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      The Bassist Carlos Henriquez Covers All the Latin and Jazz Bases

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      The longtime Jazz at Lincoln Center musician leads a tribute this weekend to his mambo ancestors Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez.As he worked his way through a rice bowl at a Japanese restaurant near Columbus Circle in Manhattan on a recent afternoon, the bassist, composer and arranger Carlos Henriquez reflected on the long history of Latino musicians in the jazz world.“In the 1920s, there was a bassist and tuba player called Ralph Escudero who used to play with W.C. Handy and Fletcher Henderson,” he said, arching his manicured eyebrows for emphasis. “We’ve always been part of this. So, I’m going to say, Hey, I’m from the South Bronx, I’m Puerto Rican and I love jazz.”Henriquez, who will lead an all-star band on May 5-6 in a centennial tribute to the mambo kings Tito Puente and Tito Rodríguez at Jazz at Lincoln Center, was about to join a rehearsal for the institution’s annual gala. Dressed down in a gray plaid flannel shirt and dark bluejeans, he took his place at his pivotally placed bassist’s chair as the orchestra practiced standards — the theme this year was “American Anthems” — including Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”“I’ve always visualized the bass as the catcher of a baseball team — we see everything, the whole game,” he said. “That catcher is dealing with everything that’s coming in and calling the plays. We, the bass players, can really determine where the music is going to, where the concept is going.”Over about 25 years as a professional musician, Henriquez has developed a reputation as a grounded but wildly imaginative composer and player. “Carlos has become a master of his instrument and writing arrangements,” said the timbalero José Madera in a phone interview from his home in Colorado. “He’s grown, he’s left the planet, he’s in outer space somewhere.”Henriquez’s path from the streets of 1980s Mott Haven in the Bronx to the Jazz at Lincoln Center stage was sparked in part by an encounter as a teenager with the organization’s director, Wynton Marsalis. “When I was a kid, the Jazzmobile used to come to St. Mary’s Park across the street from the Betances Houses, where I grew up,” Henriquez said, referring to the portable stage that brings jazz to New York neighborhoods. “I remember Clark Terry and David Murray played, and also Tito Puente, Eddie Palmieri, Larry Harlow.”Henriquez said his father, who worked at a V.A. hospital, was given cassettes by his African American friends. “One day he gave me a tape with Bill Evans, Eddie Gomez and Paul Chambers, and I was freaking out — I was like, man, this is killing.”At first, Henriquez played the piano, and then switched to classical guitar, which landed him in the Juilliard School’s music advancement program while he attended the performing arts high school LaGuardia. He switched to bass in his second year‌ at Juilliard, and won first place in Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Essentially Ellington competition for high school bands. At 19, he joined the Wynton Marsalis Septet and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra.“I started going to Wynton’s house religiously, and we exchanged information about Latin music, something we do to this day,” Henriquez said. “And vice versa. If I need help with classical music or something, he’ll help me out.”Henriquez onstage with the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, featuring its leader, Wynton Marsalis (at right).Tina Fineberg for The New York TimesDuring a question-and-answer session at Essentially Ellington in 2019, Marsalis praised his protégé: “Every night this man is coming to swing,” he said, addressing a roomful of jazz hopefuls. “He gave me a another whole way of understanding music,” Marsalis added. Describing a moment when Henriquez offered a critique on a piece Marsalis had written, the trumpeter recalled the bassist saying, “It’s all on the wrong beat.’”For Henriquez, the key to fusing Afro-Cuban rhythms and jazz is finding a way to get the feeling of swing to conform to the five-beat clave rhythm. “It’s not just imagining ‘The Peanut Vendor’ as played by John Coltrane,” he said. Henríquez credits Manny Oquendo’s Conjunto Libre and the Fort Apache Band, which was headed by the Bronx brothers Andy and Jerry González, as “spiritual leaders.”As a session bassist, Henriquez has played with Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Lenny Kravitz, Natalie Merchant, the bachata group Aventura and the Cuban jazz pianists Chucho Valdés and Gonzalo Rubalcaba. He has even toured with Nuyorican Soul, the dance-music project led by the D.J.s Little Louie Vega and Kenny (Dope) Gonzalez. “We had DJ Jazzy Jeff spinning records onstage while we were playing Latin grooves,” he said.Since 2010, when Henriquez served that year as musical director of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s cultural exchange with the Cuban Institute of Music, he has been integrally involved in the group’s Latin jazz programming. In the past decade, he’s been at the helm for a show featuring Rubén Blades singing jazz and salsa standards, a Latin spin on the work of Dizzy Gillespie, and last year’s scintillating “Monk con Clave” tribute to Thelonious Monk.“I was telling them, look, there’s a bigger picture to this,” Henriquez said of his message to the orchestra’s leadership. Musicians from earlier eras who are meaningful to the New York scene are “not getting credit,” or opportunities to perform. “We need to hire these people so that we could at least let them know that we didn’t forget about them.”“We, the bass players can really determine where the music is going to, where the concept is going,” Henriquez said.Dana Golan for The New York TimesFor this week’s Puente and Rodríguez tribute, Henriquez, who played with the Tito Puente orchestra when he was in his late teens, enlisted longtime Puente collaborators like the bongo player Johnny (Dandy) Rodríguez Jr. and Madera, and crafted a set list that combines both well-known and somewhat obscure tracks from the two luminaries.One of Henriquez’s charms is his ability to ad-lib nuggets of Latin music and jazz history between songs, in quips that land somewhere between stand-up comedy and a TED Talk. Asked over lunch about the rumored rivalry between Puente and Rodríguez, who vied for top billing at shows at the Palladium and other venues, he coolly demurred in deadpan comic tone. The song “El Que Se Fue” (“The One Who Left”)? “Rodríguez was trashing a guy,” Henriquez said, “but it wasn’t Tito Puente.”The Puente centennial has also occasioned a tribute and art exhibit at Hostos Community College in the Bronx; a vinyl reissue on Craft Recordings of “Mambo Diablo,” Puente’s 1985 jazz album, which featured “Lush Life” and other jazz standards; and an event at the Lehman Center for the Performing Arts on May 20. Yet as much as the mambo era burns brightly in the spirit of Latin New York, Henriquez, whose 2021 solo album “The South Bronx Story” mined 1970s lore of widespread arson and street gang truces, continues to dig deeper into other neglected histories.“I’m working on my next album and I realize, we’re right in the middle of this neighborhood that used to be called San Juan Hill,” he said, referring to the area that was demolished to build Lincoln Center. “And then I find out, we used to live here, with African Americans, and Benny Carter wrote a suite called Echoes of San Juan Hill, and Thelonious Monk used to play here. I came to realize how valuable this neighborhood was, and I found this out because I was yearning to find my connection to jazz.“It’s the spirits of our ancestors, and they’re calling, you know?” More

