afro-Caribbeans,” he told me in a 2004 interview. “I figured when in Rome, do like the Romans do.”Harlow never tried to pretend he was not who he was. Even after achieving insider status in the Santería community, he was often photographed wearing a Star of David around his neck. He was affectionately known by Spanish-speaking audiences as El Judío Maravilloso (the Marvelous Jew), a sobriquet given to him because of his devotion to the music of the blind Afro-Cuban bandleader and mambo progenitor Arsenio Rodríguez, known as El Ciego Maravilloso (the Marvelous Blind Man). When he chose, in the early 1980s, to release an album called “Yo Soy Latino” (“I Am Latino”), the lead vocalist who delivered the lyrics was the much-loved Puerto Rican singer Tito Allen.Beyond immersing himself in Afro-Carribean spirituality, Harlow was directly involved in the evolution of salsa music, collaborating with Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci, the founders of Fania. According to Alex Masucci, Jerry’s surviving brother, Harlow was the first artist contracted to record for Fania. His first few albums, “Bajándote: Gettin’ Off,” “El Exigente” and “Me and My Monkey,” which includes a version of the Beatles song “Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey,” traded on the bilingual, R&B-influenced bugalú sound, which united Black and Latino listeners.Harlow’s move away from búgalu to a jazz-influenced update on Rodríguez’s more Africanized conjunto sound — which added more trumpets and percussion like conga and cowbell — was crucial for salsa’s gestation. His blend of jazz, mambo and conjunto would become one of the primary influences on the emerging idea of salsa. While Eddie Palmieri and Willie Colón’s innovative use of trombone gave the horn sections a more aggressive, urban sound, Harlow and Pacheco’s influence was also decisive. Harlow’s early ’70s releases, “A Tribute to Arsenio Rodríguez,” “Abran Paso” and “Salsa,” crystallized his new aesthetic. He pioneered recording with both trumpets and trombone. He gave the Cuban charanga sound, which featured flutes and violins, new life. And he incorporated the batá drum, used in religious ceremonies, into his decidedly secular project.Harlow exulted in the spirit of the late 1960s — Rubén Blades told me he was the “Frank Zappa of salsa” — and was a voracious collaborator. His bilingual Beatles cover and the album artwork for “Electric Harlow” flaunted psychedelic style. He played piano for Steven Stills and Janis Ian, and had a rock-jazz project with the Blood, Sweat & Tears keyboardist Jerry Weiss. In 1972, after Miranda left his band temporarily, he painstakingly adapted the Who’s “Tommy” as the salsa opera “Hommy,” transferring the original British characters to New York’s Latino barrios.Although salsa’s burst in popularity during the mid- to late 1970s was organic, feeding off the hip young Latino audiences from the Bronx and Uptown, Harlow helped it blow up by taking a major producing role in Leon Gast’s vérité concert film “Our Latin Thing.” The film was a breakout party for the Fania All-Stars, a supergroup featuring Ray Barretto, Colón, Cheo Feliciano, Pacheco and many others, with Harlow on piano. Last week Masucci told me that Harlow was the connection to both Gast’s involvement and the appearance of authentic Santería devotees that appear late in the film. In 1976, he recorded a celebratory musical history, “La Raza Latina Suite,” with Blades singing in English.Though Harlow wasn’t born into the traditions that birthed salsa, throughout his career he was widely accepted as a pillar of the music. He was one in a long line of Jewish musicians who have played a key role in Afro-Caribbean music, going all the way back to Augusto Coén, a Jewish Afro-Puerto Rican who led a Latin big band in 1934 that was a predecessor to the mambo kings Puente, Machito and Tito Rodríguez. (The exchange went both ways: Even the Queen of Salsa, Celia Cruz, recorded the Jewish folk song “Hava Nagila” with her band La Sonora Matancera.)For Harlow, blending cultures and genres was simply second nature. In 2005, he contributed a wide-open keyboard solo to “L’Via L’Viaquez,” on the Texas psychedelic punk band the Mars Volta’s album “Frances the Mute” — a choice that shouldn’t be considered out of the ordinary. Several musicologists and writers have recognized the influence of Cuban bass patterns, called tumbaos, as well as cha cha cha patterns, on early rock hits like “Twist and Shout,” and “Louie Louie.” To Harlow, the connection between rock and Latin, funk and salsa was natural, a product of the era when he came of age.“It was revolution time,” he once told me. “People were writing songs about protest, and me and Eddie and Barretto were changing the harmonic concept of Latin music. I was the one who psychedelicized them a little bit.” More

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      Reggaeton’s History Is Complex. A New Podcast Helps Us Listen That Way.

