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    What to Do in Miami, According to the ‘Griselda’ and ‘Narcos’ Creator Eric Newman

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    The magic of Miami is that “you can still discover places,” said the writer and producer Eric Newman. “It doesn’t feel like people have a chip on their shoulder. There’s a healthy civic pride and gratitude.”Mr. Newman, who created the Netflix show “Narcos” and produced “Griselda,” starring Sofia Vergara, has, over the years, spent months at a time on location in Miami. To Mr. Newman, a California native, the appeal of this southern Florida playground isn’t just what it is — it’s also what it’s not. “There’s an appreciation in Miami that you don’t see in other places,” he said. “Maybe it’s because a lot of people here came from somewhere else. Maybe you came to escape East Coast winters, or you came to escape Castro, or you came to escape taxes. People in Miami are genuinely happy to be here.”Mr. Newman, 53, produced the Academy Award-winning movie “Children of Men” and, more recently, was the executive producer of “Painkiller” and “Narcos: Mexico.” He favors a side of Miami not easily found in guidebooks. An after-hours salsa club, a Xanadu hiding in plain sight, the best Cuban sandwich around: These are the secrets that Miami has slowly revealed to him.Over the years, Eric Newman has spent months at a time on location in Miami.Scott Baker for The New York Times“The diversity of Miami makes it feel like the least American city, which is kind of what makes it incredibly American,” Mr. Newman said. “It feels wonderfully foreign and yet uniquely American.”Here, his five favorite spots in the city.1. Café La TrovaLa Trova is beloved for its impeccable drinks and its theatricality.Scott Baker for The New York TimesThe décor is deliberate — a long bar lined with red barstools, low lighting and an impressive wall of spirits.Scott Baker for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. 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

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      Roberto Roena, Salsa Percussionist and Bandleader, Dies at 81

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      His albums and performances with Apollo Sound brought new complexity to the genre in the 1970s. His group was still getting the crowds dancing decades later.Roberto Roena, a dancer who became a bongo player who then became a bandleader, along the way establishing himself as a leading figure in salsa and some of its best-known bands, died on Sept. 23 in Puerto Rico. He was 81.Andrés Waldemar, a singer in Mr. Roena’s orchestra, announced his death on social media but did not specify a cause. Local news reports said he died at a hospital in Carolina, outside San Juan.Mr. Roena was best known as the founder of Roberto Roena y Su Apollo Sound, which released a string of well-regarded albums in the 1970s, salsa’s heyday. He was also a member of the Fania All-Stars, a group formed about the same time to showcase stars of the Fania record label, which was often described as the Motown of salsa.Onstage Mr. Roena was a whirlwind, dancing out front while banging a cowbell when he wasn’t playing bongos. Apollo Sound was still getting crowds dancing decades later.“The music always darted forward, driven by the sound of metal being struck by wood,” Peter Watrous wrote in The New York Times in 1998, reviewing an Apollo Sound show at the Copacabana in Manhattan. “Mr. Roena’s placement of notes, the way they fit into patterns, brought the audience and the musicians together in a form of personal rhythmic transcendence. Mr. Roena has that kind of power.”Pedro Pierluisi, the governor of Puerto Rico, where Mr. Roena was born, declared last Saturday to be a day of mourning in Mr. Roena’s honor. He called the death “an irreparable loss for Puerto Rico and the whole world, but especially for salsa lovers.”“Iconic songs like ‘El Escapulario,’ ‘Cui Cui,’ ‘Mi Desengano,’ ‘Marejada Feliz’ and many more transcended generations,” the governor said in a statement. “His musical legacy of more than 60 years will remain with us.”Mr. Roena started Roberto Roena y Su Apollo Sound, which released a string of well-regarded albums in the 1970s, salsa’s heyday.FaniaRoberto Roena was born on Jan. 16, 1940, in Mayagüez, on the island’s west coast. His family later moved to the Santurce district of San Juan, where as a boy he and a brother worked up some cha-cha and mambo dance routines that garnered enough acclaim to get them onto a local television show.After catching the act, the Puerto Rican musician and bandleader Rafael Cortijo invited Mr. Roena, who was only 15 or 16, to join his orchestra, Cortijo y Su Combo, as a dancer and chorus member. Mr. Cortijo, a percussionist, began schooling him on the bongos, and soon Roberto was part of the band.When Mr. Cortijo’s group dissolved, Mr. Roena became part of the salsa orchestra El Gran Combo, recording and touring internationally. It was in 1969 that he formed Apollo Sound — named, some versions of the tale go, because its first rehearsal coincided with the launch of Apollo 11, the first mission to land astronauts on the moon. The group almost had a different name.“First I wanted to put Apollo 12, because we were 12 musicians,” he told La Opinión in 1996, “but then I thought, if the United States launches Apollo 13, we are obsolete.”With Apollo Sound, Mr. Roena took salsa to a new level of sophistication, working in two or even three trumpets and a complex rhythm section to create a propulsive sound that drew on the music of jazz-rock groups like Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears. Its live shows were wild, with Mr. Roena setting the tone, and its albums for Fania were steady sellers.In an interview with The Times in 2014, when he was part of the lineup for a Fania Records tribute concert in Central Park, Mr. Roena credited the label’s founders, Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci, with creating the salsa phenomenon.“Jerry and Johnny gave you the freedom to do your own thing,” he said. “They allowed the musicians to express themselves the way we wanted, and that led to a lot of hit records.”His survivors include his wife, Antonia María Nieves Santos, and four children, Brenda, Gladys, Ivan and Francisco.Mr. Roena was still performing well into his 70s. He had a minor heart attack in 1995, but, he said in the 1996 interview, that wasn’t going to keep him off the stage.“I get tired,” he said, “but when I climb onto a platform, I am a different person.” More