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      Foo Fighters Begin a New Chapter, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Muna, Nathy Peluso, Salami Rose Joe Louis and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Foo Fighters, ‘Rescued’“Rescued” is the first new song Foo Fighters have released since the sudden death of the band’s beloved drummer Taylor Hawkins in March 2022, and its lyrics seem to address that tragedy and the remaining members’ grief. “It happened so fast, and then it was over,” Dave Grohl sings before unleashing one of those signature screams that manages to be throat-lacerating and melodic: “Is this happening now?” Hawkins’s absence is a gaping void in “Rescued,” the first track from a June album, “But Here We Are.” But perhaps because of it, the Foos sound more focused than they have in a while, driven by a fresh sense of pathos and urgency. LINDSAY ZOLADZMuna, ‘One That Got Away’Katie Gavin lets a missed connection know exactly what they’re missing on the bold and sassy “One That Got Away,” a new single the pop group Muna debuted last weekend at Coachella. “If you never put it on the line, how am I gonna sign for it?” Gavin sings on the synth-driven track, as the booming, echoing production serves to effectively amplify her feelings. ZOLADZSalami Rose Joe Louis, ‘Dimcola Reprise’“I know that everything is feeling like it’s falling apart all the time,” sings Lindsey Olsen, who records as Salami Rose Joe Louis, in “Dimcola Reprise” from her coming album, “Akousmatikous” (which means “sound where there is no identifiable source” in Greek). Most of the track is a busily looping, pattering, burbling electronic backdrop for her whispery voice, which eventually advises, “It’s gonna be OK/Just make it through the day.” But before it ends, the song pivots completely, turning to slow chromatic chords and suspended vocal harmonies — a brief moment of respite. JON PARELESSbtrkt featuring Sampha and George Riley, ‘L.F.O.’Aaron Jerome, the English electronic music producer who calls himself Sbtrkt and performs behind a mask, has been working over “L.F.O.” since 2018, apparently making it stranger with each iteration. It’s an ever-evolving succession of thick, harmonically ambiguous synthesizer chords, coalescing into a rhythm and pushing it aside, accelerating and falling apart and reconverging. The lyrics, delivered in Sampha’s eerie falsetto and George Riley’s confessional breathiness, offer paradoxes and self-questioning: “I’m changing, moving, losing, higher,” Riley sings. The song will be on Sbtrkt’s new album, “The Rat Road,” in May. Whatever the context, it’s likely to be destabilizing. PARELESNathy Peluso, ‘Tonta’The Argentine singer Nathy Peluso enlisted the hitmaking producer Illangelo (the Weeknd, Post Malone) for the furious kiss-off “Tonta” (“Foolish”). A thumping, clattering beat propels her indictment of her ex from seething to sneering to a well-placed scream. She also shows some gleeful scorn as she overdubs her voice into a mocking horn section, trumpeting “tararatata” as she demolishes any hopes of reconciliation. PARELESGrupo Frontera x Bad Bunny, ‘Un x100to’Bad Bunny, proudly from Puerto Rico, is determined to expand his music into a pan-Latin coalition. With “Un x100to” (“One Percent”), he joins Grupo Frontera, a Mexican-rooted norteño band from Texas, for a song about using the last 1 percent of his cellphone power to call an ex and confess that he misses her. Grupo Frontera’s section of the song is a traditional-flavored, accordion-backed cumbia. Bad Bunny arrives with a different, rap-informed melody over arena-scale electronic chords. But with Grupo Frontera working, he returns to the clip-clop beat and chorus of the cumbia — another strategic alliance certified. JON PARELESFlorence + the Machine, ‘Mermaids’“I thought that I was hungry for love,” Florence Welch sings at the beginning of a menacing new song, “Mermaids,” adding, “Maybe I was just hungry for blood.” The dark, brooding track sounds of a piece with “Dance Fever,” the group’s 2022 album that often found Welch threading her personal recollections and musings into a more mythical tapestry. That contrast emerges in the second movement of “Mermaids,” when Welch sings memorably about long nights of London debauchery and “hugging girls that smelt like Britney Spears and coconuts.” ZOLADZChristine and the Queens featuring 070 Shake, ‘True Love’At Coachella and now online, Chris of Christine and the Queens has gone primal and musically skeletal. “I need you to love me,” he sings in “True Love,” over a blipping, tapping two-chord track, joined by 070 Shake, who sees “your dark eyes staring at me.” The song is measured and quantized, but thoroughly obsessional. PARELESBéla Fleck, Edgar Meyer and Zakir Hussain featuring Rakesh Chaurasia, ‘Motion’The latest cross-cultural foray by the banjoist Béla Fleck is a collaboration with the bassist Edgar Meyer and two Indian musicians: Zakir Hussain on tabla and Rakesh Chaurasia on bansuri (bamboo flute). For most of “Motion,” Fleck takes a supporting role behind rising, inquisitive melodies from the bass and bansuri as Hussain’s tabla stirs up a fluttering momentum. When banjo and bansuri share a melody in unison, the eerie timbre is an acoustic discovery. PARELES More

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      10 Tito Puente Essentials for the Mambo King’s Centennial

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      A Harlem-born New York original, the percussionist, composer and bandleader helped define Latin jazz and lay the groundwork for 1970s salsa.Ernest Anthony Puente, known as Tito, was born in Harlem on April 20, 1923, and went on to create an enormous body of work (over 100 albums) while earning a reputation as a tireless performer. His irresistible swirl of energy helped make his main instrument, the timbales, emblematic of Latin music in the mid-20th century.In a career that stretched over six decades, Puente was a clever innovator and a prized collaborator. He got his start playing with Machito and his Afro-Cubans, the band led by Frank (Machito) Grillo that pioneered Afro-Cuban jazz fusion. He then went on to headline, becoming one of the stars of the glitzy Palladium mambo era — named for the club on West 52nd Street in Manhattan that attracted diverse crowds to dance to mambo orchestras with elaborate horn and percussion sections. When stripped-down salsa bands of a new generation began to steal his thunder, he persisted by hiring both La Lupe and Celia Cruz — two brilliant and beloved Cuban singers — as his lead vocalists. In the 1980s, he found new ways to evolve Latin jazz by spotlighting the work of unheralded instrumentalists, and at the end of the century, he teamed with younger singers like