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      “Loud” asks us to reconsider mainstream histories of the genre, and reveals critical conversations about its roots and evolution.In Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, marquesinas are centers of convocation, where family and friends gather to drink, dance and talk. Intimacy and conviviality are cultivated at these open-air garages and courtyards, a staple of middle-class homes. They’re where you gain an education. Where you learn the curves of your body when you dance to reggaeton for the first time and start to understand the language that the music offers: the ecstasy and uncertainty of youth, sexual self-discovery and the freedom of movement.Even at early 2000s marquesina parties, reggaeton carried certain myths. If you grew up at the crest of the genre’s commercial rise like I did, you were taught certain ideas about the genre early on. The notion, for example, that it is just vulgar party music. Or that it was invented solely in Puerto Rico. Or that it is a feel-good example of global cultural crossover, imploding language and cultural barriers and ushering Latinos into the mainstream.But these are deceptive and simplistic assumptions. They mask the knotty power dynamics embedded in popular music, especially if a genre emerges from a place of struggle. They perpetuate reductive ideas about reggaeton, obscuring the prismatic conditions of its past and present.As a movement that is shaped by the displacement and migration of Black diasporic sounds and their people, reggaeton is difficult to pin down with a firm definition. But there are some essential coordinates: the circulation and metamorphosis of Jamaican dancehall, Panamanian reggae en español, hip-hop and Puerto Rican underground.Many locate the seeds of reggaeton in 1980s Panama, where the children of West Indian canal workers experimented with translating Jamaican dancehall, Trinidadian soca and other Afro-Antillean genres into Spanish. New York dancehall and Panamanian reggae en español traveled to Puerto Rico, where the genre evolved alongside hip-hop en español as a movement called underground. Reggaeton always contained lyrical multiplicity: it was a genre for partying, but also for talking about life on the street: drugs, racism, crime, romance — stories of pleasure and protest.“Loud,” a new podcast produced by Spotify in partnership with Futuro Studios, chronicles the evolution of reggaeton head-on and at a critical moment, after a long period of neglect by the English-speaking media. Today, its global influence is too large to ignore: There is the success of artists like Bad Bunny, who was Spotify’s most-streamed artist in 2020; the once inescapable “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, a watered-down, popetón smash with a Justin Bieber cameo that tied for the longest-running No. 1 in Billboard’s Hot 100 history; as well as endless reports that detail the genre’s ascendance on streaming platforms.“Loud” unpacks all of this context, while fighting the narrative impulse to collapse intricate realities. Conversations about reggaeton usually include the never-ending debate about whether the genre started in Puerto Rico, which overlooks layers of diasporic musical exchange. There is the ongoing argument about reggaeton’s political utility, which suggests that political expression must be easily identifiable in order to be valuable. And there is the continued idolization of the “crossover” — songs and artists that achieve success with English-speaking listeners — a marketing narrative that celebrates reggaeton as some sort of Latino victory in the face of marginalization, without exploring everything that fraught concept entails.The thorough “Loud” is deeply aware of the textures of reggaeton. Over 10 episodes, it traces different chapters of the genre’s development: its Panamanian roots, its industry takeover in the early and mid-2000s and its rebirth in Medellín, Colombia. The bilingual podcast embraces nuance and respect for legacy artists; its narrator, Ivy Queen, is reggaeton royalty, one of the few women in the industry who garnered commercial recognition.In the first episode, the project firmly highlights the genre’s Afro-Caribbean provenance and defiant beginnings: “For some people, reggaeton is just party music. But the real story of reggaeton is about la resistencia. Resistance,” Ivy Queen states with piercing clarity. “About how kids who were young or poor, Black or dark-skinned — kids who were discriminated against