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      Adalberto Álvarez, Latin Dance Music Maestro, Is Dead at 72

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      He was known as the “Gentleman of Son” because of his infectious enthusiasm for repopularizing the genre considered the bedrock of the Cuban sound.Adalberto Álvarez, one of Cuba’s most celebrated musicians, who as a bandleader helped revive and refashion Cuban son, a fusion of European and African styles and instruments that was vital to Latin dance music, died on Sept. 1 in a hospital in Havana. He was 72. The cause was complications of Covid-19, the official Cuban newspaper Granma said.An award-winning composer and arranger, Mr. Álvarez was known as “El Caballero del Son” (the “Gentleman of Son”) because of his passion for the genre and the infectious enthusiasm with which he repopularized it. Son is at the root of salsa, among other Latin dance genres, and is considered the bedrock of the Cuban sound.“I don’t think there is a composer more important for Cuban popular music than Adalberto,” Isaac Delgado, one of Cuba’s best-known salsa singers, said in a phone interview. “He created a sound that was very individual to him.” Mr. Delgado and Mr. Álvarez recorded an album together, “El Chévere de la Salsa-El Caballero del Son,” released in 1994.Mr. Álvarez was one of the most covered of the soneros, as singers of son are known, of the past 35 years. Salsa and merengue bands and performers like Juan Luis Guerra, El Gran Combo and Oscar De Leon have all recorded his compositions. His style influenced New York City’s salsa scene in the 1970s and ’80s as well.With his two most famous ensembles, Son 14 and Adalberto Álvarez y Su Son, Mr. Álvarez garnered numerous honors, among them a National Music Award in Cuba in 2018 and several Cubadisco awards. His first hit, in 1979, was “A Bayamo En Coche” (“To Bayamo in a Carriage”), followed by “El Regreso de Maria” (“Maria’s Return”) and, later, “Y Qué Tú Quieres Que Te Den?” (“And What Do You Want Them to Give You?”), among others.Onstage he was a crowd-pleaser, flashing a blinding smile. But he was more than an entertainer; he influenced the evolution of Cuban music by returning to its musical roots.“My main objective always is to get dancers dancing,” he said in a 2014 interview. “This is our mission, to give people joy.”Son had waned in popularity after the 1959 Cuban revolution. But in the 1970s Mr. Álvarez saw an opening and began to compose music that combined traditional elements of son with more modern Latin dance music, like salsa and timba. He emphasized son instruments, like the tres, a signature Cuban guitar with three sets of double strings. He then threw in son’s vocal improvisations and its famous call-and-response pattern and incorporated the double-entendre lyrics found in the trova, a troubadour-based musical genre.This ajiaco, or stew, of traditional and modern made Mr. Álvarez unique among Cuban bandleaders at the time, said Marysol Quevedo, an expert in Cuban music and an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Miami. “What he represents was this perfect hybrid of the traditional and influences from abroad,” she said.Unlike many Cuban artists of the era, Mr. Álvarez received permission from Cuba’s Communist government to travel abroad, starting with a trip to Venezuela in 1980. (President Miguel Díaz-Canel of Cuba expressed condolences on his death.) This freedom of movement gave him access to Latin music outside Cuba and kept him in touch with contemporary musical trends. In 1999, after he and his band performed in New York City, Peter Watrous of The New York Times called their sound “modern and unstoppable.”Mr. Álvarez served as a groundbreaker in other ways. A priest in the Yoruba religion La Regla de Ocha-Ifá, he was one of the first Cubans to bring songs focused on his beliefs to the stage and into the recording studio. Religions like Ifá — a blend of Roman Catholicism and West African spiritual beliefs — were banned and practiced covertly in atheistic Cuba until 1992, when the government declared itself secular and barred religious discrimination. Ifá and other Santería religions are now commonplace and openly practiced.The ban did not stop Mr. Álvarez from recording, in 1991, one of his greatest hits, “Y Qué Tu Quieres Que Te Den?,” which focuses on Ifá and asks listeners to think about what they desire from the orishas, or deities. The song served as a tribute to his religion, but also as a public acknowledgment of its popularity.Adalberto Cecilio Álvarez Zayas was born Nov. 22, 1948, in Havana and grew up in Camagüey, a city in central Cuba. His father, Enrique Álvarez, was a musician, and his mother, Rosa Zayas, was both a musician and a singer.He attended the National School of Arts in Cuba, where he studied composition and orchestration. He later taught students for a spell until landing a job writing songs for the group Conjunto Rumbavana in 1972, having impressed the band’s leader, Joseíto González. It was Mr. González who introduced Mr. Álvarez to the idea of reviving Cuba’s dance tradition.Mr. Álvarez wrote one of his first songs for Rumbavana, “Con Un Besito, Mi Amor” (“With a Kiss, My Love”); another of his compositions for the group was the celebrated “El Son de Adalberto.”With his dedication to son intensifying, Mr. Álvarez moved to Santiago de Cuba, in the easternmost Oriente province, where it had originated. He formed Son 14 in 1978 and Adalberto y Su Son in 1984.Information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Álvarez astutely understood that son could not survive on its own; it needed to be coupled with modern life for it to be rejuvenated — a realization that led to his fresh, original sound.“I consider myself to be the bridge between contemporary music and the establishment,” he said in 2001. “All my musicians are very young. So definitely I represent the new generation.” More