La India and Marc Anthony.Growing up in New York, decades before the “Great Migration” in the 1950s of Puerto Ricans to the United States, Puente was a prototypical Nuyorican. He was just as comfortable speaking in English as in Spanish, and he idolized big-band jazz icons like Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa while studying piano with Victoria Hernández, a sister of the famed Puerto Rican bandleader Rafael Hernández. Like Krupa, Puente moved his percussion kit to the front of the band, a move that centered the rhythm as the driver of the dance beat and came to define the mambo sound — big-band jazz fused with Afro-Cuban rhythms and featuring extended improvisational breaks that fueled dancers’ energy — much in the way Eddie Palmieri and Willie Colón would later feature trombones to define salsa.When Puente died in June 2000 at 77, it was a great blow not only to fans of mambo, cha-cha-cha, bugalú, salsa and Latin jazz, but also to New York itself. Yet his sound lives on and concerts celebrating his era resonate in the city he called home and beyond. (Jazz at Lincoln Center will present its “Tito Puente and Tito Rodriguez Centennial Celebration” on May 5 and 6 at the Rose Theater.)Here are 10 examples of how Puente became known as the King of Latin music.“Abaniquito” (1949)The song that started Puente’s ascent was released as a 78-r.p.m. single with a hyperactive piano vamp and frenetic rhythm section that showcased the unrestrained dance floor energy of what was then an emergent Palladium scene. Featuring the beloved vocalist Vicentico Valdés as well as Graciela Pérez, Machito’s sister, on the chorus, the track exemplifies the strong influence of the Machito band on Puente’s jazz-mambo fusion.“Babarabatiri” (1951)Arriving at the dawn of the mambo era, this song is a riveting immersion in Puente’s rapidly coalescing sound. It’s flush with jazz swing, irresistible syncopation and a call-and-response between a repetitive vocal chorus, the horn section and percussion. Seizing on the momentum created by an earlier version — by the Cuban vocalist Beny Moré fronting Pérez Prado’s orchestra — the Puente rendition, with the vocalist Santos Colón, comes off as a cooler jazz reinterpretation.“Mamborama” (1955)By the mid-1950s, Puente had emerged as one of the dominant performers on the Palladium scene, engaged in his famous rivalry with the bandleader and vocalist Tito Rodríguez, who responded to the “Mamborama” album with his 1956 release “Mambo Madness.” Puente’s LP features the loping yet propulsive rhythmic figures of “Ran Kan Kan,” another classic, but the anthemic “Mambo Inn” makes perhaps the album’s strongest statement with its triumphant melodic theme, bruising horn section and the powder-keg pummeling of Puente’s timbale-conga attack.Tito Puente & His Orchestra, “Top Percussion” (1957)Taking a short break from Palladium mambo, Puente dug deep into the African roots of Cuban dance music on this album, bringing together the percussionists Mongo Santamaría and Willie Bobo with the vocalist Merceditas Valdés to re-create the feeling of rumba and ritual toque de santo, a practice designed to communicate with the pantheon of Yoruban deities. The album closes with the seven-minute “Night Ritual,” an Afro-Cuban jazz suite featuring Johnny Carson’s bandleader, the trumpeter Doc Severinsen. Puente revisited the concept in 1960 with “Tambó,” which repeated the deep percussion theme while using more mambo orchestra instruments.“Dance Mania” (1958)Perhaps Puente’s most famous and most listened to album, “Dance Mania” began the shift from mambo to what would become known as salsa by including some tracks identified by their Cuban-derived genres. While the track list is populated with standard mambos, “Cuando te Vea,” is listed as a guaguancó, a Cuban groove quintessential to the future evolution of the salsa sound, with Santos Colón doing an early take on the soneo, or lead vocal improvisation. The album also includes an early appearance from Ray Barretto, who would become one of salsa’s most renowned congueros and bandleaders.“Oye Como Va” (1962)At once tracing the roots and routes of Latin music in the 20th century, the song “Oye Como Va,” while not exactly a Puente masterpiece, tells the story of how Afro-Cuban music found its way into the American mainstream. Its opening riffs are based on the Cuban bassist Israel “Cachao” López’s classic “Chanchullo,” and the track is formally a cha-cha-cha that celebrates dance floor flirting. It was famously covered in 1970 by Santana, and the band’s leader, Carlos Santana, was said to have been convinced to do the song by the rock promoter Bill Graham, who had spent much of his youth in the 1950s dancing to mambo at Puente’s Palladium.La Lupe and Tito Puente, “Tito Puente Swings/The Exciting Lupe Sings” (1965)While an argument can be made that “El Rey y Yo (The King and I)” from 1967 is the peak of Puente and La Lupe’s collaboration, their album “Tito Puente Swings/The Exciting Lupe Sings” seems more spontaneous while capturing Puente’s peak cha-cha-cha grooves. It also marks Puente’s attempts to reconcile the end of the Palladium era with the emergence of the Cuban/African American R&B hybrid of bugalú.Tito Puente and Celia Cruz, “Cuba y Puerto Rico” (1966)As Puente’s working relationship with La Lupe became more contentious, he began to turn to Celia Cruz, another Cuban vocalist who had made her mark as the lead singer of the legendary Sonora Matancera orchestra. Cruz seized the opportunity to become a solo star in her own right, ultimately becoming la Reina de la Salsa (the Queen of Salsa), largely as a result of her magisterial performances with Puente. “La Guarachera,” from the album “Cuba y Puerto Rico,” became one of her signature tracks.Tito Puente, India and the Count Basie Orchestra, “Jazzin’” (1996)Toward the end of his career, Puente became a prominent member of the promoter Ralph Mercado’s stable of salsa and merengue acts that proliferated in New York’s Latin club scene. He became El Rey (the King) for young people who were trying to reconnect with their parents’ music by learning to dance at clubs like the 14th Street Palladium and S.O.B.’s. This era included his team-up with La India, a salsa vocalist who began her career singing house music, on “Jazzin’” (which also featured the Count Basie Orchestra); and a collaboration with Marc Anthony that began on ‌a 1991 album Anthony recorded with the Paradise Garage D.J. Little Louie Vega (“When the Night Is Over”), making Puente’s sound a rediscovered staple of the ’90s downtown Latin scene.Eddie Palmieri and Tito Puente, “Masterpiece” (2000)Going back to “Puente Goes Jazz” (1956), an underrecognized tour de force that also features Ray Barretto, and “Herman’s Heat & Puente’s Beat,” a 1958 collaboration with Woody Herman, Puente excelled at making records that strongly connected with his first love: jazz. Beginning with “On Broadway” in 1982, Puente embarked on a nine-album relationship with the jazz label Concord Records, doing covers of John Coltrane’s “Afro Blue,” Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” and Bud Powell’s “Un Poco Loco,” among an avalanche of original material that redefined Latin jazz as a genre, particularly through the spirit of underrecognized collaborators like the Dominican saxophonist Mario Rivera. His jazz period reached its peak with his 2000 collaboration with Eddie Palmieri, “Masterpiece.” More