in every way — how we refused to be quiet.” As the episode comes to a close, she puts an exclamation point on the show’s larger argument, stating that reggaeton is a “Black sound with roots from the English-speaking world.”The 10 episodes of “Loud” include a majority of the music being discussed.It’s a position statement about the music’s creators, ethos and identity that holds throughout the series’s run. There’s no shortage of rebellion in “Loud.” This is a project that immerses listeners in dissent.It tells of how underground artists fought back against the criminalization they faced in the ’90s and early ’00s in Puerto Rico, when the police raided public housing projects and confiscated cassettes from record stores under the guise of curbing drugs and violence. It describes the fearlessness of Tego Calderón, who made pro-Black reggaeton anthems and scorched the public consciousness with his condemnations of colonial thinking. It reminds us how Anglo major labels and radio stations stumbled as they tried to cash in on a movement that they didn’t understand, and that couldn’t be tamed. For an industry that often renders arrival in the United States as evidence of ultimate career triumph, this narrative pivot is as curative as it is urgent.“Loud” has rights to most of the music it analyzes, and knows it holds a gold mine. In one chapter, the show demonstrates how the game-changing producers Luny Tunes infused reggaeton with melody and strings through the lens of Ivy Queen’s virtuosic “Te He Querido Te He Llorado.” Listening to the episode, as the song’s bachata guitar and dembow drums slashed through each other under Ivy’s guttural wail, I was moved to stand up and belted her requiem of resentment and heartbreak to no one in particular.But “Loud” tackles the difficult parts of this music’s history, too: the homophobia embedded in Shabba Ranks’s “Dem Bow,” which serves as the genre’s percussive foundation; the vilification of the music, which led to government censorship campaigns in Puerto Rico; and the racist and classist bias of traditional Latino media, which did not book reggaeton acts at the outset of its mainstream ascent. A few moments that surround the genre’s history would benefit from further reflection here; a discussion of the racial ideology of mestizaje, for example, is a little too brief to treat the subject with enough depth.Of course, it is impossible to sketch a complete portrait of any popular music genre over the course of a podcast. And reggaeton is a genre of transformation, a movement that has refused stasis and undergone constant reinvention over the course of its existence. “Loud” asks us to reconsider the collective stories we heard about the music at the marquesina parties that shaped some of our early understanding of its contours. It chips away at reggaeton’s canon, urging us to take a closer look at the depth and the insurgency it has promised all along. It forces us to listen to reggaeton with complexity — as much complexity as the music and its history hold in the first place. More

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      Rauw Alejandro Draws a Fresh Blueprint for Spanish-Language Pop

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      On “Vice Versa,” the Puerto Rican singer traverses the lines of house music, baile funk, bolero and beyond, shirking convention and opening possibilities.“¿Cuándo fue?,” the 10th track from Rauw Alejandro’s new album “Vice Versa,” provides an unexpected jolt. As the Puerto Rican singer mourns the departure of a lover, the producer Tainy blends rivulets of synths and delicate percussion, allowing them to bleed into a hiss of hot air. Suddenly, a skittish breakbeat drops, plunging the track into rave territory. The transition is like a static shock, the equivalent of shuffling across the floor in warm socks and touching a doorknob.Ten years ago, it was perhaps unimaginable to hear this kind of moment on a mainstream Spanish-language star’s album. But Alejandro refuses to be pigeonholed into one sound. The 28-year-old artist has quietly emerged as a musical renegade, even as he’s maintained a commanding presence in the upper echelons of Latin pop.