New York City has long been a generative nexus for the transnational Latin music scene. Currently, there is no other place in the Americas where such large numbers of people from throughout the Caribbean come together to make music. In this book, Benjamin Lapidus seeks to recognize all of those musicians under one mighty musical sound, especially those who have historically gone unnoticed. Based on archival research, oral histories, interviews, and musicological analysis, Lapidus examines how interethnic collaboration among musicians, composers, dancers, instrument builders, and music teachers in New York City set a standard for the study, creation, performance, and innovation of Latin music. Musicians specializing in Spanish Caribbean music in New York cultivated a sound that was grounded in tradition, including classical, jazz, and Spanish Caribbean folkloric music. For the first time, Lapidus studies this sound in detail and in its context. He offers a fresh understanding of how musicians made and formally transmitted Spanish Caribbean popular music in New York City from 1940 to 1990. Without diminishing the historical facts of segregation and racism the musicians experienced, Lapidus treats music as a unifying force. By giving recognition to those musicians who helped bridge the gap between cultural and musical backgrounds, he recognizes the impact of entire ethnic groups who helped change music in New York. The study of these individual musicians through interviews and musical transcriptions helps to characterize the specific and identifiable New York City Latin music aesthetic that has come to be emulated internationally.

New York City has long been a generative nexus for the transnational Latin music scene. Currently, there is no other place in the Americas where such large numbers of people from throughout the Caribbean come together to make music. In this book, Benjamin Lapidus seeks to recognize all of those musicians under one mighty musical sound, especially those who have historically gone unnoticed. Based on archival research, oral histories, interviews, and musicological analysis, Lapidus examines how interethnic collaboration among musicians, composers, dancers, instrument builders, and music teachers in New York City set a standard for the study, creation, performance, and innovation of Latin music. Musicians specializing in Spanish Caribbean music in New York cultivated a sound that was grounded in tradition, including classical, jazz, and Spanish Caribbean folkloric music. For the first time, Lapidus studies this sound in detail and in its context. He offers a fresh understanding of how musicians made and formally transmitted Spanish Caribbean popular music in New York City from 1940 to 1990. Without diminishing the historical facts of segregation and racism the musicians experienced, Lapidus treats music as a unifying force. By giving recognition to those musicians who helped bridge the gap between cultural and musical backgrounds, he recognizes the impact of entire ethnic groups who helped change music in New York. The study of these individual musicians through interviews and musical transcriptions helps to characterize the specific and identifiable New York City Latin music aesthetic that has come to be emulated internationally"--

The diverse musics of the Caribbean form a vital part of the identity of individual island nations and their diasporic communities. At the same time, they witness to collective continuities and the interrelatedness that underlies the region's multi-layered complexity. This Companion introduces familiar and less familiar music practices from different nations, from reggae, calypso and salsa to tambú, méringue and soca. Its multidisciplinary, thematic approach reveals how the music was shaped by strategies of resistance and accommodation during the colonial past and how it has developed in the postcolonial present. The book encourages a comparative and syncretic approach to studying the Caribbean, one that acknowledges its patchwork of fragmented, dynamic, plural and fluid differences. It is an innovative resource for scholars and students of Caribbean musical culture, particularly those seeking a decolonising perspective on the subject.

The song remains the most basic unit of modern pop music. Shaped into being by historical forces—cultural, aesthetic, and technical—the song provides both performer and audience with a world marked off by a short, discrete, and temporally demarcated experience. One-Track Mind: Capitalism, Technology, and the Art of the Pop Song brings together 16 writers to weigh in on 16 iconic tracks from the history of modern popular music. Arranged chronologically in order of release of the tracks, and spanning nearly five decades, these essays zigzag across the cultural landscape to present one possible history of pop music. There are detours through psychedelic rock, Afro-pop, Latin pop, glam rock, heavy metal, punk, postpunk, adult contemporary rock, techno, hip-hop, and electro-pop here. More than just deep histories of individual songs, these essays all expand far beyond the track itself to offer exciting and often counterintuitive histories of transformative moments in popular culture. Collectively, they show the undiminished power of the individual pop song, both as distillations of important flashpoints and, in their afterlives, as ghostly echoes that persist undiminished but transform for succeeding generations. Capitalism and its principal good, capital, help us frame these stories, a fact that should surprise no one given the inextricable relationship between art and capitalism established in the twentieth century. At the root, readers will find here a history of pop with unexpected plot twists, colorful protagonists, and fitting denouements.