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      In Her New Show, Rita Indiana Confronts All Kinds of Ghosts

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      “Tu nombre verdadero” (“Your Real Name”), which debuts Friday in New York, is a spiritual multimedia performance from the 45-year-old novelist and musician.“In the time you dropped a chorus, I wrote five novels.”It’s the kind of shot that only Rita Indiana could fire off in a song. The lyrics — which appear in “Como un dragón,” the lead single from the musician and writer’s last album, “Mandinga Times” in 2020 — encapsulate the interdisciplinary abundance she has cultivated over the last 20 years. They also show off a slick-talking, Caribbean kind of realness, which lives in the characters that populate her world.On a recent Friday afternoon, Indiana was running around at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, posing for photos and working on set decorations with an assistant. She and her wife, the Puerto Rican filmmaker Noelia Quintero Herencia, were putting the final touches on a multimedia performance called “Tu nombre verdadero” (“Your Real Name”), which debuts on Friday at the Clemente’s Flamboyán Theater.Indiana, who sports a huge tattoo of an American buffalo on her right hand, sighed as she paused to rest on a bench. Tufts of gray sprouted from her shaggy pixie cut. “I’m a punk abuela,” she said, laughing. Not quite your average grandma.Over the last two decades, the 45-year-old Dominican artist has transformed into one of the Caribbean’s foremost cultural agitators. Indiana’s repertoire unsettles deeply entrenched cultural norms — she’s not afraid to write queer sex scenes in her award-winning books, or condemn corrupt politicians in her genre-shattering songs. In 2010, she and her band Los Misterios released the blistering “El juidero,” a record about diasporic longing and Dominican identity that shredded up merengue, rock and Afro-Dominican folk styles.Indiana’s early works were almost documentarian, exploring the everyday joys and contradictions of Caribbean life. In recent years, she has journeyed into freakier, more fantastical universes. For “Mandinga Times,” which was nominated for a Latin Grammy, she developed a demonic nonbinary alter ego, meant to symbolize all kinds of marginalized bodies.Her 2015 novel “La mucama de Ominculé,” a dystopian tale set in Santo Domingo, follows a transgender protagonist who travels back in time via a divine sea anemone to save the world from nuclear catastrophe. Scholars praise Indiana’s constellatory style, particularly the way she integrates tropical futurism, queer poetics and the buoyancy of Dominican speech to imagine the liberatory possibilities of the present. The acclaim has made her a literary superstar; she is currently serving as the acting director of New York University’s Creative Writing in Spanish M.F.A.At the Clemente, Quintero Herencia, who designed the sets for “Tu nombre verdadero,” whittled disembodied clay fingers while Indiana traced the creative process behind the show. It features her first new music since “Mandinga Times,” the LP that ended a 10-year hiatus during which she focused on writing. It’s also Indiana’s first piece as a New York resident. (The couple spent 14 years in Puerto Rico.)The show’s nonlinear story immerses the audience in experiences of death and illness, particularly as they relate to artists. Indiana said it explores the weight that an artist’s name has when they die. She cited the photographer, painter and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz; the painter Jean-Michel Basquiat; and the Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca as some of the figures that shaped the spirit of the performance. Indiana herself goes by a shortened version of her birth name (Rita Indiana Hernández Sánchez), and said she chose it not to Anglicize her identity, but because she felt Indiana was more interesting.The theatricality of “Tu nombre verdadero” draws on Indiana’s teenage years in the independent Dominican theater group Teatro Guloya, where she studied alongside the visionary actors Claudio Rivera and Viena González. Quintero Herencia has worked as a director, prop designer and set builder in most of Indiana’s films and music videos, and said the piece will feature dreamlike visual projections. “Tu nombre verdadero” is the “inevitable fate of our practices,” Indiana added.While conceptualizing the show, commissioned by the Americas Society, the couple navigated a wave of death, both personal and collective. They mourned the millions lost in the pandemic, as well as close friends, relatives and beloved musicians, like Quintero Herencia’s mother, the Dominican painter Jorge Pineda and the merengue icon Johnny Ventura. In part, the performance is a way to guide “our ghosts” to a better place and process our memories of them, Indiana said.The couple’s longstanding fascination with death and ancestral energies has surfaced in their previous work. “I never separate my art from my spiritual world and the world of my ancestors,” Quintero Herencia said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a movie, a documentary or a drawing. There’s always a channel that I open, that I know is connected to the ancestral world.” Indiana, whose father died violently when she was around 12, explained that death has intrigued her for as long as she can remember. She often wonders how a body “that we love with, fight with, work with, understand with, cry with” suddenly becomes nothing.It’s a subject that has also emerged from Caribbean colonial wounds. The island of Hispaniola, home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was the first New World colony settled by Spain in 1493. Indiana said the region is still confronting its sordid past — the massacre of native Taínos, the cruel violence of the Atlantic slave trade — and all the cultural knowledge and traditions that were annihilated in the process. “Colonialism is a machine of death,” she said. “We are a part of that — of all that pain and that whole factory of bones.”Indiana tapped a small crew of musicians for the show, including the composer and frequent collaborator Luis Amed Irizarry, who arranged the songbook for piano and drums. Efraín Martínez, a drummer who has toured with the merengue idol Olga Tañón and recorded with the reggae group Cultura Profética, also joined the lineup.The theatricality of “Tu nombre verdadero” draws on Indiana’s teenage years in the independent Dominican theater group Teatro Guloya.Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesIndiana described the compositions as “bare bones,” far removed from the conventional structures of popular music. “It’s a more poetic language, more absurd,” she said. “The references are from my childhood, the music I heard when I was very small.” She recalled the influence of her great-aunt Ivonne Haza, a decorated soprano, who was a vocal coach for some of the Dominican Republic’s most renowned singers, including Fernandito Villalona and Sonia Silvestre. Haza would give lessons at Indiana’s grandparents’ house, where Indiana lived until she was 7.