“Vice Versa,” which follows last year’s “Afrodisíaco,” elaborates on that vision, embracing melody and an unflinching (but calculated) desire to implode the traditional structures of pop and reggaeton. The album traverses the lines of house music, baile funk, bolero and beyond, shirking convention and reveling in the thrill of boundlessness. No matter the genre, Alejandro assumes the role of a playboy, delivering songs of love, lust and bombast.Alejandro surfaced from the creative playground of SoundCloud in 2014 with his first mixtape, “Punto de equilibrio.” “Trap Cake, Vol. 1” was his first formal release, a 2019 EP that positioned him as a forerunner of the putative Spanish-language R&B movement. But he shed that label with “Afrodisíaco,” which signaled a desire to jettison the constraints of genre. It included requisite features from reggaeton and trap heavy hitters like J Balvin and Anuel AA, necessary for any newcomer hoping to establish his relevance. But it also dabbled in house and synth pop, suggesting Alejandro had more ambitious designs in mind.“Vice Versa” expands on those experimental endeavors, partially bolstered by the work of Tainy, the mad scientist behind some of Bad Bunny’s most virtuosic, boundary-pushing tracks. Alejandro draws on elements of club culture on the album’s other songs, too: “Cosa guapa” — produced by Eydren Con El Ritmo, Mr. NaisGai, El Zorro, Kenobi and Caleb Calloway — opens as a not-quite-dancehall elegy for a former flame, but transforms into vengeful deep house, pierced by eerie sirens and the liquid groove of a four-on-the-floor rhythm. “Let me tell you something,” Alejandro warns in English. “I don’t need you anymore.”Though electronic music is the protagonist of Alejandro’s innovation on “Vice Versa,” he ventures into other worlds too. “Brazilera,” which features the Rio de Janeiro-born superstar Anitta, is a delicious romp into baile funk, the familiar boom-cha-cha-cha-cha of the genre slowing to a reggaeton tempo about halfway through, only to accelerate back into its original lightning speed seconds later. Anitta peppers the track with a coy dance-floor command that demands to be yelled at full volume at the club after 15 months of confinement.“Vice Versa” is Alejandro’s second full-length album.The honeyed textures of Alejandro’s voice, foregrounded on the R&B-trap-reggaeton hybrid “Aquel nap ZzZz,” set him apart from pop-reggaeton vocalists whose melodies tend to overflow with cloying sentimentality. He also has a knack for strategically deploying nostalgia: “La old skul” nods to early ’00s reggaeton, sampling genre-defining classics like Daddy Yankee and Nicky Jam’s “En la cama,” as well as Sir Speedy’s “Siéntelo.”Taken together, these maneuvers are signs of a necessary expansion of potential for Alejandro and Spanish-language pop at large. Much of the mainstream music topping the Billboard Latin charts today falls into predictable templates, diluting the most dynamic elements of reggaeton into a pop format — a reality that has produced much-needed critiques surrounding the genre’s whitewashing. For the most part, Alejandro sidesteps that pitfall by drawing from a more eclectic palette.Alejandro’s experimentation isn’t always successful, though: “Nubes” is saccharine pop-reggaeton engineered to be a radio hit, while “Tengo un pal” is anodyne trap-pop that leans a little too heavily on facsimiles of Travis Scott ad-libs. But the valleys of “Vice Versa” are few and far between. With his collaborators and beatmakers, he has drawn a blueprint for the freakier possibilities of Spanish-language pop. Now their peers will have to learn to catch up — or be consigned to a lifetime of making watered-down reggaeton. More

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      Camilo’s Hemisphere-Spanning Pop

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCamilo’s Hemisphere-Spanning PopWith indelibly catchy songs, the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter from Colombia has conquered an international audience. A new album, “Mis Manos,” may bring him even more fresh ears.Camilo’s new album, “Mis Manos,” is determinedly grateful, trans-nationally eclectic and strategically unadorned.Credit…Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York TimesPublished More

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      15 Essentials From Johnny Pacheco and Fania Records, the ‘Motown of Salsa’