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      Johnny Pacheco, Who Helped Bring Salsa to the World, Dies at 85

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJohnny Pacheco, Who Helped Bring Salsa to the World, Dies at 85A Dominican-born bandleader and songwriter, he co-founded Fania Records, known as the Motown of Salsa.Johnny Pacheco performing in Manhattan in 2009. His company, Fania Records, was a powerhouse in Latin music. Credit…Chad Batka for The New York TimesFeb. 15, 2021, 6:51 p.m. ETJohnny Pacheco, the Dominican-born bandleader who co-founded the record label that turned salsa music into a worldwide sensation, died on Monday in Teaneck, N.J. He was 85. His wife, Maria Elena Pacheco, who is known as Cuqui, confirmed the death, at Holy Name Medical Center. Mr. Pacheco lived in Fort Lee, N.J.Fania Records, which he founded with Jerry Masucci in 1964, signed Latin music’s hottest talents of the 1960s and ’70s, including Celia Cruz, Willie Colón, Hector Lavoe and Rubén Blades. Mr. Pacheco, a gifted flutist, led the way on and off the stage, working as a songwriter, arranger and leader of the Fania All Stars, salsa’s first supergroup.From the beginning, he partnered with young musicians who were stirring jazz, rhythm and blues, funk and other styles into traditional Afro-Cuban music.By the 1970s, Fania, sometimes called the Motown of salsa, was a powerhouse in Latin music, and the Fania All Stars were touring the world. The label gave birth to combustive creative collaborations, like that between Mr. Colón, a trombonist and composer, and Mr. Blades, a socially conscious lyricist and singer; and to cult heroes like Mr. Lavoe, the Puerto Rican singer who battled drug addiction and died of AIDS-related complications at 46.Fania dissolved in the mid-1980s amid lawsuits involving royalties, and in 2005, Emusica, a Miami company, purchased the Fania catalog and began releasing remastered versions of its classic recordings.Mr. Pacheco performed in 2006 at Madison Square Garden in a concert marking his 50th anniversary in the music business, Credit…Chang W. Lee/The New York TimesJuan Azarías Pacheco Knipping was born on March 25, 1935, in Santiago de los Caballeros, in the Dominican Republic. His father, Rafael Azarias Pacheco, was a renowned bandleader and clarinetist. His mother, Octavia Knipping Rochet, was the granddaughter of a French colonist and the great-granddaughter of a German merchant who had married a Dominican woman born to Spanish colonists.The family moved to New York when Johnny was 11, and he studied percussion at the Juilliard School and worked in Latin bands before starting his own, Pacheco y Su Charanga, in 1960.The band signed with Alegre Records, and its first album sold more than 100,000 copies in the first year, becoming one the best-selling Latin albums of its time, according to his official website. It jump-started Mr. Pacheco’s career with the introduction of a new dance craze called the pachanga. He became an international star, touring the United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America.Fania Records was born out of an unlikely partnership between Mr. Pacheco and Mr. Masucci, a former police officer turned lawyer who fell in love with Latin music during a visit to Cuba.From its humble beginnings in Harlem and the Bronx — where releases were sold from the trunks of cars — Fania brought an urbane sensibility to Latin music. In New York, the music had taken on the