“That was like the soundtrack to my homework — four hours, five hours of that,” she explained, chuckling.The songbook is impressionistic, sculpting Dominican gagá, Spanish copla, Cuban son and other genres into abstract shapes. There is even an experimental merengue, inspired by Danny Elfman’s Tim Burton scores, and an English-language satirical country number that addresses the brutality of Latin American dictatorships. Indiana burst into the chorus of the song, adopting a Southern twang: “He’s our strong man, he’s our puppet, he’s our pawn/You should see how he trips/Over our banana splits/When we choose his killers from among his own.”Indiana’s fearlessness helped inspire the Dominican artist La Marimba to fuse and tinker with disparate genres — to not be afraid to “have your own identity and show it.” She called Indiana a key figure in a movement of Dominican musicians who adapted the country’s folk traditions for the contemporary moment.A generation of young Dominican writers also identifies Indiana as a lodestar. Johan Mijail, who appeared in a 2018 anthology of contemporary Dominican literature that Indiana edited, said that Indiana’s novels permitted Mijail’s own writing to “offer a view of Santo Domingo and its outskirts where music, popular culture and the urban could be taken as possible horizons for sexual diversity to bloom.”With “Tu nombre verdadero” almost behind her, Indiana is working on her own books, too. “I wrote a novel last year that’s in a drawer right now,” she said, describing it as a “gender horror novel” she will revisit later. Another book, set in Puerto Rico and related to the Vietnam War, is coming later this year.No matter the medium, Indiana’s work is nourished by endless interrogation. She noted that the commitment to scrutiny — both of self and community — is grounded in her lived reality. “As a queer person, I’m questioning my identity until I’m dead,” she said. “In this perpetual transitional state,” she added, “what is my real name?” More

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      8 New Songs You Should Hear Now

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      A dive into tracks by Tyler, the Creator, Feist, Bully and more recent highlights.Tyler, the Creator released a new track as part of an expanded edition of “Call Me if You Get Lost.”Luis “Panch” PerezDear listeners,I have a constantly replenishing playlist on my phone called “Thursday Nights and Friday Mornings.” It’s named for the time I do some of my most focused new-music listening, in preparation for the publication of the Playlist, a weekly feature that I compile with my colleagues Jon Pareles and Jon Caramanica.* Each Friday, we recommend a handful of songs released in the past week, a task that helps me stay on top of all (well, most) of the new music that comes out in a given week, and often the Jons’ picks point me toward what I missed.Every few weeks, I’ll be sending out an Amplifier digest of recent Playlist highlights. Today, we’ve got a mix of some possibly familiar names (Lucinda Williams; Feist; Tyler, the Creator) and hopefully some new ones, too.Listen along here on Spotify as you read.1. Jess Williamson: “Hunter”This is one of my favorite new songs right now. It’s from the Texas-born singer-songwriter Jess Williamson, whose music I’ve been following since her haunting 2014 debut, “Native State.” Last year, she teamed up with a fellow musician from the South, Katie Crutchfield of Waxahatchee, and formed a country duo called Plains. Williamson’s contributions to Plains’ excellent record “I Walked With You a Ways” felt like a step forward for her as a songwriter, and I hear that growth on “Hunter,” the first single from her next solo album, “Time Ain’t Accidental,” out in June. It’s a bittersweet song about the spiritually exhausting process of looking for love, but on the chorus Williamson sounds hopeful and replenished, reminding herself, “I want a mirror, not a piece of glass.” (Listen on YouTube)2. Bully: “Days Move Slow”My former colleague at Vulture Jesse David Fox once compared an early song from Alicia Bognanno’s grungy power-pop band Bully to “Sugarhigh,” the fictional alt-rock hit that Renée Zellweger’s character sings at the end of “Empire Records” — and now I will never un-hear that similarity as long as I live. (It’s definitely a compliment.) I interviewed Bognanno over video chat in August 2020, and I remember a very sweet dog named Mezzi dozing behind her. (A dog lover myself, I always ask my interview subjects about their pups. Always.) Sadly, Mezzi has since passed on, but “Days Move Slow,” from the forthcoming Bully album “Lucky for You,” is both an ode to her memory and a chronicle of Bognanno trying to propel herself out of the muck of grief. That probably makes it sound like a downer, but the song has a resilient, upbeat energy about it — sort of like an excitable canine. Rest in power, Mezzi! (Listen on YouTube)3. Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro: “Beso”Some couples announce their engagement with a ring pic on Instagram. Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro, two of the brightest Spanish-language stars in the current pop firmament, hinted at theirs in a music video. Their sweet and sultry duet “Beso” is a highlight from their recently released collaborative EP, “RR” — and proof of their musical chemistry. (Listen on YouTube)4. Tyler, the Creator: “Sorry Not Sorry”Fun fact: In 2021, only two albums made appearances on all three of our critics’ Top 10 lists — Olivia Rodrigo’s head-turning debut “Sour” and Tyler, the Creator’s sprawling rap odyssey “Call Me if You Get Lost.” Last week, Tyler released an expanded edition featuring a few new tracks, including this one, the gregarious “Sorry Not Sorry.” I really like this song’s Jekyll-and-Hyde energy, as a repentant Tyler apologizes for a number of personal and professional slights and then, occasionally, a brasher version of himself takes it right back: “Sorry to the fans who say I changed — ’cause I did.” (Listen on YouTube)5. Mahalia: “Terms and Conditions”I’m a total mark for any song that mines and cleverly updates the sounds of Y2K pop or “TRL”-era R&B. (See also: The entire output of the young British girl group Flo.) “Terms and Conditions,” from the 24-year-old singer Mahalia, does just that. It’s giving me hints of Mya, Destiny’s Child and a whole lot of J. Lo’s glimmering millennial time capsule “If You Had My Love.” But it’s also got a contemporary twist, as Mahalia tells a potential suitor what she won’t tolerate (“If you look at her, consider bridges burned”), flipping the dry language of contractual agreements into something confident, fun and flirty. (Listen on YouTube)6. Lucinda Chua featuring yeule: “Something Other Than Years”Like the Mahalia song, I have my colleague Jon Pareles to thank for this next Playlist pick, from the London-based songwriter Lucinda Chua. “Something Other Than Years” is a sparse, hypnotic duet with the Singaporean musician yeule, which finds Chua pleading in a glassy voice, “Show me how to live this life,” a request that seems to be answered by yeule’s celestial melody. Jon describes the rest of Chua’s new album “Yian” as a collection of “meditations seeking serenity — often just two alternating chords, set out slowly on keyboard and sustained by orchestral