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyPlaylist15 Essentials From Johnny Pacheco and Fania Records, the ‘Motown of Salsa’He packaged New York attitude and a new spin on Afro-Cuban beats, and changed Latin music forever. The flutist, composer, arranger and bandleader died this week at 85.Johnny Pecheco co-founded Fania Records, which became home to salsa’s greatest talents.Credit…Chad Batka for The New York TimesFeb. 17, 2021In many crucial ways, Johnny Pacheco’s life told a typical New York Latino story: He was a Dominican immigrant playing Cuban music for a mostly Puerto Rican audience. Like many self-styled New York entrepreneurs, he knew he had to hit the pavement with his product and get to know his customers face-to-face, driving around Harlem and the Bronx selling records out of the trunk of an old Mercedes-Benz.Pacheco had been working several variations of the son genre at the Bronx nightclub Triton’s, making a name for himself, according to the scholar Juan Flores’s book “Salsa Rising,” by adding a hop and flashing a hankie while dancing onstage to a hot new style called pachanga. Dreaming of starting his own record company (and in the midst of ending a marriage), he met Jerry Masucci, an Italian-American divorce attorney with a love for the Cuban sound. The two hit it off so well they started a new record label they called Fania, which became home to salsa’s greatest talents.Pacheco and Masucci’s experiment blew up beyond their wildest dreams. By capitalizing on the streamlining term “salsa,” which had appeared years before in Cuba and Venezuela, Fania Records conflated the Afro-Latin fad bugalú (think: “I Like It Like That”) with the remnants of Cuban sounds blunted by the radio silence of the post-Revolution embargo to create an international dance mania. Making stars out of Puerto Ricans like Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe, the Cuban diva Celia Cruz, a Brooklyn Jew named Larry Harlow, and a Panamanian troubadour named Rubén Blades, Fania Records spread the new Latin groove from Yankee Stadium to Kinshasa, Zaire.Here are 15 examples of how Pacheco, who died this week at 85, and his Fania cohort made music history.Johnny Pacheco, ‘El Güiro de Macorina’ (1961)From his second album, “Johnny Pacheco y su Charanga,” this is a riveting distillation of Pacheco’s early pachanga sound, featuring the full effect of a Cuban charanga-style orchestra, heavy on the flutes and violins. The relentless percussion embellishes lyrics that tell the story of a woman who scrapes the percussive güiro instrument to the narrator’s satisfaction. If you can picture Pacheco quick stepping on the downbeat, you’re witnessing the creation of New York-style salsa dancing.Johnny Pacheco featuring Pete ‘El Conde’ Rodríguez, ‘La Esencia del Guaguancó’ (1970)Pacheco’s collaboration with the underrecognized vocalist Pete “El Conde” Rodríguez (not to be mistaken for bugalú’s Pete Rodríguez) captures a more polished stage of his career. Propelled by the guaguancó rhythm that would become salsa’s go-to template, Rodríguez’s edgy, velvety rasp recalls Afro-Puerto Rican peers like Ismael Rivera and Cheo Feliciano. Pacheco’s arrangements, creating an easy flow between piano and horns, were rapidly becoming the salsa sound.Fania All-Stars, ‘Live at the Cheetah’ (1971)Pacheco and Masucci’s coordination of the Fania All-Stars, an unimaginably potent group of the emerging stars of the genre, was perhaps the most single-handedly important factor in salsa’s rise. This recording, made at the Cheetah Club, which once hosted bugalú as well as the first production of “Hair” before its Broadway run, features lengthy jams like “Anacaona,” a tribute to a rebellious female Taíno leader, with powerful vocals by Cheo Feliciano, backed by Willie Colón, Larry Harlow and Ray Barretto, among many others.Johnny Pacheco with Celia Cruz, ‘Químbara’ (1974)Celia Cruz was already a star with Sonora Matancera when she left Cuba in 1960, replacing the legendary La Lupe as Tito Puente’s lead singer in 1966. Her collaboration with Pacheco on “Celia and Johnny” was key to propelling her to recognition as the Queen of Salsa. Pacheco’s precision pacing and evolving wall of sound made this guaguancó a dizzying, onomatopoetic utterance of percussive instruments.Héctor Lavoe, ‘Mi Gente’ (1975)Probably salsa’s most beloved and talented vocalist, Héctor Lavoe was in many ways emblematic of the New York Puerto Rican experience. His wistful, nasal vocal style evoked that of a country boy simultaneously losing himself in and partying the hell out of the big city. Written by Pacheco, the emotional power of “Mi Gente” derived from its ability to bring New York’s diverse Latino community together to celebrate a dynamic self-awareness in the middle of a grinding fiscal crisis. The studio version is great, but the “Live at Yankee Stadium” version is the classic.Willie Colón, ‘El Malo’ (1967)Born and raised in Mott Haven’s gritty tenements in the Bronx, Willie Colón recorded his first album at age 17, inspired by a sour, mocking tone that Barry Rogers gave his trombone in his collaborations with Mon Rivera and Eddie Palmieri. Although there’s lots of bugalú here, this is stripped-down proto-salsa. Colón’s role in inventing salsa’s attitude through the “Malo” persona is evident here, the songs insisting on Spanish-speaking, Latin-dancing authenticity filtered through a gangster-style, street-fighting sense of heart.