The Corso: The Real Nuyorican Salsa Story is a must-read book not just because it’s a fantastic and incredible story of success but also it’s a historic legacy of how it was at the beginning of the salsa movement. It is narrated firsthand by someone who was there and was an important part of it, if not the most important. Pete Bonet was born in a very humble, extremely poor part of the island of Puerto Rico. Even the police would not go in there. It was too dangerous. It is a place called El Fanguito, “the Muddy.” His mother, Olga, was abandoned there with her six children, ages fifteen down to a newborn baby. Pedrito, as he was called, was the fourth child; he was six years old when his father left for good. Olga was left alone with no money, no food, no man to protect the family, no government help, no nothing, not even shoes for the kids to go to school. The neighbors would say, “Poor Olga, she’s going to die along with all the six kids.” Pedrito left that part of the world at the age of fifteen to go to New York City, not knowing how to say no in English. At the age of twenty-one, Pedro graduated from Central Commercial High School with honors in bookkeeping and business law, typing sixty words a minute without errors. He then took the test in order to enter the United States Air Force and qualified in administration and thus entered the United States Air Force. Upon returning home with an honorable discharge, Pedro went to work for different construction companies as a timekeeper onsite—Marshall Const. Co., Arc Electric Co., Turner Const. Co., Melnick Const. Co., among others. He would go dancing on weekends to different nightclubs in New York City, from the world-famous Palladium Ballroom called the home of the mambo and cha-cha-cha, located on Broadway and Fifty-Third Street, the Manhattan Center on Thirty-Fourth Street, the Hunts Point Palace in the Bronx, and this was where Pete met the love of his life, Margie. They fell in love at first sight while dancing to the wonderful music of Tito Rodriguez and his big band orchestra. They got married six months later and still together today, in the year 2019, fifty-seven years and still counting. Pete Bonet, as he got to be known, got into music by mere chance. He started singing with Alfredito Valdez and his charanga, then Ray Barretto and his charanga, La Moderna. Then he went with Mongo Santamaria and his orchestra under the musical direction of trumpet player Marty Sheller. He formed his own big band together with the great Louie Ramirez as his arranger and musical director. After a couple of years, he got a call from Tito Rodriguez and went on to sing with the one and only Tito Rodriguez and his big band. Upon Tito Rodriguez’s death, he joined the Joe Cuba Sextet. He also sang with the king of Latin music, Tito Puente and his big band, and over forty other Latin orchestras in New York, Hollywood, and Puerto Rico. By reading this book, you will get to appreciate that great era, an extraordinary moment in time, the very beginning when the term “salsa” was born and started to be used instead of all the different names of all that great Cuban music. You will feel all the excitement of non-Latins dancing in clubs like the Corso that most likely will never be repeated again.

'Salsa Rising' provides a full-length historical account of Latin music in this New York guided by close critical attention to issues of tradition and experimentation, authenticity and dilution, and the often clashing roles of cultural communities and the commercial recording industry in the shaping of musical practices and tastes.

The intertwined stories of two archipelagos and their diasporas This volume is the first systematic comparative study of Cuba and Puerto Rico from both a historical and contemporary perspective. In these essays, contributors highlight the interconnectedness of the two archipelagos in social categories such as nation, race, class, and gender to encourage a more nuanced and multifaceted study of the relationships between the islands and their diasporas. Topics range from historical and anthropological perspectives on Cuba and Puerto Rico before and during the Cold War to cultural and sociological studies of diasporic communities in the United States. The volume features analyses of political coalitions, the formation of interisland sororities, and environmental issues. Along with sharing a similar early history, Cuba and Puerto Rico have closely intertwined cultures, including their linguistic, literary, food, musical, and religious practices. Contributors also discuss literature by Cuban and Puerto Rican authors by examining the aesthetics of literary techniques and discourses, the representation of psychological space on the stage, and the impacts of migration. Showing how the trajectories of both archipelagos have been linked together for centuries and how they have diverged recently, Cuba and Puerto Rico offers a transdisciplinary approach to the study of this intricate relationship and the formation of diasporic communities and continuities. Publication of this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.