strings.” (Listen on YouTube)7. Feist: “Borrow Trouble”I love it when Feist — an artist often associated with calm and quietude — lets loose and makes a ruckus, as she does on this stomping tune from her upcoming album, “Multitudes.” Wait for her primal screams at the very end! (Listen on YouTube)Two Lucindas in a single playlist? Better believe it. The country-rock legend Lucinda Williams’s voice has sounded defiant since at least the 1980s, but since recovering from a 2020 stroke, her survivor’s rasp has taken on a whole new gravitas. “New York Comeback” — from the upcoming album “Stories from a Rock N Roll Heart” — has Williams’s characteristic grit and lack of sentiment (“No one’s brought the curtain down,” she sings wrly, “maybe you should stick around”) but there’s something poignant about hearing Amplifier fave Bruce Springsteen (along with his wife and bandmate Patti Scialfa) singing backing vocals to support her as if he’s just one more rock ’n’ roll lifer nodding to another. (Listen on YouTube)These are my terms and conditions,Lindsay*If the grammatically correct plural of “attorney general” is indeed “attorneys general,” maybe I should say “Jons Pareles and Caramanica.”The Amplifier PlaylistListen on Spotify. We update this playlist with each new newsletter.“8 New Songs You Should Hear Now” track listTrack 1: Jess Williamson, “Hunter”Track 2: Bully, “Days Move Slow”Track 3: Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro, “Beso”Track 4: Tyler, the Creator, “Sorry Not Sorry”Track 5: Mahalia, “Terms and Conditions”Track 6: Lucinda Chua featuring yeule, “Something Other Than Years”Track 7: Feist, “Borrow Trouble”Track 8: Lucinda Williams, “New York Comeback”Bonus TracksA few of you have written in to ask if we archive previous Amplifier playlists on Spotify. We do! The easiest way to find them is through our account page, where we also archive all the weekly Friday Playlists, too.And speaking of reader emails: Special thanks to Sharon Smith for — after I mentioned that Bob Dylan won his first Grammy nearly two decades into his career, for his 1979 song “Gotta Serve Somebody” — directing me to this blistering performance of Dylan playing the song live at the 1980 Grammys. (Kris Kristofferson, as you’ll see, was loving it.) Apparently the producers asked him to cut the song down to three or four minutes; he played for six and a half. Classic Bob! More

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      Myke Towers Is Seizing His Moment

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      In just a few years, the rapper has become one of the most sought-after collaborators in Latin music. His new album, “La Vida Es Una,” surveys his many aesthetics.Myke Towers could tell you that he never knew he would make it big, but that wouldn’t be true. Because back in 2014, six years before the rapper would put out his debut, he was preparing for a make-or-break show in his hometown, San Juan, Puerto Rico, and breaking wasn’t an option.“Puerto Rico is the most difficult crowd to please,” he said this month, video-chatting from a Miami hotel room a few weeks before the release of his new album, “La Vida Es Una” (“Life Is One,” a reminder that we only live once). “They don’t just give out approval, you have to show that you are good enough. If you make it in P.R., you’re going to make it anywhere.”Over the course of two back-to-back albums, he did just that. “Easy Money Baby” from 2020 went triple platinum, building off the success of his 2016 mixtape, “El Final del Principio” (“The End of the Beginning”), while incorporating reggaeton, Brazilian funk and Colombian melodies. “Lyke Mike,” released in 2021, was a firm statement of purpose that strung together harder trap bangers. It peaked at No. 3 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart and cracked the Top 50 on the all-genre Top 200. With his new album, out Thursday, Towers aimed to marry the two approaches, striking a balance that illustrates his creative flexibility.“In this album, I want to make music to perform live,” he said, speaking animatedly in a casual white tee and a gold chain. “I want to give energy to people so they can go out and forget about their problems, forget about what’s stressing them.”Almost a decade ago, Towers, now 29, was still waiting for his shot. Raised in the barrio of Caimito in south San Juan, he grew up surrounded by music, mainly his grandmother’s: salsa, merengue, old school boleros — if it was classic Latin music, she was playing it. But Towers wanted to cut his own path in rap, and by the time he graduated from high school, he’d started releasing music on SoundCloud, initially fairly anonymously. “At the beginning, I didn’t even want to show my face,” he said with a laugh. “I just wanted to show my skills. I knew that I had to put in a lot of work to be in the mix.”“Wherever I go, I make music from Puerto Rico,” Towers said. “When I’m making music, I’m listening to the people who came before me.”Ysa Pérez for The New York TimesHe didn’t just practice music, he analyzed it, dissecting every move idols like Daddy Yankee and Jay-Z made, and seeing how he could apply them to his own life. “I studied the game,” he explained. “I have my own identity, but I started with them, and the respect that I had for them.”As his SoundCloud releases gained more traction, he began putting his name on the tracks — styling “Mike” as “Myke” — and performing around the city. He viewed his first shows as tests, and by 2014 he was ready for graduation: that important hometown performance, in La Perla.For artists who grew up in the area, performing in La Perla, the island’s famous slum — located on a stretch of rocky coastline in Old San Juan — is a rite of passage. In video of Towers’s set posted to YouTube, the rapper is dressed in all black, standing under a white beach canopy as he confidently delivers the verses of the aspirational “Dinero En Mano.” (He later released the track, filled with ominous strings, on “El Final del Principio.”) By the end of the song, the crowd is singing along with him.“It was one of my most important shows,” he recalled. He shook his head and grinned, almost as if he was still in disbelief that he had pulled it off. “A lot of people, they didn’t even know my songs, but they were like, ‘Who’s that? Why is he confident performing like that?’”Even before he released his first full-length album, Towers had already teamed up with Bad Bunny and Becky G, laying the groundwork that would make him one of Latin music’s most in-demand collaborators. Since then, the rapper’s features with Rauw Alejandro, Luis Fonsi and Farruko have all been certified platinum.With “La Vida Es Una,” Towers agonized over the track list, sifting between more than 50 songs to select the set that could demonstrate his transition from a vanguard of Puerto Rico’s grass-roots trap scene to a self-assured hitmaker. His versatility is what first grabbed the attention of Orlando Cepeda, known as Jova, one of Towers’s frequent co-writers and the co-founder of the Puerto Rican label that first signed him in 2018. After hearing his rap music, Cepeda asked if Towers had anything more commercial. He was impressed.