‘Our Latin Thing/Nuestra Cosa Latina’ (1972)This low-budget ’70s film directed by Leon Gast has the grainy subterranean feel that permeated later movies like Charlie Ahearn’s hip-hop origin story “Wild Style” and Glenn O’Brien’s reconstructed post-punk fever dream “Downtown 81.” The best visual record of Fania All-Stars rehearsals, club gigs, impromptu bembés and street festival performances, it also stars the Africanist-hippie-fusion wardrobe of salsa dancers of the time. Just a few minutes in, on “Quítate Tu,” you can see how Pacheco effortlessly commands the multitudinous chorus of star singers while directing horns and percussion.Ismael Rivera, ‘Las Caras Lindas’ (1979)Known as “El Sonero Mayor” (The Greatest Singer) in Puerto Rico, Ismael “Maelo” Rivera’s sound was formed through his collaborations with his childhood friend, the percussionist Rafael Cortijo. Recontextualizing the rustic bomba and plena genres by adding more instruments, the Rivera-Cortijo sound flowed easily into New York-style salsa. “Las Caras Lindas” comes from Rivera’s solo period with Fania — it’s written by the renowned songwriter Tite Curet Alonso and celebrates the beauty of Afro-Puerto Ricans.Ismael Miranda con Orchestra Harlow, ‘Abran Paso’ (1971)Harlow was a singular figure in the salsa scene — he was born and raised in Brooklyn, the son of a mambo musician who couldn’t get the Cuban sound out of his head. A whiplash pianist, Harlow named himself “El Judío Maravilloso” (The Marvelous Jew) after his hero Arsenio Rodríguez, known as “El Ciego Maravilloso.” “Abran Paso,” sung by his favorite vocalist, Ismael Miranda, is at once an invocation of Santería mysticism and a metaphor for an emerging Latino community.Héctor Lavoe, Willie Colón and Yomo Toro, ‘Asalto Navideño’ (1970)This was a Christmas album with a twist — rather than trot out the Fania All-Stars to do salsa versions of “Silent Night” and “Jingle Bells,” Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe decided to record classic Puerto Rican aguinaldos with a kind of Bad Santa New York feel. This album is inescapable around the holidays if you have extended Puerto Rican family, balancing reverence for tradition with an incredible sense of swing. A highlight is the first appearance of Yomo Toro, sometimes known as the Jimi Hendrix of cuatro, a rustic 10-string lute that explodes from the vinyl.Ray Barretto, ‘Indestructible’ (1973)The emotional percussive core of the Fania All-Stars, Ray Barretto was a remarkably versatile conga player whose career ran the gamut from bugalú to salsa, Latin jazz, and even session work for the Rolling Stones. His mid-period excellence is crystallized in “Indestructible,” which rode unparalleled waves of frenetic dance energy. The title track describes a promise salseros make to themselves to keep getting up no matter how many times they get knocked down.Rubén Blades and Willie Colón, ‘Siembra’ (1978)For many years the best-selling salsa album of all time, “Siembra” was the culmination of the Blades-Colón partnership. The album is an attempt to fuse a cinematic concept of New York Latino life with the idea of a classic rock concept album, and the performances are singular and immortal. As a songwriting team, the two had no competition; Blades was at the top of his vocal game, and Colón’s arrangements were never more brilliant.Tommy Olivencia and Chamaco Ramírez, ‘Planté Bandera’ (1975)Another anthemic crowd pleaser, “Plante Bandera” alludes to the growing sense of nationalism and pride that tied together salsa fans, as well as a growing awareness of Latino presence in the United States and the projection of the salsa genre itself. Chamaco Ramírez’s sometimes-overlooked plaintive style hits all the right notes, and the band’s percussive momentum, punctuated by a tenacious horn section, pushes the lyrics to their maximum effect.Rubén Blades, ‘Bohemio y Poeta’ (1979)The multitalented poet/troubadour/Hollywood actor shines here on his groundbreaking solo album, combining lyrical elements of Cuban nueva trova with lush Colón orchestral salsa arrangements. With songs like “Pablo Pueblo,” he defined the working-class Latino subject, disillusioned with urban misery after being promised the American dream. On “Paula C” he remembers a lost love with the skill of a Magic Realism boom novelist.Ricardo Ray and Bobby Cruz, ‘Sonido Bestial’ (1971)Ray and Cruz were one of salsa’s most successful internationalizing forces, spreading the promise of its sound to countries like Colombia, in particular. Evolving from their bugalú roots into a mainstream salsa machine, Ray and Cruz have a following of rabid devotees. This particular track features a break based on a Chopin étude, which is always a live crowd-pleaser.