RIP Willie Colon, The Greatest Salsa Musician Who Ever Lived
Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.
Late last week, the music world lost one of its greatest pioneers: Willie Colon passed away at 75 years old. It’s possible you’ve already read some tributes about Colon in the days since his death, but since he touched so much of what I’ve already covered in All the Music of All the World—from the history of Fania records, to the tiny record store in a beach town in Puerto Rico, to Bad Bunny himself—I figured I owed it to this space to pay homage to the man here too.
Born in the Bronx as part of the Puerto Rican diaspora, Colon started making his own music in the early ‘60s as a preteen. By his middle teens, he was one of the hottest trombonists in New York City, versant in every style of music that was the rage in Latin-leaning nightclubs in the five boroughs, playing a blend of all the regional sounds of Cuba, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. At 17, he was signed to the nascent Fania Records—a label on the come up putting out Latin recordings—and effectively became the label’s Stevie Wonder at the same time Stevie was a precocious teenager on Motown. Colon would become the inarguable bandleader of the salsa movement, the hard-charging, danceable style of music he and his Fania labelmates perfected as the label exploded in popularity in the early ‘70s.
His first album was El Malo, a record whose title and cover played up his bad boy teenager status, but which was the bedrock that many salsa careers would be made on top of. It also introduced his first major vocal collaborator—Colon could sing OK, but was better as a bandleader and trombonist—Hector Lavoe, the great balladeer of salsa.
Colon would eventually release more than 30 LPs on Fania, and throw a dart at their lineup and you’ll find incendiary, groundbreaking, fun salsa music. His many records with Lavoe all lean into a mobster motif, with titles like Cosa Nuestra, La Gran Fuga, Crime Pays and El Juicio. That latter one has one of the coolest album covers ever:
When Colon was 27, he partnered up with labelmate Ruben Blades, a Panamanian singer-songwriter who was toying around with what eventually would become “intellectual” salsa, where social issues and stories of strife and tribulations would be told in the salsa medium. Their first album together—Metiendo Mano, *Hard at Work”—was a modest hit, but did not forecast what would happen the next year for their next album together. Released in 1978, Siembra is universally heralded as the greatest salsa album ever, and even has been voted as the best album in Latin American music history. Blending Colon’s impeccable instrumentation and production with Blades’ songwriting, it hit the salsa world like a bomb. It’s breakout song—“Pedro Navaja,” a play on “Mack the Knife”—told the story of a down-on-his luck young man who prowls the streets of New York trying to get over. His life ends in tragedy, the opportunities he thought he’d get never materializing. It’s a masterpiece of a song. Listen to it below:
Colon also had long partnerships with Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, and basically any up-and-comer in salsa did a tour through his band or in the studio.
It’s hard to overstate the impact Colon had on Puerto Rican music; he was the first artist from the island to break through in a huge way outside of it and the Puerto Rican community in NYC. He, in his time, paved the way for artists like Bad Bunny and J. Balvin, and made it not inconceivable that the most daring music being made on American soil was made with singers singing Spanish. For that, he earned his place in music history.
I leave you with Colon’s appearance in Bad Bunny’s “Nueva Yol” video, a handshake across generations:
-- Andrew Winistorfer