“He’s an artist without limits,” Cepeda said in a phone interview. “He’s a writer, he’s a composer, he’s a lyricist. I think that hearing someone who comes from the hood like he does, when you listen to his music, it inspires, it excites, it makes people want to work with him.”By the time Towers graduated from high school, he’d started releasing music on SoundCloud.Ysa Pérez for The New York TimesIn addition to tapping some of his past collaborators, including Ozuna and J Balvin, for “La Vida Es Una,” Towers also enlisted producers from across the Latin music diaspora, including Sky Rompiendo (from Colombia) and Tainy (Puerto Rico). “I want to show my fans the difference between ‘Mike’ and ‘Myke,’” he said, explaining his efforts to blend his grittier rap roots with his mainstream ambitions. “In the beginning, my fans would say things like, ‘Oh, you went commercial. What are you doing?’ Those comments would get in my head, and I felt like I was losing who I am, but I like to challenge myself. I took a lot of risks on this album, but I feel confident that when people listen to it, they’ll hear something they needed from me before.”The new album includes songs for his more pop-minded fans: “Sábado” and the Daddy Yankee collaboration “Ulala (Ooh La La),” two dance-floor-ready tracks produced by the Texas duo Play-N-Skillz. Towers heats things up on “El Calentón,” a sparse track that begins as a reggaeton jam before building to a display of his lyrical dexterity. And as its title might suggest, “Flow Jamaican,” produced by Di Genius, dives into reggae rhythms, with Towers switching up his flow in the lead-up to the song’s earworm of a hook.The album was primarily recorded in Puerto Rico, a place with such a long, diverse musical history, Towers said, that anyone who taps into it comes away overflowing with ideas, influences and potential: “Wherever I go, I make music from Puerto Rico. When I’m making music, I’m listening to the people who came before me.” He lit up, a wide smile spreading across his face as he described his usual routine of returning home from tour to his wife and son, and then heading to the studio.“My family is my home base,” Towers said. “Going back to them is spiritual to me. Before I had my son, I would be in the studio until 7 a.m., every day. I’ll always have that hustler spirit, but when I found out I was going to have a kid, it was about working smarter, not harder.”Towers ends the album with a triumphant celebration, “Lo Logré” (“I Made It”). “It’s an anthem that a lot of people are going to relate to,” he said.“People think I made it and it was easy, they forget the process, everything that it took to make it happen. I value every moment in my career because years ago I was even crying trying to make it come true. There are trials you go through, but when you come out on the other side, people just see that you made it. And I have, but I haven’t. I have more dreams to achieve.” More

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      Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro’s Love Trilogy, and 8 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks from Meshell Ndegeocello, the Japanese House, Hannah Jadagu and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage, and The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro, ‘Beso’“Beso” (“Kiss”) quivers with fear of separation, as Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro tell each other that “Being away from you is hell.” The song is part of a three-track collaborative project called “RR” the couple released on Friday; the “Beso” video hints at an engagement. They keep their voices high, small and tremulous over a brusque beat topped with quasi-Baroque keyboards and strings, a genteel backdrop for deep neediness. PARELESMeshell Ndegeocello, ‘Virgo’“They’re calling me back to the stars,” Meshell Ndegeocello declares in “Virgo” from her coming album, “The Omnichord Real Book.” It’s a funky march that revels in cosmic imagery, cross-rhythms and multifarious vocals: singing, chanting, making percussive sounds, high harmonies, husky low confidences and an occasional “la-la.” Morphing through nearly nine minutes, the track struts on Ndegeocello’s synthesizer bass lines; twinkles and hovers with Brandee Younger’s harp; and sprints toward the end with double time drumming, headed somewhere new. PARELESMoor Mother featuring Kyle Kidd, Keir Neuringer and Aquiles Navarro, ‘We Got the Jazz’Moor Mother seethes about Black achievements met with disrespect in “We Got the Jazz”: “We ain’t ’bout to stand for no national anthem,” she declaims. “When we was swinging they couldn’t even stand in attention.” Her testy voice is surrounded in a rich, polytonal murk: multiple tracks of Aquiles Navarro’s trumpet, Keir Neuringer’s saxophone and Kyle Kidd’s vocals over a slowly heaving bass line, burdened but determined. PARELESThe Japanese House, ‘Boyhood’The British musician Amber Bain, who records as the Japanese House, reckons with her past and present on the flickering synth-pop track “Boyhood,” which pairs smooth sonic surfaces and effervescent electronic flourishes with her yearning, achingly human vocals. “For a moment there, I swear I saw me,” Bain sings, her 20-something growing pains palpable as she yearns — in vain — for a stable, unchanging sense of self. ZOLADZRina Sawayama, ‘Eye for an Eye’The British-Japanese pop musician Rina Sawayama makes her film debut on Friday in “John Wick: Chapter 4,” and has released a new song from the soundtrack, the slinky “Eye for an Eye.” The track splits the difference between Sawayama’s gloriously bombastic debut album, “Sawayama,” and the softer, more recent “Hold the Girl.” Propelled by a mid-tempo, industrial chug, Sawayama vamps with the confident menace of an action star. “A life for a life,” she sings. “I’ll see you in hell on the other side.” ZOLADZBully, ‘Days Move Slow’“Days Move Slow,” from Alicia Bognanno’s grungy indie-rock project Bully, is a song about being caught in the muck of grief — she wrote it after the death of her beloved dog, Mezzi — but it also has a propulsive, bouncy energy that promises eventual forward motion. “There’s flowers on your grave that grow,” Bognanno sings in her signature holler, battling her buzzing guitar. “Something’s gotta change, I know.” ZOLADZShygirl, ‘Woe (I See It From Your Side) (Björk Remix)’Björk’s remix of Shygirl’s “Woe” is equal parts endorsement and disruption. Shygirl, born Blaine Muise in England to parents from Zimbabwe, has worked with pop experimenters like Sophie, Arca, Tinashe and Sega Bodega, and she was a founder of the label Nuxxe. “Woe,” from her 2022 debut album, “Nymph,” was a smoldering counterattack to a toxic partner: “Smiling faces fade just to leave a shell,” she charged. Björk, playing fourth-dimensional chess, offers both sympathy — agreeing with Shygirl that “I see it from your side” — and outside perspective. The new track lurches from the dark groove of “Woe” to something else: Björk’s vocal harmonies, warped keyboard vamps and mystical life lessons. “Forever we shoot for the sublime,” she advises. PARELESHannah Jadagu, ‘Warning Sign’“Warning Sign” is a hushed, hazy song that maps interpersonal tensions onto musical contrasts: quiet and loud, sustained and rhythmic, dulcet and distorted. Jadagu is an N.Y.U. student who grew up in a Texas suburb and recorded her first EP, in 2021, entirely on an iPhone. She has more resources since signing to Sub Pop. “Warning Sign” could have been an easygoing R&B vamp, but Jadagu has other imperatives; the song coos with keyboard chords and airborne harmonies, then crashes or glitches. What she hears goes with what she feels: “I can’t stand to hear your voice when it’s oh so loud/Could you quiet down?” PARELESLucinda Chua featuring Yeule, ‘Something Other Than Years’The songs on “Yian” (Chinese for “sparrow”), the new album by the London-based songwriter Lucinda Chua, are meditations seeking serenity — often just two alternating chords, set out slowly on keyboard and sustained by orchestral strings. In “Something Other Than Years,” she sings, “When all I fear is all I know/Show me how to live this life,” and she’s answered by the higher voice of Yeule, who promises, “There’s more in this life/Angel being of light.” PARELES More