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Anything for Selena’ Examines a Singer’s Legacy and Latino Identity

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Anything for Selena’ Examines a Singer’s Legacy and Latino IdentityWhile the podcast is a biography of the Tejano star, it also weaves in the personal story of the host and examines why the singer has had a lasting effect on culture.Maria Garcia, the host and creator of “Anything for Selena,” in El Paso, Texas, where she was raised.Credit…Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesFeb. 2, 2021Maria Garcia has a distinct memory of when her connection to Selena Quintanilla-Pérez began. It was the early 1990s and she was 7, watching the Tejano star perform on television.“She had this cascade of black hair, red lips, brown skin,” Garcia says in the first episode of the new podcast “Anything for Selena.” “She sang like she felt every single word of her songs, like the music was emanating from her body.”It was a pivotal moment for Garcia, the podcast’s host. Born in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and raised in El Paso, Texas, she struggled to figure out who she was and where she belonged, describing in the podcast how she felt “a rejection, a stigma, in both countries.” Yet, here was someone who looked like her, uncompromising in her biculturalism and appearance. Selena was Mexican as much as she was American. Her first hits, like “Como La Flor,” were in Spanish, but “Dreaming of You,” her posthumous English-language album, was a mainstream success and the 1997 biopic starring Jennifer Lopez further cemented her legacy.While the show, a 10-episode podcast co-produced by Boston’s NPR affiliate WBUR and Futuro Media, serves as a biography of Selena, it also weaves in Garcia’s personal story. And she makes the case for how the singer’s life and death (Selena was fatally shot by the president of her fan club in 1995) were profound flash points for Latinos like herself that had lasting effects on the cultural landscape. The episodes drop each Wednesday and are paired with Spanish-language versions.Selena was Mexican as much as she was American, uncompromising in her biculturalism and appearance.Credit…Arlene Richie/Media Sources/The LIFE Images Collection via, Getty ImagesI also grew up in Texas, 100 miles north of Corpus Christi, where Selena was from, and like Garcia, I am a first-generation Mexican-American. Whether it was at a quinceañera or blaring from the kitchen radio, Selena’s music was part of the soundtrack to life. Tejano music, which fuses Mexican, European and American influences, was an expression of what it means to be from Texas. She embodied all those influences.Garcia is currently staying in El Paso, where she spoke on the phone about the series and how much it hinged on a meeting with Selena’s father, Abraham Quintanilla, who is known to be very protective of her legacy. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What was the inspiration for “Anything for Selena”?The podcast has been my own search to figure out where I belong in the world and how I belong in the world. Everybody who knows me knows that I have always been a huge Selena devotee from the time I was a little girl to my adolescence and to my early adulthood.The last home video I have with my father before he died, it’s of us dancing to Selena music. I realized there were all these moments in my life where Selena was there, and I really wanted to unpack why she felt so profound to me even in my 30s. I knew the answer was more than just she was this Mexican-American performer in the ’90s — a time when that really incentivized assimilation. I wanted to go even deeper and try to connect the dots through the decades and really try to do her legacy justice in music and in culture.The other thing about this series is that it’s partly a memoir about your upbringing and life on the border and struggling to