name “salsa” (Spanish for sauce, as in hot sauce), and the Fania label began using it as part of its marketing.Guided by Mr. Pacheco, artists built a new sound based on traditional clave rhythms and the genre Cuban son (or son Cubano), but faster and more aggressive. Many of the lyrics — about racism, cultural pride and the tumultuous politics of the era — were far removed from the pastoral and romantic scenes in traditional Cuban songs.In that sense, salsa was “homegrown American music, as much a part of the indigenous musical landscape as jazz or rock or hip-hop,” Jody Rosen wrote in The New York Times in 2006 on the occasion of the reissue of the Fania master tapes — after they had spent years gathering mold in a warehouse in Hudson, N.Y.Mr. Pacheco’s first album with Celia Cruz went gold. It mixed hard-driving salsa with infectious choruses. The duo released more than 10 albums together.Credit…FaniaMr. Pacheco teamed up with Ms. Cruz in the early 1970s. Their first album, “Celia & Johnny,” was a potent mix of hard-driving salsa with infectious choruses and virtuosic performances. It soon went gold, thanks to Ms. Cruz’s vocal prowess and Mr. Pacheco’s big-band direction, and its first track, the up-tempo “Quimbara,” helped propel Ms. Cruz’s career to Queen of Salsa status.The two released more than 10 albums together; Mr. Pacheco was a producer on her last solo recording, “La Negra Tiene Tumbao,” which won the Grammy for best salsa album in 2002.Over the years, Mr. Pacheco produced for several artists and performed all over the world, and he contributed to movie soundtracks, including one for “The Mambo Kings,” a 1992 film based on based on Oscar Hijuelos’s novel “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love.” For the Jonathan Demme movie “Something Wild,” he teamed up with David Byrne, leader of the Talking Heads, one of his many eclectic partnerships.Mr. Pacheco, the recipient of numerous awards and honors both in the Dominican Republican and the United States, was inducted into the International Latin Music Hall of Fame in 1998. He wrote more than 150 songs, many of them now classics.For many years he spearheaded the Johnny Pacheco Latin Music and Jazz Festival at Lehman College in the Bronx, an annual event in collaboration with the college (streamed live in recent years) that provides a stage for hundreds of talented young musicians studying music in New York City schools. In addition to this wife, Mr. Pacheco’s survivors include two daughters, Norma and Joanne; and two sons, Elis and Phillip.The salsa phenomenon that Mr. Pacheco created hit a new high on Aug. 23, 1973, with a volcanic sold-out show at Yankee Stadium, where the Fania All Stars brought 40,000 fans to a musical frenzy, led by Mr. Pacheco, his rhinestone-encrusted white shirt soaked in sweat. The concert cemented the band’s, and his, legendary stature.The 1975 double-album “Fania All Stars Live at Yankee Stadium” earned the group its first Grammy nomination.Credit…Fania RecordsIn 1975, Fania released the long-awaited double album “Live at Yankee Stadium,” which, despite the name, also included material from a show at the Roberto Clemente Coliseum in Puerto Rico that had much better sound quality. The album earned the Fania All Stars their first Grammy nomination for best Latin recording.In 2004, the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.Michael Levenson contributed reporting.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More