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      Polito Vega, Salsa ‘King’ of New York Radio, Dies at 84

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      In a career that began in 1960, the Puerto Rico-born Mr. Vega became, one admirer said, “the architect of Hispanic radio at a global level.”Polito Vega, an exuberant announcer with a booming bass voice and a finely attuned ear whose Spanish-language shows popularized salsa music in New York in the mid-1960s, died on March 9 in North Bergen, N.J. He was 84.His death was announced by his family. No cause was given.After abandoning his dreams of becoming a singer, Mr. Vega began his broadcasting career in 1960, shortly after transplanting himself from Puerto Rico to New York. He quickly distinguished himself on air with his signature voice, his perky epigrams like “Andando, andando, andando” (“Keep going”) and his adventurous playlists. He also distinguished himself in person, at concerts and dances, with his ubiquitous Yankees cap, starched white guayabera shirt, white goatee and fuzzy sideburns.The disc jockey and recording artist Alex Sensation described Mr. Vega on Instagram as “the architect of Hispanic radio at a global level.”In an obituary in Billboard magazine, Leila Cobo, the author of “Decoding ‘Despacito’: An Oral History of Latin Music” (2020), wrote: “Vega’s importance to Latin music cannot be overstated. He was the most influential tastemaker in the country’s top market, dating back to when tropical music first became popular in the city in the 1960s and 1970s and stretching all the way to the 21st century.”He was heard on two New York AM stations, first WEVD and then WBNX, and finally on WSKQ (Mega 97.9 FM) — which began broadcasting as a full-time Spanish-language format in 1989 and has often been rated No. 1 in that market. He also became the station’s program director.When Mr. Vega began broadcasting, he recalled, he was struck by the disconnect between the comparatively temperate bolero music that dominated Latin broadcasting and the feverish salsa he was encountering in nightclubs. He was among the first radio personalities to recognize the market for salsa, identifying promising talent and mentoring gifted musicians.“It was two different worlds in those early days,” Mr. Vega said told The New York Times in 2009. “At the dance halls and up in the Catskills you would hear the Tito Puente and Machito orchestras tearing things up, but on the radio the kind of thing you heard was romantic trios, unless you were tuning in to Symphony Sid” — the prominent jazz D.J. who began playing Afro-Cuban music in the 1960s — “late at night.”The trombonist Willie Colón, who became one of salsa’s biggest stars, recalled that the first time he heard Yomo Toro, the maestro of the 10-string guitar known as the cuatro, with whom he would later collaborate on several recordings, “was on Polito’s show, playing along with listeners who would call in and sing over the telephone.”In the late 1960s, Mr. Colón got a break when he was invited to appear on “Club de la Juventud,” an “American Bandstand”-inspired TV show that Mr. Vega hosted on the Telemundo network from 1967 to 1970.Among the other musicians whose careers Mr. Vega helped promote were Celia Cruz, Tito Puente and Ismael Miranda.Mr. Vega in a photo-booth picture taken in 1957, shortly after he arrived in New York.Tim Knox for The New York TimesHipólito Vega Torres was born on Aug. 3, 1938, in Ponce, on the southern coast of Puerto Rico. His father was a bus driver, and the young Hipólito sold newspapers on the beach to supplement his family’s income.He began calling himself Polito as a teenager after winning an amateur singing competition, only to be told by the contest’s master of ceremonies that he would never become a celebrity with a name like Hipólito.In 1957 he moved to New York City, where he lived with an uncle near Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx and worked as a shipping clerk while trying to get a break in the music business.“I came to New York as a skinny little kid with a wisp of a mustache, hoping to make it as a singer,” he said in 2009.Johnny Pacheco, the Dominican-born flutist, bandleader, songwriter and producer, knew Mr. Vega in those days. “Even before Polito got a job, he was already an announcer,” Mr. Pacheco, who died in 2021, told The Times. “He used to go to a barbershop owned by a compadre of mine, and I remember how he was always joking and kidding around there, imitating announcers and singers and talking as if he were already on the air.”One night in 1960 he was helping a friend who was hosting “Fiesta Time,” a half-hour show on WEVD; as his friend’s sidekick, he read listeners’ names and record requests on the air. The station’s owner heard his voice and hired him as an announcer.“Radio fever got into my head,” Mr. Vega recalled.When WEVD expanded to 24-hour programming not long after that, he was offered the midnight-to-6 a.m. slot.“The show,” he later said, “was so successful and I felt that liberty to express myself that I’ve maintained to this day.”Mr. Pacheco, who co-founded Fania Records in 1964 as New York was supplanting Cuba as a center for emerging Latin music, described Mr. Vega in 2009 as “part of the whole salsa movement, one of its pillars.”“As we were building the company,” he added, “he was there with us. I’d bring him the LPs, he’d listen and say, ‘I like this song, I’m going to push it,’ and he’d play the hell out of it.”Mr. Vega later moved to WBNX, where he became known as “El Rey de la Radio” — the King of Radio — and where he met Raúl Alarcón, the senior program director. Mr. Alarcón went on to become head of the Spanish Broadcasting System, where Mr. Vega was for many years executive vice president in charge of programming.In 2009, Mr. Vega was honored at two all-star 50th-anniversary concerts at Madison Square Garden. Three years later he was celebrated at Citi Field in Queens by a lineup that included Gloria Estefan and Daddy Yankee.Mr. Vega’s wife, Judith, died last year. His survivors include two sons and a daughter. Two other sons died before him.In a statement, his family asked that his fans not mourn but “celebrate his legacy,” adding: “Polito continues to live in the music that he loved and shared, as well as the impact he left in the Latin community. Polito lived happiness, smiles and love. We would like for all his fans to live life to the fullest, as he did.” More