fit in. It made me think of this saying in Spanish, “ni de aquí, ni de allá,” neither from here nor there. Why did you want to open up about that?I wasn’t thinking of it as a memoir when I started writing it. For me, I was telling this story because when I was 7 years old and I have the first memory of Selena, I didn’t have the language to articulate what she meant to me.There was this tension between these two parts of me, and to see somebody who embodied both of those parts fully in the States and in Mexico, who traversed the two countries without code switching, who was the same person on both sides of the border — I’d never seen anything like that. It struck me at a young age and it stayed with me all of my life.Garcia was filled with trepidation in meeting Selena’s father, known for tightly controlling the singer’s legacy.Credit…Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York TimesThe most recent episode has topics that listeners may find intriguing.We explore race pretty deeply in these next episodes. I have this theory that there is a direct historical lineage from Selena to today’s mainstreaming of big butts. Black women have always been at the forefront of celebrating curvaceous bodies, but there is this moment in the mid-90s, after Selena’s death, and particularly at the time of her biopic, when Latinas made it a feature that became desirable in the mainstream.To me, that story is about Latino identity’s fraught relationship with Blackness and the way Latinidad (the concept of U.S. Latino identity) has dehumanized and erased Black people while capitalizing on and obsessing over Black features. And the way that Latino identity has served to make these features palatable for white audiences.In the second episode, you talk about going to meet Abraham Quintanilla, Selena’s father. What was that experience like and did you have concerns about what might happen?Oh absolutely. I was terrified. I flew to Corpus Christi without any guarantee that he would even see me. We had been trying to acquire the music rights for Selena’s catalog. We had heard from the record label and they told us that not only the family rejected it, but that they were not supportive of the project.But I knew Abraham was one of the foundational keys to understanding Selena. It’s amazing how often and how devotedly she talked about her father. They had a creative bond over their craft, over music.He’s this really imposing character, especially in Spanish media. There’s been so much salacious coverage about him, and I wanted to get to know him as a person, without an agenda. I think he realized that after he spent some time with us and opened up.It felt like he let his guard down with you.And I with him. It was reciprocal.He is genuinely a complicated person. He admits that he was an incredibly demanding father. But he told me he has moments where he wonders if he had not pushed Selena to be a star, would she still be here? That’s a very real tension he has lived with for the last quarter century.Young mourners outside Selena’s home the day after she was killed in 1995.Credit…David J. Phillip/Associated PressThe series also discusses how after Selena’s death, Howard Stern became a flash point on how Latinos were portrayed in the media. It was startling to hear the rhetoric now (in a clip, he makes fun of her and the Latinos grieving her death; he later apologized). Do you think much has changed since then?A lot of people listen to that archive tape and feel distressed. I say this in the episode — this is his thing. But I really wanted to focus an episode on that because that is the moment in the Selena journey that it became clear to me how political [her death] was. To make fun of the people who mourned her was to dismiss the life of Latinos.When I heard this tape, all I could think about were the women in Juarez who have been murdered over generations and nobody cared. And it feels like to this day, nobody cares. So many of them looked like Selena. These are women who were poor and brown like Selena had been. But Selena was afforded a different path because she was born on this side of the border.Even if she did everything right, even if she played by all the rules, still to Howard Stern, her life didn’t matter. That’s the moment where her symbolism took off, the weekend after her death. After her death, her symbol then transformed even more. She became this vessel to look at the polemics, tensions and narratives around Latino life and its worth.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More